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

4 Comments

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

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