I have used some form of the OpenOffice suite as my usual office apps collection for personal use for several years now, actually since Sun offered StarOffice for free, early on. Oh, I’ve used the progressively-upgraded M$Office suite (now with Office 2003, 2007 and 2010 on various Windows boxes, “real” and virtual) just because I need to maintain familiarity for troubleshooting or tutoring others’ use, but that’s just about it for me and M$Office apps.
Now, though, the scene’s a bit complicated since LibreOffice has forked (sort of) from OpenOffice. So, OK, I uninstalled OpenOffice on this lil 15.6″ toy Asus and installed LibreOffice. Most things seem about the same, except… killer feature: natively editing PDF files. Very nice. I liked being able to create PDf files in OpenOffice, but opening and editing PDF files is a very cool feature. Kudos, LibreOffice guys n gals.
I never got on with Open Office and found it did not cope with my Excel sheets well.
OOo is much better nowadays than in earlier iterations, even handling pivot tables rather well. I’ll have to test out some of my Wonder Woman’s Excel spreadsheets on LibreOffice. *heh* Strangely, she had a class (masters level, curriculum development) last September that the professor had specified that ALL students needed to install Office 2007 for use in loading, creating and otherwise using different Office documents. Unfortunately, some of the documents he had created for the class to use were created in Excel 2003, and he was swamped with complaints from students that some of his formulas didn’t work, wouldn’t load properly, etc., in Excel 2007.
I checked. They didn’t. I installed OpenOffice 3.2 on my Wonder Woman’s lappy and… the documents loaded just fine, and she could complete assignments. That was just “emergency mode” though. I loaded a VM on my lappy with Office 2003 for her to use (since that’s what her schools where she teaches still use and she is more familiar with the interface) so she could use that for the rest of the class. (Oh, the professor had worse things to deal with than his sloppy assignments; the whole course syllabus and rubric were so screwed up the university offered folks who had difficulties the option of taking the class again–for credit or not, students’ choice–for free.)
But that one case of Excel 2003 spreadsheets loading better in OOo than in 2007 was a bit odd.