New to OO

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viperking
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Joined: Wed Feb 20, 2008 3:14 pm
Location: Roodepoort, South Africa

New to OO

Post by viperking »

Welcome beginner. Please answer all of the questions below which may provide information necessary to answer your question.
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Which version of OpenOffice.org are you using? Not Downloaded it yet ... first want some answers
What Operating System (version) are you using? Windows XP Home
What is your question or comment? Hi, I am new to the Forum and new to open office. I have not used or even seen open office. I would like to get honest feedback first of what people think about it. I have been using MS Office for so long I am affraid to change.

Does OO have a package like "Frontpage" to make webpages?
Does OO have a mail package like Outlook? I am looking for a freeware or shareware type email client, that has the same functionality as outlook. Firefox is not what I am after as it is the same as "outlook express"

Am I barking up the wrong tree in trying to replace my MS Office?

Regard,

Werner
TerryE
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Re: New to OO

Post by TerryE »

Werner, you need to read the independent reviews to make up your own mind about OOo. MSO is a total solution that is still the market leader and the strongest in feature / functionality. It has two major limitations: (i) you have to pay for it, and (ii) you have to run Microsoft OSs on your PC which also for most people means that you quite unnecessarily need to replace your PC every two years or so.

So the alternative to an MS proprietory stack an Open Source one. You need to look at the entire array and not just a single product. So OOo is a broad functional equivalent of MSO for Office automation. Its functionality exceeds MSO97 (I doubt that 5% of users use any material features introduced by MS subsequently). It has reasonably good interoperability with MSO. Yes it has some niggles and annoyances, but it is free and can run on virtually any OS that you can get commercially. Even MSO has niggles (though different ones).

For email you can use Thunderbird, which when combined with some of the rich add-ins such as the calendar functionality is broadly euqivalent to Outlook Client. And as for web page editing, Writer is functionally similar to Word for HTML authoring but if you want the sort of tight control that Frontpage offers there are many alternatives from the WYSIWIG type to the more developer oriented tools such as HTML-kit.

At the moment my home PC still runs XP Home, though I do most of my development now in Linux VMs. The OSS stacks are now an effective alternative to MS, so I think it extremely unlikely I will buy MS products for home use in the future.
Ubuntu 11.04-x64 + LibreOffice 3 and MS free except the boss's Notebook which runs XP + OOo 3.3.
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ccornell
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Re: New to OO

Post by ccornell »

OpenOffice.org provides tools to do word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings, and databases. These are similar to Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Access. OpenOffice.org can open and edit standard Microsoft Office documents, amongst many other formats. OpenOffice.org cannot yet work with the new Microsoft Office 2007 formats, but that functionality is coming in a release due out later this year.

OpenOffice.org can be used to create HTML, but it is not the best tool for the job. If you are looking for an open source and cross platform HTML editor, there are several. NVU is a fairly easy to use one (of many available)... http://nvudev.com/index.php

OpenOffice.org does not have an integrated email client. Many people use Thunderbird http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/ with the Lightning extension (provides a calendar component) http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightning/.
Another option for email is Evolution http://www.gnome.org/projects/evolution/ which is part of the Gnome Desktop (Linux/Solaris). If you are still using Windows, there is a Windows version of Evolution http://shellter.sourceforge.net/evolution/. There is more information and a link to a Mac version of Evolution on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novell_Evolution
openSUSE 11.4, KDE4.6 with OpenOffice.org 3.3
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AndrewZ
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Re: New to OO

Post by AndrewZ »

ccornell wrote:OpenOffice.org can be used to create HTML, but it is not the best tool for the job. If you are looking for an open source and cross platform HTML editor, there are several. NVU is a fairly easy to use one (of many available)... http://nvudev.com/index.php
NVU is dead with no releases since 2005. Try http://www.kompozer.net instead
* Did you solve your problem? Do others a favor: Post the solution
* Visit OpenOffice.org Ninja (blog) and OpenOffice.org Ninja Wiki for news, previews, troubleshooting, etc.
OOo 3.0.X on Fedora 9 + XP
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ccornell
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Re: New to OO

Post by ccornell »

Oooops... Good catch Andrew. :-)

In Linux I tend to use Quanta+ as my preferred editor... but that is not cross platform (no Windows version). The last time I used Windows, NVU was still an active project. That will give you some idea how long it has been.
openSUSE 11.4, KDE4.6 with OpenOffice.org 3.3
viperking
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Feb 20, 2008 3:14 pm
Location: Roodepoort, South Africa

Re: New to OO

Post by viperking »

Thank you people for your replies. I have a couple of links to have a look at now. I will post my findings soon.

Cheers

Werner
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Hagar Delest
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Re: New to OO

Post by Hagar Delest »

TerryE wrote:It has two major limitations: (i) you have to pay for it, and (ii) you have to run Microsoft OSs on your PC which also for most people means that you quite unnecessarily need to replace your PC every two years or so.
I would add a third one: using the (proprietary) MS Office formats means that you don't really own your data, they're bundled in black boxes and nobody knows what's really inside. You'll find other links about that here: Office 2007 beginning to Bite.
LibreOffice 7.6.2.1 on Xubuntu 23.10 and 7.6.4.1 portable on Windows 10
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