Hey I was thinking of giving this suite a shot.
It looks like Star Office is realy Open Office supported by Sun. Am I way off on this?
Also wondering for basic home office documents and such what opinions of Open Office there are on 7. being able to shuffle documents back and forth to a PC with MS Office (Word). And, if anyone has tried the speech - dictation in 7 with the writer.
Thanks!
Open office and star office are more or less the same thing although slight variations may exist due to their separate development cycles.
As for compatibility OOo can load DOCx format but currently cannot save the format, I believe that the same applies for XLSx and PPTx.
OOo fully supports the 2000/XP/2003 office formats which are still the standard for most organisations.
Microsoft office 2007 does not have support for OOo formats but Office 2010 does.
Although I have not tried the speech functions this should work in OOo as this is designed to be application independent
Thank you Barman58. I decided to install the latest version (3.1) and look it over. I am mainly interested in the Writer for some basic word processing so I probably won't explore or need the finer possibilities of Open Office.
Installation was smooth and profesional. At first glance Writer seems to have more then enough features and power. Realise it's a free office package, not expecting wizzards, bells and whistles. There wasn't the included amount of templates you might expect from MS Office either. However as an example I needed a resume template/example for a friend of mine looking for a new job. Open Office has a quick link to check for templates online, quickly found what I was looking for.
That's all I got for now but first impression I would say it's got a decent footing for documents.
One more thing the d/l is about 150 megs compressed, 32bit.
I've always been satisfied with Open Office for my home machines. I've got Office 2007 on my work laptop if I really have to use that for something, but I cannot justify the cost of MS Office for home and I have yet to invest in TechNet yet...so I don't get it from there.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, if you need citations, Open Office doesn't have them.
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