Pls tell me if ive missed anything

thnks

Poll modified to include all office suites

Best office software is OpenOffice.org ... http://www.openoffice.org/ ... you missed it

Reasons why it is better:
1) Does not crash every 5 minutes like M$ office.
2) It's free and open source
3) You can export to PDF ... M$ can't ... at least not yet
4) Far more useable than M$ office ... M$ just can't handle the pressure
5) It's not made by M$ ... and has no connection to Bill Gates
6) Oops ... almost forgot ... it does not include Find Fast ... which indexes EVERY FILE ON YOUR COMPUTER ... in case you have anything to hide ... or care about privacy

I voted for MS Office 2003 professional... it may be bloated, but nothing comes close to being feature-rich, best compatibility, integration with other productivity software. It is the definately most stable suite that MS has to offer.

BTW, FindFast is the indexing process used by Microsoft Office applications to index Office documents to speed up search operations. Like Windows XP indexing, it can be turned off and NO it doesn't consist of spyware.

P.S. Guess we know where TexMex stands on this poll.

At home I hav OpenOffice. I liked it, picked it because it was easyer on my system then MS Office 2000. MS Office I use at work. I like two things about it. Ok.. three. Publisher, grammer correction and clipart.

Now I've just upgraded to OpenOffice 2, and I have't tried the clip art thing yet, but I do wish it had a grammer correction plug in or something.

Is one out there??? I can work around the clip art thing and I'll look to see if it has something like publisher.

That shows how much I've used my office suite at home.

I heard that one state was switching from MS to and Open source office suite. Intresting. Does anyone know if it realy happened?

The state is Massachusets ... "All Massachusetts agencies are expected to migrate by January 1, 2007"
http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/why-opendocument-won.html

Good news indeed

P.S. Sorry for hijacking this thread earlier ... but hey you said ...


Yet .. I guess it was rather rude of me to do that ....

Intresting victory that you are doing that little dance for.

I keep seeing incompatable issue between them and other state angencies even though I know that just about ever office suite can save their text files in .doc format for the MS people.

Do you expect this to catch on and have other states go that way??

It's hard to say with all the M$ propaganda out there (don't tell me it doesn't exist ... it is more than obvious if you read stuff on decisions like this ... FUD (Faulty use of detail) is a common stategy M$ uses). OpenOffice can do everything M$ Office can and more ... yes you can save things as .doc and .ppt and .xls, etc. you can even make PDFs ...

grammar correction ... you can use http://www.abisource.com/download/ AbiWord-2.4 is the first Free Word Processor to offer an integrated Grammar Checker ... I have yet to find a Windows addon for OpenOffice ... most are for Linux (uhhh .. is grammar check that important ... I had to turn it off in Word quite often cuz it was pissing me off ... I mean I know what good "grammar" is, I don't need a word processor telling me something is grammatically incorrect, when I know it is correct ... but that's just me)

... clipart is a bit more obscure ... I mean you can find it lots of places ... you can even buy cheap CDs with lots of pretty nice clipart on them ... so it isn't really an issue.

I certainly hope all states follow this example ... why ? well the benefits are obvious ... check my first post ... I can always come up with more if you want ... but, if you need more, it's probably better to stay with M$ ... the crashing every 5 min. on my computer was the main reason I moved away about 3 years ago (OpenOffice 1.0.0)

Believe it or not, the gammer correction catches my other spelling mistakes.

I type faster then I'm suppose to at times and I write "and" instead of "an" and the grammer correction catches that for me. Ya, bad speller. I'm lucky I get though this ok.

I am what microsoft wants me to be. I like most of their clipart, and how they resize in MS products, and for a while I thought that they had better clip art than anything else I could find for free. I live on a dinky little island that taxes you to death on anything brought into the island. But I guess I should start looking again. It has been like 4 years at least since the last time I looked in the three computer stores down here for such a cd. Maybe they have something current by now that won't cost over $50.

Well I still have to use MS at work. As for states switching over. That would be intresting. I don't know about better. Maybe they can spend that money on paying teachers more or something like that.

If anything it might lower the price of office for those who don't want to change.

Oh, you do know that OpenOffice is up to version 2 now right?? It happened a month or so ago. Wait, I think it might still be in bata, but I haven't had any crashes with it.

I'll go check out the link and see how well I like it. Thanks.

Well ... actually the official (non-beta) release happened like a few weeks ago ... uhhh, unfortunately they haven't quite fixed all the bugs in it yet, and there's a chance it may crash .... but if it does it usually is recovered ok. The older stabler version 1.1.5 has never crashed for me ... so to all those reading this ... if OpenOffice 2.0 crashes too often the Legacy Openoffice 1.1.5 is still available on the openoffice site if you want absolut stability.

About the clipart ... uhhh if a clipart CD costs $50 ... I don't think it would be worth buying ... maybe try online clipart sites
http://www.clip-art.com/
... or maybe just stay with Word ... really whatever works best for you ...

(I'm just arguing for open source to try and open people's minds from say thinking that the only options they have are M$ office 2004 or 2005 or 2006 or Works etc. )

I'm with H_TeXMeX_H. OpenOffice.org is the best office software.

Beta hasn't crashed on me yet. But I still have both versions on my computer just incase.

Monday I was thinking of seeing how much those cds are worth. I can already cross one place off my list. I was in there for something else and didn't see any cds.

I do like office, but I just can't afford it for home. I let other people know about alternatives when they say they are broke too.

It's all good. It's even better if you have money, most of us just don't, at least not that much.

Price is extemely important especially since we are talking in the price range of hudreds of dollars for say

Microsoft Office 2003 Standard: $275 - $554
or
Microsoft Office 2003 Pro: $162 - $400

Corel Wordperfect: $241 - $301

Lotus Smartsuite: $95 - $123

Works is cheaper, although less useable (I've had works before I know): $50 - $110

StarOffice (comparable to Microsoft Ofiice, in fact even better and cheaper too): $82 - $100

OpenOffice (work just as well as the non-free others, only downside is no grammar check yet, get Abiword for that, and no included clipart): $0 - 0

there may be lower prices for them, but these are the average ranges.

Ok,

I had to track down this tread. Odd.

Either which way. I found another office suit for you. It's called Ashampoo Office 2005, and it's only $70. The only catch is that it only has text and excel replacements. But for home use, what more would you be asking fo that you don't already have in some other program.

Well they say that it had no issue with MS files for excel and word.

Well here is the link if you want to check it out. You can get a free full 30 day trial to see how you like it.
It's called Ashampoo Office 2005

I voted for MS Office 2003 professional...

StarOffice/OpenOffice.org are good too