Difference between Office and Open Office?

What is a major difference between Microsoft Office software and Open Office? I hear Open Office is basically the same thing as MS Office but it is like 200 bucks cheaper(free acctually)...so what makes MS Office worth the 200 bucks, is it just not worth it?

 

well, here are a few things that i noticed...for word, you don't have the wide variety of writing templates (e.g. fax, prof. letter). also, it has no thesaurus function which i use often with ms word. also, i don't remember seeing the ability mark up on oo, though i didn't actively search for the option.

 

Well, Microsoft Office is more powerful than OpenOffice, but it comes at a cost.

It depends what you do, if you're in a tight budget, and you mostly only write text documents, then OpenOffice will be fine. However, if you have to design lots of really nice PowerPoint presentations, Microsoft Office will be better.

 

Yeah office does have a lot of features(even though i dont use most of them)/more powerful as sam mentioned but OpenOffice does its job and works pretty well and is Open Source.

I have both MS office on my lappy(i also use abiword) and portable openoffice on my flashdrive/mp3player.

If you want to look at a more detail comparison do a google search on what MS office you want to compare Open Office too.

 

the fact is that I can afford it, but I would very much like to save the 190 dollars, is the perfomance on MS Office something that is vital?

 

i use open office.org and use it for documents, power point presentations and spreadsheets. it is mostly everyday use but have had no problems what so ever.

 

People usually use office not because of its feature but it being a standard, this is particularly important for corporations(or jobs related with corporations that demand it).

for individual use, it is very unlikely open office cannot meet the needs.

 

say I'm just doing word documents and just a tad of excel and powerpoint (does it have outlook?) would this be quite suitable?

 

yes should cover all your needs. no outlook though.

 

looks like I'll proboly be getting it when my new lappy arrives, so thanks all of you

 

no outlook. but it can handle the task you mentioned.

The problem about open office is usually in the following form :

how can I do equivalent of feature X in which is in Office, in open office ?

If you are not an office user, it is very unlikely you would find things that cannot be done in open office.

 

really all I'm doing in Office right now is word documents, so I'll be using excel and power point in Open Office realitively new

 

thunderbird should work well enough to circumvent the need for outlook.

when i first tried open office, i didn't like it....but when i started doing reviews for machines that weren't mine and needed a word processing software for them, i got used to it, and found it to be mostly good. for excel, i would assume that they don't have as many commands as excel and the function commands that you do use may be different. and i am betting that they have less templates for powerpoints....also, oo doesn't export/import 100% correctly, so expect to have some formattng errors when opening outside powerpoint presentations in oo and when opening your oo created presentations on powerpoint.

 

I occasionally use it when I’m on Linux, but not as comfortable as with MS Office.

What better way to see if it really meets your requirements than to try it yourself ? Its free so nothing to loose. . If it doesn't then you can buy MS office

 

Office Docs are the business standard, you will not have issues communicating with most businesses. Open office will be more than enough for any home use I can think of, if you hope to email something out to lots of freinds or business peers be aware that some formatting may drop off, usually the text is still readable. I sometimes use the portable apps version on a 1gb usb drive. That way if I need to open a document on any windows machine I have the doc and the application with me.

Outlook is valuable if you hope to sync with a phone or PDA on a regular basis. Thunderbird is fine by itself, but difficult to sync and migrate from.

At work I use MS Office and at home I my wife mostly uses works as it came for free with our laptop and really works well. I always have Open Office on my flashdrive in case I need to do something more complex at home.

 

To be honest, Evolution is much closer to Outlook than Thunderbird, but it's a Linux-only app.

The biggest thing you will notice when using OO instead of MS Office is the lack of templates and the big differences in macros in Spreadsheet (aka Excel). Any macros that you use in Excel will not translate to OpenOffice since they are written in Microsoft Visual Basic. Also, you will lose some formatting when opening MSO documents in OO occasionally, especially when complex tables, graphics, and uncommon texts are used. I have successfully done work presentations, school documents, and many spreadsheets in OpenOffice without incident though.

 

Excel has at least one feature that OO Calc doesn't have, the ability to show the equation of a curve fit of a plot. I was looking for it and googling it, and finally I found that somebody said in the forum that it is not available with Calc, and they have no plan to support it. So I installed Excel.

Otherwise, OO is good enough for me. Infact, there are a few features on OO Writer that Word doesn't have (as far as I know - probably I wasn't looking for it seriously enough) that I find convenient.