OpenOffice.org 2.1 at effective web ministry notes

OpenOffice.org 2.1

filed under Tools by rob on 14Dec06 @ 6:16 am EST

You know, it occurs to me that with Microsoft Vista coming out next year and loads of ministries wanting to keep up, switching to OpenOffice.org 2.1 seems like a great idea…at least from a stewardship standpoint.

I’ve never used it, but am very tempted. It seems to be a great, free replacement for Microsoft Office.

Anyone with experience using any of the OpenOffice suite care to comment about the product?

4 Responses to “OpenOffice.org 2.1”

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1 Steve Clark on Dec 14th, 2006 said:

Over a year ago I put Open Office 1.0 on a machine I only use for some English language software. I didn’t want to pay for the Microsoft software I use on my main machine. As it turns out I only use it for passing Excel bits of information to the software on the other machine, so I have not used it extensively, but for that purpose price was great and the learning curve on the differences not steep. I have not yet evalutated the 2.1 version to see if there is greater compatability, but I expect there is. So I can at least recommend putting it on your “non-main” machines…
2 Yannick on Dec 14th, 2006 said:

I’ve been using it for over a year now and can definitely say its a very good alternative to the MS Office Suite. It can do pretty much all the things you would need to do in an Office Suite.

The only thing I would say that might be a ‘little’ problem is that sometimes when you open up a Word/Powerpoint presentation in open office, at times (not all the time) it might not display exactly as it does in MS Office and vice versa, but for the most part it does display them pretty well and pretty much exactly like it would in MS office. I think it has quite a bit to do with some differences in the way the two companies implement certain features. Perhaps with version 2.1 those differences might be reduced or no longer exist.

Also I’ve noticed that while they do have templates, they aren’t quite as good as MS Office’s templates, but they did hold a competition recently and users have contributed more templates, so there might be some better ones out there now and I’m sure more will come in the future. However, if when you created your document in MS Office you applied a template to it, the template will remain when when you open the document in OpenOffice.

I would definitely recommend it to anyone who is looking for an Office Suite. It is probably one of the best MS Office alternatives out there and the fact that its free is another good reason to give it a try.

Oh and if you are looking for an alternative to MS Publisher, there is another free and open-source alternative called Scribus. I haven’t been able to play around with it much but I have been hearing very good things about it.

URL: http://www.scribus.net/

By the way thanks for the heads up of version 2.1, I didn’t realise they released an update.
3 Jayson on Dec 14th, 2006 said:

Before my recent memory upgrade it ate up a lot of my system resources to run it. I haven’t tried it much since then, but I wonder if it would be too much for people’s systems who are not up to date as far as technology goes.
4 Paul - SteelerDirtFreak on Dec 14th, 2006 said:

I use Open Office almost all the time now. I’ve heard that their counterpart to Access isn’t quite as good, but as I’ve never figured out how to use Access, it’s a moot point for me.

One of the things I use Writer (OO’s Word) the most for is turning Word docs into PDF files. Writer has a built in PDF tool that lets you save any document as a pdf file. Very handy, indeed.