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Sorry folks, but Open Office v2 really is that bad. - Wallace B. McClure

Wallace B. McClure

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Sorry folks, but Open Office v2 really is that bad.

I do my best to never say anything negative on my blog about a specific product, but my pain and agony this morning with Open Office Version 2 has forced me to put that aside.  Basically, its support for MS Office file formats is not greatly improved in this release, but is in much worse shape.  It is horrible.  This is a horrible product.  I pulled in a very simple MS Word document.  The document is all messed up.  If I change things in OO, the changes are not reflected when I open the document back up in OO.  I just want products that work.  I don't want to fight religous wars.  OO does not work for me.  Given that I also write programming books, I won't be using OO there either.

Wally

Posted: Nov 21 2005, 09:25 AM by Wallym | with 6 comment(s)

Comments

Frans Bouma said:

Funny, I always have those kind of experiences with word: header formatting which is continued after you press Enter, bullit lists which show up without bullits, very slow scrolling, horrible table editing...

OO however does this without problems. Of course, I don't have to work with complex word docs, it's likely the problems you ran into are rooted in the fact the document you worked on is made in word. We here use OO native docs and it's never a problem.
# November 21, 2005 9:52 AM

Richard Dudley said:

You're not alone. I tried Open Office, and I came away with the impression that people are willing to overlook A LOT of issues just to say there's something that's "not Microsoft" out there.
# November 21, 2005 10:46 AM

lynn said:

I stick with Office 97 at home. It's payed for and does most of what I want. But I gotta admit, Office Vista does look tempting.
# November 21, 2005 1:27 PM

Damien Guard said:

While I agree OO isn't perfect by a long stretch I don't think it's entirely fair to slate it for not being able to correctly parse another systems undocumented file format.

If you want to transfer documents, consider opening in the Word reader and cut-n-pasting into OO.

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# November 22, 2005 10:26 AM

Buddy Lindsey said:

That is interesting problem. I use OO.o in linux all the time and use word files form word 2003 interchangelbly and never have had a problem. All edits are kept exactly accross platforms. I guess it might be the windows version of OO.o
# November 23, 2005 12:08 AM

John said:

I have been using the OOv2 on windows for a little while now. It has performed very well, even when dealing with complex word documents. It can be used to recover word documents (from co-workers) that MS Word has corrupted. Overall, a very good program that plays very well in a MS Office work environment.
# December 10, 2005 3:19 PM
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