Open Office

[milanbenes]

installed it last night

fantastic

and free

Milan.

[rootsnall]

What is it ?

Not looking too hot in .Net world at the moment. Barely a sniff in the job hunt.

I've just installed the latest version at home and I'm learning Web Dynpro ( .Net version ) ready for the next wave.

[DiscoStu]

installed it last night

fantastic

and free

Milan.

Got to agree with you there, I've got it on all my machines, haven't even bothered installing MS Office

[SueEllen]

What is it ?

Not looking too hot in .Net world at the moment. Barely a sniff in the job hunt.

I've just installed the latest version at home and I'm learning Web Dynpro ( .Net version ) ready for the next wave.

www.openoffice.org

[expat]

installed it last night

fantastic

and free

Milan.

Agree. I have an old copy of MS Office which I paid for. It now has security holes which MS will not patch. So much for Gates's assertion that progress in MS products has no downside because you can always continue with the old versions if you want.

So I uninstalled my paid-for MS Office and installed Open Office. Great.

Only downside is you have to remember to bend your way of working to suit the MS world: e.g. your Open Office word processor can read and work on Open Office documents (.odt) and on MS Office documents (.doc), but MS Word doesn't read "foreign", so you may have to save your documents in .doc for the poor people who use only MS. But that's a small price to pay for not being a sheep in an ovine world.

[milanbenes]

roots

sorry to hear that

my area of new fangled administration work is seeming ok at the moment touch wood

don't forget to look at _a_ W-D-P (not only _j_ W-D-P) because interestingly they're starting to do a lot of stuff in that area too out of the box, and if it needs customizing then someon will need to know how to do it

Milan.

[d000hg]

It's not great IMO. Styles are terrible, and import/export to MSWord format is sucky - you can love it but if you can't communicate with the rest of the world why bother.

[rootsnall]

roots

sorry to hear that

my area of new fangled administration work is seeming ok at the moment touch wood

don't forget to look at _a_ W-D-P (not only _j_ W-D-P) because interestingly they're starting to do a lot of stuff in that area too out of the box, and if it needs customizing then someon will need to know how to do it

Milan.

I'm only looking at _a_ W-D-P, too far behind the pack on the _j_ front, I did some yonks back but it's long forgotten.

[NotAllThere]

It's worth every penny. The only downside (or possibly not ) is that you can't use sharepoint with it. Sharepoint insists that it's e.g. powerpoint that opens ppt files, even though openoffice can open them.

[minestrone]

Find it pretty slow, it's not near the same level of quality as MSOffice, but then I don't really need a full blown office app except outlook for integration with my windows mobile phone so I have it on my laptop and keep office on my desktop.