News Grab your free OpenOffice 2.0

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/10/22/free_open_office_2/

 

If creating pdf's is a big deal to you try http://www.primopdf.com/ it's a free pdf printer and seems to work quite well even keeps hyperlinks and stuff. Can't say I'm going to give open office a try just because I already have a office licence and just about everyone I know uses MS office anyway...

 

Or a better one called PDFCreator, even has a server edition for shared pdf converting.

http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/PDFCreator/1092137928/1

 

It's come at a good time, with small firms upgrading their Office 9x-2k3 and finding one copy of Office XP won't install on every PC in the building.

My boss, honest as the day, could never understand software licensing, that if he spent £1k on a new PC he needed to spend as much again for extra copies of software we already had.

 

I switched to Open Office a while back. I miss Outlook but I'm happy with the rest of it, I don't use it that often though

 

Used OOo for ages, the pdf export is great for uni and looks rather pro. I have been using v1 but this is a huge upgrade and I hate to use Office now.

'doc

 

Well, there are a lot of people, companies and even cities or state organisations switching to Linux and/or OO.
For example the city of Munich which is switching the school pc's OS to Linux and hands a free OO cd to every student.
Or the Frech Gendarmerie switching to OO.

 

Is there any advantage over office 2003? ive got office 2003 and it doesn everything I want it to and has a nice GUI. Need I switch?

 

Imho: No. You bought 'o3? Keep it! You downloaded it? Give OO a try.

 

I've considered OOo, but have too much experience with MSO to just chuck away...
Perhaps I'll try weaning myself off it.

 

I *ahem* Aquired a copy of M$ Office, I need it for college since i`m doing the BTEC nationals which uses M$-O. I Have to use M$ at college, So this wouldnt be any good for me, Tho i do get the satisfaction of ripping off M$ whenever i use it

 

The transision isn't that bad didn't take me long, their is even a guide as to the MSO equivalent functions are in OOo.

MSOOOo

'doc

 

you can barely tell this new version apart from MS office, they are almost identical.

 

Will definately have to look into this update. Didn't have any problem migrating from an ancient copy of Office to OpenOffice. Now I am going through all my old docs and archiving them into pdf.

 

I have MS Office 2003 for £17,-- as part of the Home User scheme for NHS staff.

MS has licensing agreements with several government institutions like this. The deal is simple: as long as you work for an outfit which has such a deal, you are entitled to use one copy of MS Office for just £17,-- admin fee on a home machine. One copy per user. If you work for a government outfit in the UK (or the US, for that matter), check out whether it has a Home User license deal going with MS.

Otherwise, OpenOffice is your perfect option.

 

Where does Star Office 8 fit in the scheme of things? I gather it's a bit like Mozilla and Firefox, same codebase in 2000 but now developed by different groups, a Sun pro and an OOo am team. Who's winning?

 

I belive StarOffice is still built from the OO codebase, but is closed as it uses extra patented technologies, that can't remain as code in the open-source of OO.

Kristian

 

Has anyone used the Mac version of this yet? I was using both versions of the 1.1 OOo, and neither of them were particularly nice to use. NeoOffice (Open office v1.1 but based on Java) was a bit slow and didn't work amazingly. OpenOffice v1.1 for X11 was a bit ugly and the lack of keyboard shortcuts was a bit annoying. I don't really want to download this new version only to find it's not great either.

Or if only pages would support doc files, I would be happy with that.

 

OOo is a fork of staroffice, mainly due to sun's licensing

I've been using the betas of OOo 2 for a while now, I love it

 

The consumers, of course. Multiple implementations of free/open source means take your pick without having to buy a new version. Whether it's for stability, UI or whatever, you can easily get a hybrid version coming about that's the best of both, umm, codebases.