Open Office

[nihil]

Open office v3.0 is now available.

This is an open source (free) fully fledged Office Productivity suite. It is supposed to be compatible with MS office but I haven't had a chance to try it with Office 2003 or 2007 yet.

If you are building a budget machine for an older or younger person (not indoctrinated with MS office) this is a solution I would certainly recommend looking at.

I have just loaded it onto XP SP3 and it uninstalled and transferred settings from v2.4 automatically

I will do some compatibility testing and report back

Cheers

EDIT:

Link is here:

http://openoffice.3-suite.com/index....p_uk&se=google

[t34b4g5]

Works fine opening and editing office 03 documents.

Seems to open office 07 stuff.

Formatting is a little wierd but then again the 07 document was a mangled trainwreck when i saved it.

[Cheap Scotch Ron]

Nihil,

We have been using openoffice for several years on our *inux laptops. Recetnly installed the 3.0 beta. There are some quirks but for the most part it works just fine re: MS Office 2007 interoperability. . MS Office 2007 support the openoffice XML spec, however, we've needed to install MS Office 2007 SP1 on our workstations to resolve some quirks with open office created files.

I noticed that the ink you posted is for the 3-suite.com domain. We use http://www.openoffice.org/

Any idea who 3-suite.com is?

[nihil]

Hi CSR,

Any idea who 3-suite.com is?

A UK site for the main one I think?............sort of a "mirror site".............. I have different links for the Sun Development Network as well?

[chaosclown]

Hi,

i used open office for a little while, but it seemed really slow on my pc. where as office 03 and even 07 ran considerably faster. i havent tried the latest version yet, but that was one of the reasons i stayed away from it. since im starting to go linux i might as well get used to it.

[t34b4g5]

Yeah OpenOffice is a lil slower then Ms' offering.

But at the end of the day for a Free Office suite one cannot really complain, especially in this day in age...

[nihil]

I can't say that I have noticed a speed difference but I have managed to pitch it a curved ball

I have some zipped Excel .csv (comma separated variable) files............ it just hangs up on them whilst Excel (XP and 2003) opens them in a spreadsheet. I have tried that on Win 2000 and XP boxes, but I need to check if it is the .zip file utility that is the cause.

It will open an Access 2003 database which v2.4 didn't seem to want to.

At this stage all I will say that the GUI seems a lot cleaner. At least it says what things are, rather than using their brand name