Bruce Byfield wrote:
James W.Greenidge wrote:
This doesn't alter my using OpenOffice one iota nor question its more
than adequate functions. I'm just asking this as a techno curiosity:
OpenOffice would be (roughly?) the equivalent of what version of MS
Office? I kind of bristled at one associate who said OpenOffice is
pretty much equal to MS Office 98, which is a put down to me since I
see for more capabilities in current OOo than that!
I don't think you can make an exact comparison. Both OOo and MSO have
features that the other doesn't have. Draw, for instance, has no
equivalent in MSO, while Outlook has n equivalent in OOo.
Also, to be meaningful, you'd have to compare the two application by
application; Writer is far ahead of MS Word in terms of stability and
DTP ability, while I'd rate Impress somewhat behind MS PowerPoint.
When it comes to spreadsheets, the comparison is even harder. For the
average user, Calc and MS Express are fairly even, with Calc perhaps
having a slight advantage, but, for advanced users, for whom
spreadsheet size and calculation time is important, Calc lags behind.
Anyway, what's been added to MSO in the last few versions that makes a
eight year old version significantly lacking? Even if you could decide
in any meaningful way that OOo was equivalent to MSO 97, you would
still have all the tools that the average user would want. The fact
is, so little has been added to office applications in the last decade
that people could still use MSO 6.0 and get their work done without
any inconvenience.
Well, in my opinion, what was said above is mostly correct, I think
Writer is ahead of Word for my academic needs except in one area. The
lack of a grammar checker is a downside. I find that if I require
students to run their papers through the grammar checker prior to
submitting them, they are much better than otherwise. I would love to
tell all my students, do not pay for Office, go to OO. (Of courses, it
would be great if they were learning grammar in High School, but gee,
that would be going back in time to the days of Middle Earth.) But the
lack of a grammar checking feature holds me back. Other than that, I
use OO (or NeoO on my Mac) for everything. Cheers!
Jeffrey Zents
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