Well, I was excited because I was about to get MS Office for free(My mom was planning on buying it and it comes licensed for 3 computers)..................and then damn.......she tells me she's not going to buy it anymore, because she found some program for free called OpenOffice. So what I want to know is......is OpenOffice as good as Microsoft Office? What features will I lack? What Problems will I encounter. I mainly use Word and Excel(accounting student, and I like my spreadsheets). I don't really want to shell out $100+ on Office unless there is no other viable option.

And yes, I am still pissed that they stopped including Office when you buy a laptop. Greedy bastards.

I've yet to find OpenOffice lacking. LibreOffice is what I believe the newest/best incarnation of that is called now. Well worth looking into. I actually prefer them to the M$ Office suite.

I haven't used openoffice much but i downloaded it the other day for my nephew to use to make a presentation and from just a spectator point of view it still looks nice and has a ton of features and it is also compatible with the Microsoft office programs. For example he made his presentation and then saved it as a powerpoint file so that the other party could view it with powerpoint.

I wonder if Office 2000 works on Windows 7
I still have that somewhere on a flash drive.....

I've completely scrapped MS Office for OpenOffice. I still haven't lacked a feature, to be frank. Also, the Swedish government is starting to migrate more and more towards OpenOffice, so it can't be all bad either.

Sounds viable. I'm looking at the LibreOffice.

And I generaly don't tend to follow government trends as a model for efficiency

I mostly use IBM Lotus Symphony. It's free, works nice - has docs, spreadsheets and presentations.

Honestly, unless you're a really hardcore user of office software, you'll likely not even use a fraction of the full capabilities of either, let alone really miss something. In that case, the price tag is the only real difference, and it's a pretty sizable.

My only experience with OpenOffice was this guy I was partnered with in college using it for a project we were working on and completely jacking up the formatting. I wouldn't have minded so much if both windows 7 and microsoft office weren't free from our University, for all students.

*mutters something about Linux hipsters*

I've seen people jack things up with MS, too. Hell, at my mom's work they use Word for EVERYTHING, including as image software, which is just ridiculous, especially when you have Illustrator and Photoshop and Publisher and who knows what else on your computer to work with.

I've been screwed over multiple times by MS word turning my formatting into something absolutely horrible for no reason. For whatever reason openoffice did not have that issue.

That's about the extent of my knowledge though, I don't know what you would even want to do that's fancy on them. I just type stuff in and print it out.

I downloaded LibreOffice onto my mom's laptop. Seems pretty decent. That's what i'll load onto mine when it gets here. Now I can save the clams for Quickbooks, which I'll need as an Accounting student.

I had a simple solution for that in my projects as a group leader - enforcing PDFs and 2003 .docs and .ppts, along with Google Docs.

I liked OpenOffice a lot, used it on my Windows box, use it on my Ubuntu. Only thing is I found that the Windows version was very processor intensive. It was an old machine I was using it on, though, so that is likely it.

Formatting between MS Word and OpenOffice has been an issue for me, so consider that.