OpenOffice .org

[Bill]

While the discussion in the other thread continues, I read a review of OpenOffice that sounds like it could easily replace MS Office, and it's free.

Anyone have any experience with any of the Open office components?

Bill

[query]

Yes, the suite works quite well for spreadsheet, word processing and presentations.  The weak spot is the lack of a RAD database (Access workalike) but that is in the works as well.

[Bill]

Thanks, Q.

B-

[Bill]

Thanks, A.

B-

[pat]

I still have Office 2000 installed, but use Open Office most of the time. It?s certainly adequate for my modest needs. I would certainly find it hard to justify the price of a new version of MS Office with a fine product like Open Office available.

[scuzzy]

OpenOffice is great for most people, but unfortunately cannot outright replace MS Office - at least not yet. I still depend heavily on MS Office, especially for Access (database). Where I work, MS Office 2002 is the software of choice, and most of the files we work with have a lot of special formatting that may, or may not work with OpenOffice.

I am looking forward to OpenOffice 2 becoming available in the hopes that it will have a better integration with MS Office. However, there is still the issue with MS Access. I'd like to get away from MS Access to something easier/better, but I just don't see that happening anytime soon. I have spent hundreds of hours over the years creating some complex Access databases that I can't simply dump and start over. OpenOffice 2 will sport "Base" for a relational database, and it supposedly "supports" MS Access, but I don't know to what level. Heck, even Microsoft can have problems converting from an older version of MS Access, depending on the complexity of the database that was built.