Yesterday I played with Open Office 1.1 on my Debian/KDE system. It takes an age to start, and it's quite sluggish when compared with Office2K/NT4 on the same hardware. However, it costs a lot less, and it does what I need - in particular it can export documents to PDF without buying Adobe Acrobat. We converted a MS Word 2K document to OpenOffice format, then made very acceptable PDF, the PDF looked good and had a much smaller file size than the Word original.
OpenOffice, KOffice, et al. may not be perfect yet, but they are very good really, cost nothing, and are as compatible with MS file formats as MS are. We all know how annoying it can be to get an older Word document that Word can't open properly.
OpenOffice makes a very acceptable alternative to an unlicensed copy of Office for the average home user, and in a corporate settings, a significant cost saving.
Re:You mean
ajt on 2004-03-16T13:49:45
I suppose, but it's not a good name "OpenOffice.org", even "OOo" is a bit of mess. Mind you it works great, so what's in a name...?
If Microsoft thinks Lin---s is too much like Windows, then what hope does OpenOffice.org have? it could be mistaken for Micrsoft Office...
Re:You mean
sky on 2004-03-16T13:52:22
It is still very important to follow the branding guidelines of a product!!!Re:You mean
ajt on 2004-03-16T14:31:57
Tell me about it. For my sins, I work a marketing dept, web=marketing obviously.... I'm not really at liberty to say any more...
Re:You mean
phillup on 2004-03-16T18:49:45
Why should a customer or a user have to worry/care about the branding guidelines of a product?Re:You mean
ajt on 2004-03-16T21:08:43
I agree with that, you make a very good point. However I was evangelising aboyt the product, so I should get it right.
Re:You mean
drhyde on 2004-03-17T08:56:40
Furrfu! Next you'll be telling me how to typeset Brian Foy's name!
