… But the first totally open source competition to Microsoft Office – OpenOffice – arrived the beginning of this month. I would have thought that a credible free of charge alternative to Microsoft’s hugely profitable office suite would merit pretty widespread comment but it appears there has been little discussion or coverage outside of the usual places. Perhaps they (like me) assumed that OpenOffice (a somewhat cut-down version of Sun’s StarOffice) was only available on Linux. Nope – it’s available on Mac and Windows as well.
Has anyone reading this attempted to switch over permanently to it? How are you finding it? While I think of it, is it worth downloading Mozilla? Or the beta of Netscape 7?house 300,000 loans60,000 loans dollar12month loans poor credit200,000 personal loans dollarbank dollar from 5000 loanfha loan financing 100 homebad loan 30000 credit withscholar loan academic91 bill t student day loanabout rich sloan jeff and
I’ve been using Mozilla for months. It works fine for me – there have been some crashes, but recently I’ve only seen them when doing strange things involving trying to change plugins while the browser is running. It renders pages well, is acceptably fast, and has a number of features I would now find it hard to live without: tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, cookie management (“So-and-so wants to set a cookie. Allow it? Remember this decision?” so you get asked ONCE for each site) and a nearly-100%-perfect popup/popunder blocking.
I’ve also been using OpenOffice (under Linux) since 1.0 came out, and I’m quite happy with that too. It reads and writes Word and Excel files, is no harder to use than them, and isn’t Evil.
Comment by wjr — 4 June 2002 @ 6:24 pm
I use Open Office at home on my Windows 2000 computer. I mainly write letters and edit documents under 80 pages, with sections and headers and stuff like that. I don’t do any mail merge or use any clip art or anything of that nature, but for what I do, it works great.
Comment by James — 12 February 2003 @ 5:43 pm