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Joined: Oct 2010
Posts: 197
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OP
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Posts: 197 |
Anybody use this software?
G/f has been offered some work to do from home but needs Excel which we don't have on our lappy, is this a useable alternative?
No idea how complicated the spreadsheets she has to use are though.
Cheers
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Joined: Jul 2008
Posts: 14,350 Likes: 20
Wiki Master
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Its very good, tiny bit of learning if you are used to Microsoft Office but fairly obvious after a quick head-scratch.
I think that Microsoft do Office-online as well if you get stuck and need excel - some vague memory - could be nonsense.
We don't do charity in Germany, we pay taxes. Charity is a failure of governments' responsibilities - Henning Wehn https://ddue.uk
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It's an alternative, as to whether its a good one, is a matter of user opinion. The interface is similar, but has some strange quirks, in comparison to MS Office. I tried it a while back, and couldnt be bothered, just went straight back to Office. As DD says, there is a learning curve with it. Until you are used to it, it does hamper productivity.
Also, I noticed it does not display MS documents "true" as in, the documents were being displayed differently to how they are displayed on Office.
Though the same can be said with different versions of Office if im truthful (the reason I'll just stick with 2003 for eternity, and send office documents as PDF's instead lol).
I was actually part of the BETA team for StarOffice when Sun were developing it, and as part of the trial, they gave us all lifetime subscriptions to StarOffice (which was then a paid product). Ive never used it since the BETA finished, and even then, I only really used MS Office in production. OpenOffice is based on the StarOffice source code iirc.
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It's an alternative, as to whether its a good one, is a matter of user opinion. The interface is similar, but has some strange quirks, in comparison to MS Office. I tried it a while back, and couldnt be bothered, just went straight back to Office. As DD says, there is a learning curve with it. Until you are used to it, it does hamper productivity.
Also, I noticed it does not display MS documents "true" as in, the documents were being displayed differently to how they are displayed on Office.
Though the same can be said with different versions of Office if im truthful (the reason I'll just stick with 2003 for eternity, and send office documents as PDF's instead lol).
I was actually part of the BETA team for StarOffice when Sun were developing it, and as part of the trial, they gave us all lifetime subscriptions to StarOffice (which was then a paid product). Ive never used it since the BETA finished, and even then, I only really used MS Office in production. OpenOffice is based on the StarOffice source code iirc. Thanks for the info both  So there could be issues in exporting xls files back into Excel one they've been edited? Did you find you lost any information or was it just in the way it displayed?
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Joined: Aug 2004
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Wiki Master
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No loss of data, just the format in which it was displaying files that had been created in Office 2003.
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There are a lot of customizable thing in OpenOffice and numerous layouts available - also there has been major updates in recent times.
Like you Matt, I have found no reason to use anything beyond Office 2003 - stable as a rock and generally predictable and at least slightly intuitive. Some later versions of Office have been a pain to do even simple tasks.
We don't do charity in Germany, we pay taxes. Charity is a failure of governments' responsibilities - Henning Wehn https://ddue.uk
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THIS may also be of help - 60 days free trial of Office 2010. Sorry, I haven't looked into it properly.
We don't do charity in Germany, we pay taxes. Charity is a failure of governments' responsibilities - Henning Wehn https://ddue.uk
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THIS may also be of help - 60 days free trial of Office 2010. Sorry, I haven't looked into it properly. Cheers for that. I wouldn't bother using anything other than Office myself but like I say our lappy is quite old and I don't think we have it installed, no point paying out for a software suite we'd rarely use at home if I can find something free that will do the job. Sent myself a few spreadsheets home so will have a look at this later.
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HERE Is the online (Web Application) stuff I was trying to find - there must be some limitations but it does say you don't have to have Office yourself.
We don't do charity in Germany, we pay taxes. Charity is a failure of governments' responsibilities - Henning Wehn https://ddue.uk
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You could get Office 2003 for free on the web anyway... its not strictly legal however. PM me if you'd like details.
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You could get Office 2003 for free on the web anyway... its not strictly legal however. PM me if you'd like details. Not strictly legal? It's not legal at all unless you pay for it! I have used OpenOffice and find it does the job great. Big fan of Open Source software.
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Joined: Aug 2004
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You could get Office 2003 for free on the web anyway... its not strictly legal however. PM me if you'd like details. Not strictly legal? It's not legal at all unless you pay for it! I have used OpenOffice and find it does the job great. Big fan of Open Source software. That depends what part of the world you currently reside in  Besides which, you'd have a job paying Office 2003 nowadays, since Microsoft no longer sell licenses for it.
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willo
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willo
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Anybody use this software?
G/f has been offered some work to do from home but needs Excel which we don't have on our lappy, is this a useable alternative?
No idea how complicated the spreadsheets she has to use are though.
Cheers I CAN SORT YA OUT WITH MICROSOFT EXCEL
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Joined: Apr 2011
Posts: 1,337
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Stick to libreoffice.org instead of openoffice, after that fiasco with Oracle OO.org doesn't deserve support from OS users.
Course Oracle still control Java ...
Additionally if she only needs it for one document why not just use googledocs? (docs.google.com) or generate an excel file yourself and upload it to zoho.com for her to edit.
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Smartchild
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Smartchild
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Posts: 417 |
it's interesting how alternatives to Office haven't managed to make massive inroads into the corporate market. Microsoft are very good at tying in support as part of their Premier services and big organisations may use Enterprise agreements which rap up large-scale licensing arrangements. Support for third party office plugins that extend office functionality into line of business systems and intergration with other MS deployment and management products gets products like Office stuck in like sheep ticks. Every few years I hear Office alternatives get mentioned but nobody can be really bothered with the upheaval of replacing something that isn't broke or spending time developing a business case to see if there really is money to be saved.
Last edited by Neil_c; 25th Apr 2011 5:07pm.
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