On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 11:27 AM, Beartooth Comcast<Beartooth@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Tue, 7 Jul 2009, Austin English wrote: > >> Perhaps because OpenOffice is a free (beer & libre) project, whereas >> Microsoft Office isn't. If you don't need the bloat/extra features of >> Microsoft Office, then why give Microsoft money for something you >> don't need. > > I've never been in business, let alone used business software -- so > this may be a Very Dumb Question. Is the scuttlebutt I see, to the effect > that OO can do anything M$ Office can, mostly better and more reliably > (including output Office formats) -- is that not so? I'm sorry, I don't understand your question. If you mean, can OO do everything Microsoft Office can, then no. The same goes for Microsoft Office, which can't do everything OO can do. If you mean, can OO open Office formats reliably? In my experience, it depends. Documents with crazy formatting often break, though the same occurs between Microsoft Office versions (I see this at work between 2003/2007 nearly daily). For most documents, it works well. Though, in my case, I don't care to support Office formats. I don't operate a business, so it's not critical to me. I've written all my papers for school in OO. When professors ask for a computer format, I send .odt/.pdf. No one has complained yet. Microsoft Office will remain the status quo unless people actively fight it. Just because OO supports Office formats doesn't mean you have to. Lastly, fwiw, we use Microsoft and Open Office at my workplace. I use Open Office for spreadsheets, since I'm usually working with flat text files, which Excel butchers, but calc helpfully asks me if I want to preserve formatting whenever I open. -- -Austin
