Office 2000 Premium or OpenOffice?

I've never used OpenOffice, but I lost my copy of MS Office 2003 so I'm exploring alternatives to installing my copy of Office 2000 Premium. It seems that the interfaces are exactly the same, but I'm a student, so I can't afford to have others have trouble opening files I email them, etc.

I'll also be using MS OneNote at school and don't know if it'll conflict with OpenOffice...

 

If you have free copies of both, I'd go with whichever booted faster on my computer. If you have the space, install both, and give both a test drive. I don't recall OS2k, but it'll still open all standard doc, ppt, and xls documents. Basically, I'd go with whichever felt better. I've used both Office 2k3 and OO2.0 (and currently use Office '07), and both'll get the job done - although I did have trouble making a powerpoint presentation in OO, which was what led me to download Office '07 and do away with OO.

 

I have Microsoft Office 2000 still as my only office suite, and am still quite satisfied with it. I haven't had any compatibility problems at all, either with opening files from others or having them open files from me. If anything I'd except you'd have more of that with Office 2007 - they can rely on backwards compatibility with Office 2000. The only thing I don't like about it is load time - for that reason I'll use WordPad if I'm in a hurry and don't need formatting.

Office 2000 is still a very viable option. I haven't tried Open Office yet, so I'm not sure about it. OneNote shouldn't interfere with it. I agree with Overclocker; install both and see which you like better.

 

Open Office (Writer) is fine for most of your word processing requirements; however it lacks some features like the thesaurus, some formatting options and few fancy graphic options.

In general both of them are compatible with one another, but there can be small formatting and layout differences when you try to use the same files between the two.

Since OpenOffice is free, why not try it out and see if it works for you ?

(if money is not an issue I’d stick with MS office)

 

Why not invest in Office 2007? The academic, ultimate and enterprise versions all include OneNote 2007, which is a great program. If you get it through your school, even the enterprise version can come out to be under $90.

 

Because that's $90 you can spend on something else if you use OpenOffice. For any undergraduate academic needs, OpenOffice is more than adequate. It'll handle all your Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents with ease and includes more features than you'll know what to do with. Looks and feels almost identical to MS Office even. If you're getting into advanced desktop publishing, then start looking into other commercial packages.

When you're a student, $90 is a lot.

That's how I got into Linux. I was taking some C++ courses in 1998 and they said I had two options: Buy Microsoft Developer Studio for the student discounted price of $399, or install Linux (which comes with C++ compiler and tools) for free. That was an easy decision.