open office drawbacks???

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psycho d

New Member
i am considering open office for my writing project. My main concerns are:
-not being able to email my work to others for editing/proofreading
-keeping my copies on a penstick and then not being able to use another computer to continue my work when away.
Are these real concerns???
Also, i have been using someone else's computer with Word and have a considerable amount of work already saved. My guess is that it is not going to be transferable to Open Office and that i would probably need to retype it all back out. i don't like to rant, but i hate having to buy a new copy of word every time i get another computer (i always seem to lose the original copies). Looks like i am going to be a hundres bucks lighter in the end.
d
 
With Open Office, you can save documents as microsoft word files, so you will be able to email it to othe people and put it on a flash drive to use in another computer. Open office is also ully compatible with word documents, so you can open them in Open Office.
 
All you need to do is to open the document on OpenOffice, and then save it in a MS Office 97-2003 format. You can edit any MS Word files on OpenOffice just fine. Trust me, I used Linux (came with OpenOffice) for college, all college computers had Windows w/MS Office installed on them and it never gave me any trouble - I could witch the documents back and forth as I wanted, whenever I wanted.

Are these real concerns???
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No. Anything MS Word can save, OpenOffice can open, edit, save, whatever. You're good.
 
OpenOffice can even open those miserable .docx files created by Word 2007. Earlier versions of Word cannot open these without some sort of patch or something.
 
Why don't you get Microsoft Office for reliability and if it's a writing project, money (it's only like $70 or something) shouldn't be first, it's as long as you get what you have done and compatible with everything else.
 
Open Office file sizes are also weird. I had a speadsheet, saved it in excel and it was 30kb, in open office it was 200 and something. Otherwise it's a decent alternative.
 
Why don't you get Microsoft Office for reliability and if it's a writing project, money (it's only like $70 or something) shouldn't be first, it's as long as you get what you have done and compatible with everything else.
Click to expand...
MS Office offers no extra reliability whatsoever over OpenOffice.
 
I have always preferred using open office, as it is free and not very big (compared to Microsoft Office). Which is important because I'm internet isn't very fast.
As far as compatibility goes, I've never had any problems.

And on OS X I also use open office because for some reason Microsoft Office: Mac doesn't include publisher.
 
Thanks you for all of the great feedback. i'm gunna go ahead and download OoO tonight and see for myself. i have the 60 day trial for Word option, so i can play with my document using both (saving an original somewhere else of course). i guess the worst that can happen is that i'll have to get Word, but it sounds like Bill might not get my dinero. Thanks again.
d
 
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