Do you use Open Office?

I've never used it but have always wondered. Is it as good as Word?

If you want to do that in a Word document, just hit Shift + F5.

I've used it for years now, but encountered a serious problem when opening Word-based files with tracked changes for editing.

In the first instance, none of the sidebar dialog boxes showed up. In the second, about 1 in 3 changes weren't on their proper lines, so it was a total mess to figure out.

Mark G said:

ouch... hadn't tried that yet.

My wife uses Word with track changes to edit my writing, but I haven't imported that back into Open Office...

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The files I opened were from 2 separate outside sources, downloaded via Yahoo as attachments. I"m not sure if it has the same effect with files already on your computer.

I had a Star Trek word processor for a while on the other laptop, but I can't remember where I downloaded it from. Le sigh.

The more basic the features are, the better. Some of us like not having all the bells and whistles distracting us.

I use Open Office Writer a lot. I'm using it now to write a book about self-publishing on a budget.

It has one notable flaw, which has been in the program for years, which the gurus know about, and which they refuse to address.

Scrolling up and down with the arrow keys doesn't work intuitively. The cursor scrolls down (or up) and when it hits the margin, the page jumps about a third of the page height with the cursor going to the new line's position.

The only way I can use the program is to scroll with the mouse wheel, which is almost okay, except that it scrolls three lines at a time rather than one and does not reposition the keyboard cursor to the next line down (or up).

Most annoying and many users have complained. It falls on deaf ears. I keep threatening to download the source code and fix the bloomin' thing. Maybe when I get some spare time.

Other than that it does everything that Word does that I need, and in many cases, it does it better.

(I suggest a fast machine with this program. It is a resource hog and doesn't display things smoothly on my prehistoric XT PC. It works great on my wife's belch-fire, neck-snapper Windows 7 crate, however.)

I love Open Office. If you need super advanced functionality, it's not so great. But if you need a decent word processor, it's perfect. The only complaint I have is that you have to save stuff in earlier versions of .doc. But that isn't such a big deal, seeing as it's a good idea to do that anyway. (In case someone else doesn't have the latest software.)

I tried it, but I can't work with the spell-checker, it's just to weird for me (I'm a simple mind). Windows is much better on that.

I used both OpenOffice and LibreOffice, but what I didn't like about OpenOffice is the fact that, when I write in a language other than English (Spanish) words that I use in Spanish a lot are marked as misspelled, and I know that I didn't really misspell them. Their Spanish-language dictionary is just poor, just ahhh...not cool.

Then, when I tried to access the language pack in LibreOffice to get to the Spanish one, it was really weird, like it didn't install the language pack at all. I need a good Spanish-language dictionary because I write in Spanish also. It's my native language so I don't think I should stop writing in Spanish. Anyway...


Just downloaded AbiWord today. It's nice, and hopefully, the two Spanish-language dictionaries it has will work. I am really tired so I haven't explored that but I am going to, tomorrow. If I didn't write anything in Spanish, I would've stuck with OpenOffice, but since I had that difficulty, I had to download a trial of Microsoft Office Home and Student 2010, which expired last Thursday and now I'm going to see if AbiWord has what I need.

For 90% of what I do, OO is fine. I like the versatility in that it doesn't think it knows what you want (like Word does) and force you to do it.

As Cyia said, the track changes and editing features don't work as well as I'd like, and for some reason OO just doesn't feel right; I'm not sure if it's the display, but something has just felt off about it. I can't figure out how.

I've never used it, but I have a vacation coming up pretty soon and I'm going to be pried away from my desktop. I'll have to use my laptop to work. The laptop has linux installed on it, so I'll have to give OO or LO a try. I'm hoping there's no formating (or similar) issues going from one platform to the other and then likely back again while in the middle of my manuscript.

I use it to open MS Office documents if someone sends one to me, but my go-to office suite is iWork. Haven't had MS Office installed for four years.

Mark G said:

You can always right-click on words it underlines with the squiggly line and choose "Add..." to teach your standard dictionary - or you can try loading a dictionary (http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries) and highlighting the selection that's Spanish and setting the language for the selection...

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Thanks.

I use openOffice. It doesn't change formats as frequently as Word.

I use it, and voted as such--but just for the record, I also like pie.

I use it, but primarily for opening other people's Word files, rather than for writing. (And I also like pie.)

I use Word mostly, simply because that's what I use at work so a) I'm used to it and b) I have a home use license through them. But the kids have Open Office, so if I'm on their computer for some reason then I use it.

I used to but I found a copy of Microsoft Office 2007 that my boyfriend had. And I've since replace it with that.

I prefer it. Open Office is ok but it can lag.

If you want a much better updated free version of Open Office I'd suggest going with Libre Office which has updated all the bugs etc.

fireluxlou said:

If you want a much better updated free version of Open Office I'd suggest going with Libre Office which has updated all the bugs etc.

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Much of the improvements can be traced to the fact that Oracle started introducing more Java dependencies than the Org team was comfortable with, and LibreOffice attempts to reduce the dependence on Java to a bare minimum. It may be cross-platform, but Java is still ***ing slow.