Eskimo North

Microsoft Office is more popular and owns the ball, staroffice is free - where does it balance out for you?

One of the problems with Microsoft applications, aside from their price, is the fact that since you don't get source code you are restricted to the platforms they bothered to port it to.

I run Linux on UltraSparc equipment, no Microsoft application runs on this platform, and I have to compile most applications myself as this platform is not common and therefore frequently no binaries are available.

Price is an issue, but portability is another reason for going open source. In addition, open source software is reviewed by a very large community instead of a small programming team. Security issues tend to get found and fixed sooner.

While I'm a believer in Open Source Software, the reason I have OpenOffice.org installed at work is due to price. Our small company uses Windows 2000 workstations [since the primary programs being used are FileMaker Pro and a DOS accounting app called ACCPAC+]. But I could not justify the cost of MS Office on all 30 systems, so OpenOffice.org was a no-brainer. I've used it on my linux boxes for years, and have always been impressed by the features and stability [though at first the interface was quite difficult to get used to; at least when it was known as StarOffice [and was free at that point]].

The only reason I have purchased one copy of MS Office was due to the need for MS Access, which, until recently, OpenOffice.org did not have the equivilant of in their suite. Now they offer Base which works *very* well with Access files [and is a good front end to MySQL as well].

One of the disadvantages of not using MS Office is the lack of Visual Basic for Applications [many will see this as an advantage, since many VBA macros are simply viruses]. But when VBA is used for Good and not Evil, the macros can be quite useful. Since MS has just killed VBA in Office for the Mac, I think that now there is one less reason to develop VBA macros in MS Office, so hopefully down the road, this will become more of a non-issue for OOo as well [though i wonder what language future macros will be written in - macros *can* be quite useful when done correctly].

BTW, if you're using Mac OS X, OpenOffice.org [OOo] 2.0 is available for it too. Just make sure you install X11 from your Panther/Tiger install disc [e.mail/followup if you need more details on that].

As Robert said, cross-compatibility is a big plus for OSS apps. I can use my Mac at work with OOo and be able to walk to a Win2k PC and train the PC's user how to use that app, even though I've never touched it on a Windows PC!

/vjl/

On OS X there is a port of Open Office called Neo Office which doesn't need X11.

I admit that I have gone to the darkside and spend quite a bit of time with Excel, which I have found to be a very useful program. When combined with VBA it is impressive what you can cobble together. That being said, I have heard openoffice has it's own VBA-like scripting language.

I don't have any warm feelings toward MS Word. If I had my way everyone would use Latex, but that's really not realistic. Access, I know nothing about. Visio is handy for quickly making diagrams, but I don't really know how to use it properly. I believe Dia is an opensource version of Visio. I am not sure if there is a way of using PowerPoint properly. Well...PowerPoint can be useful, but it is the most evil program in the suite, but that is the nature of presentation software.

In the end for most work performed by most people I am pretty sure that the difference between MS Office and OpenOffice is insignifigant.

Don't have MS-Office, but do have to deal with Word documents from time to time, I use something called AbiWord, is free, deals with Word Docs and a number of other formats, and for basic HTML documents it kicks out not bad HTML as WSIWIG editors go.

AbiWord is an excellent WP. Best to stick with the 2.4.X branch, since the 2.5.X branch is lacking a lot of functions still. BTW, for wysiwyg html editors, Kompozer is king:

http://www.kompozer.net/

It's much more stable than SeaMonkey's "Composer", which is a reimplementation of the earlier non-free-and-open Kompozer interface, called "NVu". Kompozer will compile on all platforms ;^)

For pay-to-play word processing, TextMaker offers significant advantages over AbiWord in terms of features. It can do many useful desktop publishing tasks, and imports the new and excitingly braindead M$ XML word format. It's pretty cheap too, at around $50.

There is, of course, no good excuse for using any M$ product, unless you like the idea of your purchase price going to develop new document formats that you can't read... And that generally suck anyway. Ah, those fond memories of the old days of M$ Office when we would use our magic undo button on vendor's quotes to find out what they were quoting for our competitors... And sometimes find their emails to their drug dealers buried in there as well ;^)