Microsoft Office Vs OpenOffice-Which do you prefer?

I've never been an Office guy, I've typed the occasional long *** book report, paper, resume, or whatever junk i had to do. But for my whole life I've always used MS Office, at home and at work.

But I've always been the type to say "hey use OpenOffice it's free" until I actually used it.

I know it's free but I am so used to MS Office, It took me forever to find the "page Setup" link so I could adjust the borders and such. All of the normal office things (line spacing etc) were hidden or in the wrong place. It's so wierd, here I was thinking the config in MS Office was the norm, since every PC I've ever touched has MS Word.

Anyways, what do you guys use?
I think I'm going to install Office XP now, Open Office is nice for the fact that you can run it off your thumb drive, and it's kinda small, but MS Office hasn't changed for the last 10+ years, and I'm so used to it. It's not worth relearning a program that I only use 2 times a year lol.

 

Open Office definately.

Free, More stable then Office IMO, and Open Source....

 

well if you compare it to MS office 2007 the menu schemes are much easier in openoffice

 

I use OpenOffice...I had Microsoft 2007 on my desktop.

I can go with either. If I had MS 07, I would use it. Now OpenOffice..because it's free, etc.


Cin

 

Yeah I just looked up MS Office 07 on Wikipedia and I realised that I use the Office 2003 set of programs the most lol.
I'm going to give Office 07 a try tho.
I think I just need to move stuff and set options in Open Office to get it how I want it.

 

If I had MS Office, I'd use it.
But I don't, so I'm content in using OpenOffice. :]

 

Don't like the Office 2007 layout. I use 2003, OpenOffice, and Scribus. Mostly 2003, because it is what I started my dissertation in, and every time I open it with a different version, the formatting gets borked.

 

I like the "I use OpenOffice because it's free" comments.. in a Windows forum.

I use MS Office because I do not want to deal with any potential problems working with files I receive which were made on MS Office.

 

In my opinion Open Office is superior to Office XP and earlier, while Office 2003 & Office 2007 are superior to Open Office.

In my experience Open Office does a good job handling MS Office files and vice-versa.

 

Would you say OpenOffice is absolutely 100% mission-critcal going to be able to read EVERY file I could EVER potentially get in ANY Office format and read it perfectly in the intended way the document creator intended?

Oh, and how is OpenOffice's email exchange client?

 

MS Office 07 hands down.

 

I wouldn't guarantee its compatibility. Only in my experience has it been good, and I haven't explored all possible things a person may someday need to open.

I don't know about its mail client. I have been using the one built into Server 2008 and am happy with it.

 

MS Office 2003 by far the best office. Office 07 would be good if they used a simple menu system.. .which they don't...

 

OpenOffice doesn't have an e-mail program.

 

I love open office with one exception... i like Excel better than the Open Office spread sheet program. The coding is a bit "off" in Open Office so you cant do some things.

But by large i will stick with open office.

 

Office 07 "looks" better visually speaking, but its confusing to navigate thru and do things you want compared to Open Office.

Open Office is more user friendly and so far, no problems.

Speaking from a student point of view, I would choose OpenOffice. It's free, easy to use, and virtually compatible between the 2, so far.

 

I've noticed formatting issues when I open .doc in OpenOffice.

 

I don't exactly get why "free" would sound out of place in a Windows forum.
Regarding to the OP initial question, I don't see why Open Office should be considered "bad" just because you are *used* with another software. It's not OpenOffice's fault and you are not judging it objectively.
I think it all has to do with the way the product is used. MS Office is more full featured and if you are part of a company/organization which uses it then why complicate your workflow with another software.
On the other hand, if your not tied by that then go for whatever you like.
I use OpenOffice and I'm very satisfied. I'm not an "office" person, so it's not my main app, I use it for various documents, quotes and various calculations. We also use it to open MS Office documents received from clients (mainly .doc and .ppt) and it works well for us.
I also find it's feature set very satisfying and well suited for our needs.
Another great feature for us is it's cross-platform availability and compatibility, which I don't think was mentioned yet. Being a VFX studio we are also heavy Linux users and it's very useful for me to have it on Windows *and* Linux.

