Any experience with "Open Office?"

[rosarugosa]

Has anyone downloaded this free software? Is it legit?

[Tradd]

Yes, it's legit. I've used it for years. There was some dustup between the developers and their backers, so they went off on their own and developed LibreOffice. Both are the same thing really. Free open source software that's great if you don't need something fully compatible with MS Office.

[bae]

Legit. Used it forever.

[jp1]

Yes, I've used it for about a year since I bought my most recent computer. It's not fully compatible with MS Office, but somewhat so. Things like macros don't work right, or at all, when shared between the two, but you can open docs and review them, make edits, etc, without a problem.

[rosarugosa]

Thanks for the feedback everyone!

[cdttmm]

Interesting. Does anybody know if you can run both MS Office and Open Office on the same machine without issues? I teach Computer Applications at the community college and we have to use MS Office for that, but I'd love to load Open Office on my laptop as well in order to show my students another option. But I'd need to be able to run both sets of software, for obvious reasons. TIA for any info!

[rodeosweetheart]

Interesting. Does anybody know if you can run both MS Office and Open Office on the same machine without issues? I teach Computer Applications at the community college and we have to use MS Office for that, but I'd love to load Open Office on my laptop as well in order to show my students another option. But I'd need to be able to run both sets of software, for obvious reasons. TIA for any info!

I'd be interested in knowing this too!

[jp1]

There's no reason that it'd be an issue to have both on one machine. The computer has dozens of programs on it already. This would just be one more.

[JaneV2.0]

I have both on my computer; I mostly use Open Office.

[SteveinMN]

Yes, you can use both. I did so on my work laptop a few years ago; OpenOffice was the standard and they would give you Microsoft Office if you couldn't get your job done with OO. But my question would be, why would you want to? If you've already put up with devoted the resources to Office, why use something that's not 100% compatible?

That said, I have no Microsoft software on my Mac at all anymore. I do have NeoOffice, which is a Mac-ified version of LibreOffice. I've used it for years happily and even donated money to the cause. NeoOffice is totally sufficient for my purposes; then again, I don't have exacting needs like maintaining huge Word docs that I have to share with others or using accounting systems built into Excel.

But, yes, entirely legit software and further proof that not all good software comes with a big price tag. :)

[ToomuchStuff]

Open Office started it's life as Star Office. Sun opened it up and made it into Open Office, which was widely used until Oracle acquired them. Oracle played some games and enough of the benefactors of it, went to form Libreoffice, that last I looked, it only had one advantage of Libreoffice (not for all). Now the Apache Foundation has control of it. It certainly is more then capable for the average home user needs. You should be able to use both on your machine. I think I still have it on one machine and may place it on another in the future, I just tend to have migrated with Libreoffice, during the scuffle (mostly use only the word processor).