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

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.

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?

No loss of data, just the format in which it was displaying files that had been created in Office 2003.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I CAN SORT YA OUT WITH MICROSOFT EXCEL

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.

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.

To be fair that's partly because people aren't educated enough about computers. If someone's machine breaks they will call someone to fix it and 999 times out of 1000 that person will recommend installing office when the box is fixed. It doesn't matter to them cause the cost of the licence is paid for by the machines owner and its easy enough to download office at no cost.

OO/LO aren't any different to their office equivalents in terms of core usage. It's the same as IE, off the shelf machines came supplied with internet explorer for so many years that people simply don't know to change to a better alternative. Office has the same problem, people pay for a replacement because they simply don't know they can get the same program for free under a different name.

Things are slowly changing though, IE is the same as office when it comes to those third party plugins - webapps built yonks ago based on IE6 or whatever and they are just having to change now that there's better available.

Personally when I'm replacing home or office machines I install from an image with LO/firefox already present and configured. With links to googledocs if people really must use excel (for whatever reason).

It's like anything in life, you keep using something because it's easier than looking at doing something differnet. If Office has already been paid for, then you'd probably not see a compleling case to change it. For core functionality, Word 95 would probably do most home users.

The same is true of browsers, if you're happy with the browser you've got, you probably won't be bothered to change it. Admittely if sites stop to work altogether on older browsers, then you might be compelled to change. I can't say that one browsing experience for me is significantly better than another for the features I require for home use.

I would love to see you back that up with some hard facts? Bearing in mind that Microsoft do not have a policy allowing some parts of the world to have their products for free. And even if that was the case (which it isn't) the UK certainly would not be in said part of the world.

Iran is such a country. IIRC you can download software in Iran for nothing as long as the software wasn't produced by Iranian engineers and developed from within Iran itself. About a year or so back there was a leaked .gov.ir server that had thousands of programs available for download, except it was left open to access from any country Got closed within a few days.

Realistically it's a moral issue, there's simply no way for anyone to tell if Office has been paid for or not.

edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_and_copyright_issues

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez#Legality

The Home/student versions of office 2010 are quite reasonably priced nowdays, but you don't get Outlook included.

i have every edition of office made except 2011