Microsoft Office vs. Open Office

MS Office for sure. I got it for free so price wasn't an issue...love the features and usability.

 

I used Open Office for most of the past month exclusively, except to print documents (I don't have my own printer, so the university's computers with MS Office were used for that). At first it seemed rather nice. But once I started doing more heavily formatted things, I wasn't impressed. Some of the important differences I noticed:

*Trying to write mathematical equations and sentences in Open Office doesn't work anywhere near as well as Office 2007. Not only was the nice equation editor not there, but the line spacing got all messed up whenever I inserted many of the special mathematical symbols. OO Equation isn't as intuitive as Word 2007 for equations, either, and with final assignments and papers I didn't have the time to learn it (if I did, I'd probably learn LaTeX). So Word proved far superior to OO Write for mathematical things.

*Spreadsheets are much less sleek in OO Calc than Excel, particularly in charts (aka graphs). In Excel, if I add another row of data, it automatically adds that to my charts. Very handy! In OO Calc, I have to manually re-assign the data location. Not so practical. Formatting is also much more intuitive in Excel. Even in Office 2000 the series of menus makes things easy enough to find, but I was amazed just how easy things were in Excel 2007 when I used it yesterday. Just select the data and click two buttons and you've got your chart. From their it's easy to customize. Very polished.

*The layout in OO Presentation seemed less intuitive than Powerpoint's. For something as simple as changing the color of the font you have to navigate a somewhat labyrinthine menu. It got the job done, but it could have been much easier. Powerpoint makes this easily visible, as does IBM's Lotus Symphony's Presentation (which unfortunately has other shortcomings due to being based on OO 1.1 that effectively cancel out its better interface relative to OO 3).

*Although I can't really blame Open Office for this (yet), compatibility with MS Office is still pretty poor. Nearly every Powerpoint (.ppt) I opened was not properly viewable, making Powerpoint Viewer essential, and Word documents that were templates of something you were going to print out (say labels or flashcards) were not opened properly at all (.doc). Calc actually did the best of the three for what I had. Now that MS released the Office document specification in 2008, however, I would expect the next version of Open Office to have much better, hopefully fully compatible, document fidelity with Office 97-2003 documents at least. It certainly seems like it should be a priority.

To be fair, MS Excel 2007, though supposedly have OO compatibility with SP2, still didn't recognize the OO Charts properly, displaying them as blank Star Office charts. But it opened all the other OO documents I'd created properly, and really, while compatibility is a two-way street, it's much more important for Open Office to have MS Office compatibility than vice versa.

So I'll take Microsoft Office over Open Office for all of the constituent parts (that I use, at least). It provides a superior experience and works better with my existing files in all three programs. Well worth the low per-license cost of Home and Student.

Microsoft Works is lacking in capabilities, but it does at least have MS Office compatibility. For the few weeks I used it I encountered less frusteration in using it than with Open Office, but I didn't do anything heavy-duty in Word during that time either. It sufficed for the time until I went out and bought Office, though.

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The spell-check actually wasn't a factor for me, though. But I generally don't depend on it, anyways, except for a few words I can never remember. Mostly I just use it to catch any typos (although re-reading works better for that, too). On the Web I don't use a spell-checker at all - my browser has one, but I disable it because the false positives are more annoying than the real positives are helpful. For a paper in Word, of course, I use it at least after I've finished typing the paper.

 

Wordstar, all the way baby!

 

As far as the spell check and grammar check reason for picking Office, I can tell you this: you would be making a huge mistake to rely on these programs to edit your work. They don't catch a lot of errors and see others where there aren't any. Take it from me, I'm a journalist.

 

Wow MS Works is still around? Clearly it's not getting a lot of love here.

MS Office without a second thought. Besides, do most people really even have a choice? At the point when people actually use office applications where it really matters--for production on someone else's money (corporation's, employer's, client's, etc.)--and not just for some academic paper or personal enjoyment, they really have no choice. There's really only MS Office, with a few exceptions for really old government institutions and niche industries.

 

Office 2007 > > > > > > > Open Office.

People who think otherwise either don't work in a business environment (thus making your needs for depth in the products much, much simpler) or are being outright dishonest.

