Feedback on OpenOffice for a magazine article

[Duncan]

I'm writing an article on OpenOffice for MoneySense, a national magazine based in Toronto, Canada. I'm looking for feedback on OpenOffice from people (preferably Canadians) who have been using it for a while.

I'd love to hear your comments on:

- your overall experience using OpenOffice
- the quality of the software, compared to commercial applications
- how easy it is to open and save documents from other applications

Please post them below or email them to me at:
letters@moneysense.ca

Many thanks,
Duncan
Toronto, Canada

[Villeroy]

No cross-posting in this forum. Please, remove your post from the "Beginners" forum.
- your overall experience using OpenOffice
very much like Word/Excel 2000 with some extras and some features missing
- the quality of the software, compared to commercial applications
very much like Word/Excel 2000
- how easy it is to open and save documents from other applications
File>Open...[path/name.xyz]
File>SaveAs... type:[choose format], name:mydoc, [X]auto extension

IMHO, your questions don't get the important point, which is about the ownership over your data and how to access your data in centuries of time from now with *any* application of that time or a simple zip-algorithm and ASCII/XML decoder. Today you can buy a computer at a grocery store, use the preinstalled office application and when the evaluation period expired you can not open your own files anymore. Your files had been saved in a file format called "Office Open XML" by Microsoft, similar to the XML file format of OpenOffice.org - but impossible to implement by anybody else but a company named Microsoft.

[keme]

First note: expect a considerably increased load on your spam filter. Publishing your email address verbatim on any website will soon bring it into the spammer databases, in which it will remain for years. Next time, rephrase it to avoid harvesting (e.g. using <at> instead of @ and -dot- instead of the period.)

Then to the experience (not in Canada, but anyway...):
Using: It has all features I need. The installation package is light on ready made templates, but heavy on functionality. Lots of material (templates, functionality addons, etc.) is available online, downloadable for free or for a fee. A few issues concerning instability/malfunction, particularly in the presentation and database applications (Impress/Base). Upgrades are made available, normally at schedule as published, with noticeable improvements on those issues.
Having the same user interface across all platforms is a great advantage when supporting users with limited experience in using computers. With OOo I can have practically identical front end on the Mac, Windows, Linux and Solaris workstations. The other suites I've used are for Windows, with some ported to Mac and nothing for *nix. Anyone who've used both Mac OSX and Windows versions of MS Office will know that there's a considerable difference between them...

Quality compared to other suites: Not very different in quality from the MS, Lotus or Corel suites. The commercial suites do have a more even quality of templates, whereas the quality of material downloadable for OOo varies a lot. Then again, freely available material for the other suites (in the instances where I've downloaded such) have the same variation in quality.

Open and save documents from other applications: For my needs, OOo has the best support for foreign formats of all the suites I've tried. Some of the support depends on installing addons, but much is available in the basic installer package. Then again, I haven't used Lotus or Corel suites extensively for the last 4-5 years or so, so things may have changed.

[bhmt]

...for MoneySense, a national magazine ... looking for feedback on OpenOffice from people (preferably Canadians) who have been using it for a while.
...

Perhaps consider also

http://user.services.openoffice.org/fr/forum/

Just guessing, but French-speaking Canadians might visit there?

[Phylis Sophical]

- your overall experience using OpenOffice.
Moments of frustration moving from MS Office as the many commands are different. But once I've figured out the OOo equivalent command, I've found OOo to be much more logical. People forget how frustrating it was when they first started to learn MS Office.

- the quality of the software, compared to commercial applications.
Superb! Very easy to navigate, update, and open.

- how easy it is to open and save documents from other applications
Extremely easy. I have OOo set to open Office files. Boom..done. And the files convert very well. Hardly a glitch in the formatting. Creating .pdf documents is a breeze. Converting .csv files works flawlessly in Calc. OOo was the only thing I could use to view an Appleworks file. Garbled, but none-the-less, viewable.

I do find the Help files to be more of an explanation of each function rather than how to actually use or implement the function. However, due to the great forum we have here, and the patient people who participate, help is not far away.

[Weatherlawyer]

The help doesn't.
If it wasn't for this forum I'd be back on M$ Office. The help files are written by people who can read code and live and breathe geek. They aught to be shot for writing help files.

And there is a rather defensive attitude towards the suite in general on this forum. But it isn't as bad as the defensive attitude in general that can be found on more evangelical open source sites such as Groklaw. Or maybe it isn't that bad on Groklaw either.

What do you feel is the attitude toward Canada and the Canadian IT politics that is discussed there? I gather things are pretty oppressive.