Dragos

 

I use open office even when I had the option of MS office, mostly because I'm used to it and am also a Linux/Windows user.

 

I quit using O when it was unable to open a very critical file [Word Document] sent to me that I had to print for the next day. Very sad. It was also really hard to do charts in O Writer, while it was a breeze in Office [and I was still using Office XP then!! Although that was O 2.4 if I remember correctly...] Now I'm only keeping O because I still have some old documents saved in the open format.

Now I'm using Office 07 and despite all the negativity surrounding the Ribbon interface, it's grown on me and I actually like it much better than the old menus. Just had to get used to it [i.e. memorize where this and that function is ]. Maybe MS should "Ribbon-ize" all its programs in Windows 7 [as we've already seen in Paint and WordPad in 7].

 

I know that old !!! Open Office had some bugs.

MS Office up to Office 2003 was very inefficient - Office 2007 (12) is completely new in comaprison.

Stabilitywise I don't have any problems - I managed to mess up Excel, but that was me feeding in too much stuff.

 

i dont mind using open office word processor for casual stuff, but if im doing something that requires a lot of formatting, inserting tables, graphs etc i find it somewhat frustrating

having said that, im jealous of the apple keynote program. the animations/transitions look nicer than powerpoint

 

Point is though:
Do you want animations?
I a professional presentation you don't want any animations - or if, very simple ones like sliding in or apearing -nothing fancy, so why bother?

 

I prefer MS Office but since Open Office is free I use that, Open Office 3 is almost as good MS Office IMO.

 

I use OpenOffice because it is free and open source and works for me when I need it. If MS Office 2007 was free and open source and available to Linux users with perfect quality and support, not some crappy port *cough* Flash, Picasa, younameit *cough* then I might consider using it just because I think it is shiny.

 

I love the net interface in Office, I'ts so much easier to find those lesser used functions... and use them.

 

ditto, its free and it doesnt suck, very usable

 

For what its worth, I have used both OpenOffice and MS Office. I particularly like Office 2007. Open Office is good but it still looks clunky. I am usually working with large documents - say around 300-400 pages with over 1K footnotes etc and say around 30-50 images. I have Word to suit my requirements perfectly. Its equivalent in OpenOffice is not quite responsive. I also use Powerpoint and Excel extensively and here again Office 2007 is more responsive - to me - than Open Office.

That being said, however, if in a pinch I will use Open Office willingly. The cost is an important factor - though comfort of use is also a variable I will not be willing to compromise on. I was lucky to have been able to legally obtain the Ultimate Steal offer from MS for Office 2007. If I had not been eligible for that offer, I would have been in a quandry.

I was on Ubuntu for a while and had to use Open Office on it. While it worked, I was never really comfortable on it. But that I just put down to being more used to the MS Office suite than anything else!

Cheers!

 

MS OFFICE 2007 ALL THE WAY! I love the Office 07 suite. It more than gets the job done for me.

 

Did someone or I mention this before?
The key thing about MS Office 2007 is that everything was redeveloped and optimized.

a word document 07 is say 27KB- the "old one" is about 100odd KB

By the way: The same interface comes to paint in Windows 7

 

I generally like OpenOffice best, but I also use Google Docs and Abiword from time to time.

 

Is OpenOffice documents backward compatible with Office 2007? If I save a document in Open Office on one computer and bring it over to another computer running Office 2007 only [via a flashdrive] will the formatting be okay and renderable?

 

Not natively. OpenOffice documents are saved as ODF format files which, according to this wikipedia article, can only be opened in Office-2007 if you have the appropriate plug-in. However, also according to that article, MS announced in May '08 that SP1 for Office 2007 would add support for the ODF format.

 

MS Office! so used to teh interface FTW

 

I still haven't figured out how to install dictionaries and spell checks/thesarus in my OOo. Can anyone teach me? *sweet angelic eyes*

 

I like Office better, but I use both, along with Abiword on my EEE.