Comments about ‘Free OpenOffice giving Microsoft a fight’

I think Open Office is great. I just finished my first year of grad school and I never used Microsoft Office. Don't waste your money, download Open Office!

OpenOffice is a viable alternative to MS Office. People familiar with MS Office will find the transition to OpenOffice to be fairly painless.

However, there is no real change in the marketshare that OpenOffice has over the past 2 years. To say that it is giving MS a fight is WAY overblown. That may come, but MS has A LOT of pricing room to give to ensure that their marketshare stays at least in the mid to low 80 percent range.

Always is good for the American enterprise. If you have no competition, our country would be stagnant!!

I was hesitant about the switch. REAL hesitant. So I switched one of my computers to OO.org and left the other one on MSOffice.

When the newer version of MSOffice came out, there was no reason at all to buy it, so I didn't and I am happy as a lark.

The spreadsheet program (Calc) works fine unless your ssheet is loaded with VBA macros. Then there is a problem, but for learning or starting a spreadsheet from scratch or using a non-power-user-macro-loaded version... it works great.

In fact... it works sooooo well I decided to try MEPIS Linux also. Now I've switched all my computers to running MEPIS Linux 8.0. No viruses, pre-loaded with OO.org, Firefox, etc...

there was no pain. Actually, it was quite incredible. Anybody with average intelligence does not need Micro$oft!

And I aint' going back!

I've run Linux for a few years and I like OpenOffice. I find myself using Google Docs a lot for small jobs. I haven't bought any software for years. It is surprising how good these opensource apps are. If you want to get started with Linux, try Ubuntu.

Open Office is good stuff, it saved me a whole lot of moeny

Open Office is a good alternative to paying for software. If you don't have the $ for MS Office, by all means use it. If you're an infrequent user of applications other than Word, you really won't miss MS Office much and will be able to do the things you really need to do, albeit with a little less professionalism. The word processor really is quite good for general document editing. On the other hand, if you often depend on applications like Excel, PowerPoint, or Access you'll probably find Open Office intolerable. It lacks the finer features of Microsoft's applications.

I have worked extensively on both and varying versions. Whilst OO.o is good enough for the home user, there are many areas which are lacking for the business environment. Collaboration, Integration of business apps, Workflow, platform to build biz apps on top of, search. Productivity tools should enable the user to do more, not just the same. MS Office 2007 is stellar, would definately continue to pay the USD100 for a GREAT product.