Hi guys

Shortly I'll be replacing my aged pc and wanted to know whether anyone has had experience of using either of the above two products.

My ancient Evesham came with MS Works Suite which included Word and I definitely need a word processor. I was wondering though whether to go for the OO suite or MS Starter when I replace the pc. Any comments or advice would be gratefully received.

Paul

The short answer is "It depends".

What are you using it for?

Open office is OK, not quite the bells and whistles of MS but does the job very well. Free for non commercial use and has more features than the free MS starter edition.

The MS office starter does all most people will need. Review on the other place:http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/software/358585/microsoft-office-starter-2010

Open office doesn't have the box with adverts pushing towards MS upgrades and probably other stuff later - a marketing tool. Be warned if you do the online MS upgrade it's cheaper than a disk version but dies with your PC. A boxed version is reinstallable on a new PC.

Take your pick really.

Although it depends with what you're doing, I'd recommend OpenOffice.
It has perhaps 99% of the functionality 99% of people want (basically if you want something really specialised from MS Office, you're probably out of luck).

I've been using OpenOffice calc these last couple of weeks while my boss has been using Excel 2007, we've had no problem reading each others files and formatting has been OK. Personally I swap between OpenOffice and MS Office (Pre 2007) fairly easily, though the ribbon does my head in because I don't use it enough...

Many thanks guys for answering.

I'll mainly be using the word processing program and have been quite happy with Word 2002.

Mike and Ben..... In a previous life I used MS Office and, to be honest, probably never got further than using maybe 10% of the functionallity the thing offered. I'm quite sure that either of the above progs will do. I just wanted some feedback from other users.

Yes.... I read the PC Pro review on MS Starter Mike and was a bit iffy about having adverts on my main screen. Static ones would perhaps be ok but I don't know about vids. The interoperability you mention Ben is interesting and would tempt me to give OO a try.

I think I'm leaning towards OO.

Cheers Paul

I've not done anything too complex, just some basic Word/Writer docs and Excel/Calc docs (i.e. headings, page numbers, page breaks, columns, basic equations in calc - most complex being =IF(F473=52;57;IF(F473=57;52;0)) ).

Most new PCs should start appearing with Office Start pre-installed - it is "free" on most machines. MS are using it to replace Works, but more as a path to sell upgrades to the full suite.

At the end of the day, it comes down to what features you need. If the PC comes with Office Starter installed, you don't have anything to lose. Openoffice is free anyway, so you can give it a try as well.

However, both come up short, if you need to exchange documents which use advance MS Office features (such as pivot tables or formatting in Word documents). I used OO.o for a few years, but always kept a copy of MS Office handy, on a test rig, for checking the formatting of documents, before sending them to customers (I was using Linux as my main workstation at the time), but it usually meant a couple of hours of correcting OO.o's poor interpretation of the MS formats...

If you are only doing documents for yourself and sending out PDFs or printed results, then OO.o is probably sufficient, if you need to send out documents in MS formats, then I'd get the Office 2010 Home & Student version...

Edit: Impress -> PowerPoint interchangability makes the Word -> Writer interoperability look like a model citizen (it isn't!). We had a presentation sent in by a customer, which the boss put on the computer in the meeting room (OpenOffice), the customer had done it in PowerPoint 2003. The lines pointed to the wrong boxes, text from inside boxes appeared outside the boxes, some lines were orphaned, it was a complete mess!

That persuaded him to invest in a copy of MS Office for proofing documents before sending them out (it was an advertising agency, so the incident was very embarassing and nearly lost them their oldest and biggest customer!).

One thing to concider with OOo is that a document saved as a .doc file may look very different when opened in Word. I know this from trying to write my CV with Writer. Many agencies require your CV in Word format, and although mine looked great as an rtf or pdf the doc version looked totally different depending on which version of Office was used. Personally I think it's a lot like racism to require a CV in an expensive proprietary format, but I wanted a job so I had to play their game...


I'm quite a fan of OOo, but seriously! Using software that is "free for non-commercial use" on a computer connected to a projector in the meeting room you use for customer presentations..? That screams "Cowboys R Us" to most clients!

Having said that, my company does cut corners in IT... but not where it really matters and not on display like that.

The office had standardised on OpenOffice for all workstations, because we used a mixture of Linux, Windows and OS X... But the interoperability with customers and partners who used MS Office was appauling

OO.o is free for commercial use, they just expect you to buy Sun Office or a specific support package, if you want it to be supported.



You just can't resell it.