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Open office production use

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mattaw

Instructor
Mar 18, 2004
546
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Can people give me examples of how many open office installs they have and whether they use it in a production environment, i.e. at work?

Just being nosey!

Matthew

The Universe: God's novelty screensaver?
 
In a previous life, I used 1.1 for production use. I now work at a MS shop, so it's not really feasable. The word processor is MUCH better if for no other reason it handles graphics and formatting much more intelligently. The spreadsheet is not quite as good as Excel (but let's be honest, Excel is MS's finest product period)...it doesn't integrate with other things quite as well. It's perfectly fine, just not as easy to connect to other programs and files. The presenter--I liked the interface better but never had a chance to use it in front of customers.

My only REAL complaint about open office.org is it's lack of an easy-to-use database product. If we didn't have such an MS fetish here, I'd be telling anyone who will listen to use it. You can't beat the price, and it's at least MS Office's equal.

On either a Win2k, a win XP or a Debian GNU/Linux box, I don't think the openoffice.org EVER crashed or had issues.
 
I have an installation with 150 machines, everything is OK, we gave a lot of capacitation to users, that's the key of success.
 
Thankyou very much for your inputs, I would like to see more to convince more people who come here looking for reasons that they exist!

Matthew

The Universe: God's novelty screensaver?
 
One other thought:
I'm not convinced tek-tips is frequented by the Unix community that much. You might try looking at openoffice.org's site for the forum they identify as informative. Also, you might poke around freshmeat.net and/or sourceforge.org. Both are sort of big in the open source movement, but both are kind of unix centric.

And I forgot to mention that I use openoffice at home almost exclusively.
 
I use OpenOffice almost exclusively. I have it on my Linux laptop, my XP home PC. I even convinced my wife to use it on her laptop. I am involved in IT and will try and convince people to use it as much as possible. Unfortunately when back office systems decided to intigrate with a wordprocessor or spreadsheet, guess what? Yes, they can't see past MS Office.

I don't think MS Office is a bad product, far from it. I think OpenOffice is a viable alternative if you don't need database (can't wait for for version 2.0). I really think it is over priced and you will end up paying for features you never use, I would estimate the majority of users only use about 10% of the features MS Office has.

In answer to another post, I have used Impress in the real world and its great. Would like more templates etc though. Can't really complain considering the price.

Cheers

Scott Melvin
 
I just downloaded v2.0 today. I am seriously considering setting up our next office with boxes running some flavor of Linux and OpenOffice 2.0.

However, I have one problem which is undoubtedly a product of my total novice status with anything Non-Microsoft. It's all I know...

Anyway, my problem is, what is the mail client? Quetzalcoatl says he has about 150 installs, what do these users do for their email?

My mail server is Exchange 5.5 so a mail client that integrates well with that would be the perfect fit.
 
Well, I suppose I'll test this out, Thunderbird 1.5 Beta 2.
 
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