After using both extensively, I find it akin to comparing Photoshop CS3/4 to Gimp. Sure Gimp is an amazing free product and will meet the needs of many...but there are things Gimp can't do (or do as well as).

Open Office is good in the same way that Works is good. If all you need from Office is functionality similar to the Office of 5-7 years ago, then Open Office is fine. In fact, if that's the case, Works (free on every Windows system) probably means you won't need Open Office. But Open Office has a long way to go to equal Office 2007.

 

I think the equivalent would be Microsoft Publisher and/or Visio? Visio's very handy for making flowcharts.

I disagree. Personally, I like GIMP better than Photoshop, and I definitely prefer Digsby to Trillian Pro.

 

Yeah as said before, MS Office is better than open Office for in depth work, however for the casual user, Open Office works just fine.

I have MS Office9ranging from versions 200, 2003 and 3007) on some computers at my house and Open Office on others and I use both pretty actively.

 

Depending on who you are and your preferences, your browser of choice will be different.

Firefox is only better at customization than IE8 and almost nothing else. Firefox's speed/default ui are miles behind both IE8 and Chrome.

GIMP is as good as photoshop with the basic features and so is paint.net and a whole bunch of photo editing software. However if you're more advanced user, photoshop will be much better because of the tight integration with other programs and other "exclusive" features.

 

GIMP better than Photoshop? Come on people!

 

Gimp is better than photoshop for a lot of cheap, computer illterate people.

 

Problem solved. Works with all types of users.

 

LOL Too bad my WPM would get chopped down to probably half.

 

WOW... you type so slow or you write super fast.

I can type above 100WPM with about 99% accuracy and can only write 25WPM.

 

If you're deciding between the two but have to pay for the MS version then it's a no-brainer. Open Office!

 

I have MS Office 07..If I didn't I would prolly be using OO


Cin

 

MS Office is the best IMO, however, I use OO because it's free.

Not sure about that! GIMP is pretty hard to use compared to PS IMO.

 

After using Open Office and Microsoft Office, I can say with confidence that they are almost the same, mechanically. At least for what I use it for.

 

Yeah, but where's the "backspace" key?

 

The difference between that and MS Office or OO is that...I can actually read what I write with MS Office/OO afterwards.

 

I don't think it's worth it to pay for MS Office over Open Office. I personally prefer Corel WordPerfect for it's formatting options. However, I've installed Open Office on my desktop.

 

Uhm yes, because it's always better to take a worse product that is free than a better one you can pay for. not stating, that this is the case in this situation, but the price difference may not be a one-fits-all-thing. else, a netbook is always the perfect server for anything, as it's cheap. we remove now all our multicore vm serverfarms in our company and put one netbook in instead

back to not-overstretching: i'd have to pay 33$ right now for the basic office (word, excel, powerpoint, onenote (i have a tablet, so i love it)), instead of paying 0$. if i look at how office performs, and allows me to quickly reach my goals, yes, those 33$ are definitely worth it.

and that is the default price on newegg. that's not student price, or what ever.

 

I'm sure there are many, anyway, it's $60 for ultimate with student discount.

 

MS Office is very affordable. Plus it is THE standard for productivity software. For example, Outlook has no real equivalent in the open source arena. It has no real equivalent even in the commercial arena. Pretty much any workplace you are headed to is going to assume you have MS Office experience. Even my little cousins are familiar with wordart, table, and text boxes at the age of 11.

 

Are MS products free to all students? I mean, here in Canada says I can get the Student version for 60$ but that's about it and it's a one license installation(and I have over 5 computers lol )

 

Some universities offer it to their students for free, but most of us have to pay for it. The best deal available universally to students is Office 2007 Ultimate for $60 via The Ultimate Steal.

 

that's in US only. Ultimatesteal doesn't work in US.. i think.

 

You mean Canada? It's $64 for Canadians: http://www.microsoft.com/student/discounts/theultimatesteal-ca/default.aspx

 

Yah.. nice catch..
I didn't see there was a button to change the country preference.

 

That's awesome, I will probably buy that over the summer...