Does anyone recommend it?

Having taken delivery of a new 'pooter, an Asus 2020 'all-in-one' which will do until I get more adventurous, I need a tryping system etc.

I have a 2000 and something MS Office suite, and MS Photodraw but am tempted to try 'Open Office' as it includes a drawing system.

Any observations?

As I intend this machine to be for 'worky things' and a railway simulator I don't want to put loads ofcr^p on it.

Doug

Open Office, Libre Office, et al., are fine, Doug - provided that you don't want to share your documents with other non-users.

You will get many complaints.

For internal working, they are great.  :thumbs

Hi Doug

You can certainly read and save MS Office 2007 documents in the latest version of LibreOffice as I have been doing it.

Theoretically you can also save a LibreOffice document in MS Office format.

I haven't tried but I would think it would work OK or there would be loads of complaints posted all over the web.


Ed

The only one I would avoid is MS Works. Needs too much conversion to make it useable with MS Office. I'm using MS Office 2003 Pro with Win7 and that does me fine as I need the Front Page part of it for website building and Publisher for my Stamp Album pages. Watch out on some of these 'Free' Office style programmes. You may get bombarded by loads of emails offering stuff you don't really need and some of them seem to take over the computer.

G`day Doug,

 I have used Open Office Calc, Libre Office Calc.? and Excel to design control panels for my railway.

 I have found there will be corruption of some shapes when transferring between the three formats. For example a circle drawn in Open Office and saved and then opened in Excel may re-open as an oval,whereas other shapes will be fine. This can be quite frustrating if you wish to share your work with others.

 There are subtle differences which can create compatibility issues, however if you just wish to use the one system to create items for your own use, the Open Office suite is quite good. I particularly like the Drawing program.

 The thing with Open Office and Libre is that they are free to use. You can try them and if you find them unsuitable, you can delete them from your system.

:cheers  Gormo

Hello,

I use open office but only for the database front end with MySQL back end. I have found it really good.
Stephen

I use Open office most of the time. The only issue with saving as Word Document files is when you use a table either open or hidden as the dimensions are corrupted but otherwise there is little problem. And the price is right compared to MS Office which is only a reconfiguration of the old program and not very logical in some parts… 
If there is a need to share, there is an automatic share to PDF part of the menu. I would recommend it.
Regards from Oz
Trevor

We sent one Open Office document out to NMRA members last year.  Almost all of them complained that they couldn't open it.  They weren't prepared to download Open Office to deal with it, and insisted that we resend it in MS Office - and stop messing about.

Like I said, you can save the document in both formats if you want to send it out.  Why would you bother?

I use LibreOffice both personally and at work.

LibreOffice is an off shoot of the OpenOffice core from 2010 when the main developers were not happy at the move from Sun Microsystems to Oracle of the OpenOffice source, the result is that LibreOffice is more actively developed now so is the better choice.

You can use the propriety LibreOffice file formats for saving or you can save n the Microsoft format if you need to send the file to someone else. (Newer versions of Microsoft office can now actually open the LibreOffice file formats)

I have found the drawing program in LibreOffice to be really useful and I think you will as well.

I have drawn up buildings along the lines of scalescenes and it will do seamless texture fills, so if you have some images of brickwork you can scale it and import it into the program as a fill.

Give it a go, I don't think you will be disappointed.


Poop, poop from a non nerdy computer eggs spurt

Hello Doug,
I've been using OpenOffice for more than 15 years now. I would strongly recommend to download the latest LibreOffice 4.3.4 - www.libreoffice.org - be careful if you hit the download button you will end up with 4.2.7. The latest version is important for the refurbished im- and exportfilters, which work fantastic with MS products. If you want or need to share documents with MS office users use the export filter in save as and save the document as word or excel file.
As to your MS office 2000 something version, you should not under any circumstances use this version except youd like to collect all the trojans that are currently around.
Openoffice itself is ok but the problem with it are the im- and exportfilters which usually cause a lot of headscratshing…
An alternative which I can only warmly recommend is the German Office suite "softmaker office" which is available in English to underr "www.softmaker.com". There is an exelent free version, with fantastic im- and export filters. And the best thing is, if you download the free version until the 24th of Decembre Softmaker will donate 10 Euro cents to a charity organisation in the third world, You can find details on their homepage.
I hope this helps a little and you could understand all of my English and there aren't too many typos.
Best wishes from Bavaria
Helmut

(I am reading and thinking, I promise)

D

Well I have decided to download Libreoffice 4.3.4 which loaded very easily, together with the 1.5 Mb help files.

The drawing programme looks useful, and the word processor doesn't look to short of features either. I wish I had chosen a custom install, I can't see me using the Maths programme or the spreadsheet etc, but it does have a dedicated uninstall/modify facility.

I am excited with my Railway Simulator 2015, and tonight have driven from Bishops Lydiard to Watchet in a 2-8-0, running out of steam several times…Poop-poop!

Thank you for all you input,

Doug

I wouldn't worry about the stuff you wont use from it, your new machine probably has at least a 500GB hard drive so the space they use will be minimal and it just makes updating LibreOffice in the future easier as you can just run the full install each time, the programs being on the hard drive willnot impact the performance of the machine in any way.

Unless you have a solid state drive, which is often 128 Gb.

Not to worry, you can plug in a 1 Tb USB external drive.  It's good practice not to save stuff permanently on your C drive anyway.

A bit of housekeeping every few days does the trick.