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OpenOffice

Wed, 10/08/2003 - 1:43pm — eddycurrents

This is very very cool. There is an open source (free!) Office suite. I haven't tried it yet, but I plan to install it on a spare computer at home soon.

Supposedly this is 100% compatible with Microshaft Office, presumably without some of the extra features.

That's okay by me, because I haven't found any new useful features since Office 97. All that extra crap Microshaft throws in to get people to buy new versions just slows it down and makes it bigger.

So if you can't afford MS Office or don't need the bloat, try out:

http://www.openoffice.org/

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Wed, 10/08/2003 - 3:17pm — EmptyKube
EmptyKube's picture

Re:OpenOffice

If I'm not mistaken, this is the software that Sun basd StarOffice on.
I used to run Star because I couldn't afford Office and it was preety good.
Now I have Wordperfect (which I always had, but which doesn't always open Word documents correctly) and Office XP. I'm addicted to word processors.
At one point I had eight installed on my PC. Laughing out loud

Sun, 03/07/2004 - 10:58pm — DaveK
DaveK's picture

Re:OpenOffice

I would like to promote Open Office and slow down Bill's march to owning the entire software industry. OO has a new release Version 1.1 which is a big improvment over 1.0 especially on Linux. It can create PDF's without Adobe. Also it is very easy to create a style which takes a story and formats it into the form needed for submissions to magazines. If anyone is interested I can post the procedure.
If I remember, Star Office came from a German company which Sun bought. They split it into the totally free Open Office and Star Office about $70. Star Office includes some licensed software for interacting with databases or maybe licensed fonts.

Mon, 03/08/2004 - 5:06am — eddycurrents

Re:OpenOffice

Create .pdf's without Adobe? Doesn't that violate their license?

That's Adobe's cash cow. They give away the reader and charge for the writer. Very clever IMO. But if people can write their format (which can't be hard) without paying them license fees, they will be out a lot of moooola.

—

I'm not a complete idiot -- some parts are missing.

Mon, 03/08/2004 - 11:33pm — DaveK
DaveK's picture

Re:OpenOffice

It writes in MS Word format too. I don't think you can protect the format. Maybe put a copywrited logo into it. But it seems to work.