Will Open Office do ok?

[Xaixis]

I am currently working towards a Macbook but the one thing that bugs me is that I won't have any of the iWork products. I will have to use Open Office.

What I want to know is if Open Office docs are compatible (like will formatting stay relatively the same) as this is crucial for future school projects.

 

[Despain]

I use OpenOffice for everything and have absolutely no problems with it. I have a PC though, and most of my school computers are PC, so I can't say much about macs. But my guess would be yes. I love OpenOffice.

 

[Tohsaka]

I run a Macbook Pro, and I use OpenOffice.Org and iWork a lot. OpenOffice.Org is my choice of office suite that I deploy on Windows Computers down at the refurb lot.

It'll work fine- Just save as a MS Office format.

 

[___]

Yeah you'll be fine, just remember you need to specifically tell it to save in MS Word compatible format when you save; word cannot open Open Office's default document type.

 

[$t3v0]

Open office is fine for most things. I'm not entirely sure about the limitations, but I haven't ran into one yet.

 

[Venetia]

OpenOffice doesn't feature all the features of, say, Micro Office (note: I have never used the Mac equivalents). But for basic shit like text and footers and tables and whatever, it's more than enough. I use OO at work and Micro Office at home (which I personally find funny).

I like to work with Micro Office's more advanced features sometimes, like specialized wordfields that are completed for you, or more finely-tuned pagination/position things. Not everything will carry over perfectly, particularly if you have special pagination around tables or images. And I don't think that Calc has quite as many equations or functions as Excel. But otherwise you should be 100% fine.

I've never used OpenOffice Impress, which I think is a knockoff of PowerPoint, but I assume that this program would be the one where you see the most conversion problems.

 

[Juno]

The only issue I have ever run into using OpenOffice is if you need to open spreadsheets made in Excel that use certain complicated formulas.  There can be compatibility issues, when porting from Excel to OpenOffice.  But if you're starting from scratch, or don't use any formulas in your existing spreadsheets, you should be fine.

 

[___]

I have had a variety of problems with Open Office's database and spreadsheet apps, but the text editor is pretty solid. Flypaper is a pretty good free solution for simple presentations as opposed to OO's software, but I haven't used the latter so I can't give you a good comparison.

 

[Tohsaka]

I might note that, since you're going to be on a MacBook- Automater/AppleScript will be your best friend. It's a replacement (basically) for VBA, and Macros.

I'll add, Microsoft Office:mac 2007 sucks balls. OpenOffice 3.0 or NeoOffice will do fine- Both are Cocoa/Aqua apps.

 

[Xaixis]

Ok, I don't need anything TOO complicated. And I will mostly be using the word processor.

 

[Tohsaka]

OpenOffice 3.0 would work for you then. If you find that you are more familiar with the old Windows menu, then you'll want an older version of OpenOffice, which uses X11.

 

[Xaixis]

I used OO 3.0 for a bit and it seemed to crash on me constantly, as well as have weird formatting errors (bolding random text, increasing size, etc.) So I moved to NeoOffice (which is the same thing but more stable). I used that for a good deal of time but then I finally got Office:mac 2008 because of the constant need for compatibility between school and my home-work (such as in my tech classes).

On trial now and I think it's ok, I preferred OOs layout though, I think it works better on Linux.

 

[Tohsaka]

OO 3.0 is known to crash on Mac since it uses Aqua, which is relatively new in the OOo chain. Aqua support, is to say, crappy.

 

[Xaixis]

Does aqua work best on Linux/Windows? Because I think that using something that is somewhat unreliable is not the best thing when creating open-source programs.

 

[Tohsaka]

Aqua doesn't run on Windows/Linux at all. Aqua is the Mac OS X interface, so it's a Cocoa GUI.

 

[Xaixis]

Then why is it so buggy if it designed for osx?

 

[shadow]

I think that it has got a lot better in the past year or so.

 

[Tohsaka]

Xaixis, you're missing the point. OpenOffice is originally designed and coded as a Java Application using a Java GUI. 3.0 on the Mac is using a Cocoa/Aqua GUI, which hasn't been used on OpenOffice.org before, so it's buggy.

Besides, plenty of stuff designed for OS X is buggy- I mean, even iWeb screws up all the time. Don't talk like OS X as if it were some magical system where everything is perfect. We don't want more switchers.

 

[Xaixis]

No no no, I wasn't trying to overplay mac, I just misinterpreteded your answer.
Also I haven't really ran into as many bugs as I had with any other program (but I haven't used iWeb all to much), but OOo would freeze every 3-4 minutes making it unusable. I simply acquired NeoOffice and it worked just fine.

I still use it when I'm on Ubuntu on my desktop without any problems

 

[DragonZX]

This may have been mentioned, but even the NEWEST version of OpenOffice.Org does NOT support .DOCX/XLSX/ETC. In other words, Microsoft Office 2007+ new file system are not supported, so if you're using open office, and you're bringing school files home, save them as a 97-03 document. I know, I use OOo, and I have to do that.