Microsoft Office 2003 professional = Open Office?Follow

As the title says, how do they compare.

Great. Thats what I wanted to know. Thank you.

It was one thing when Office came loaded onto my computer, but I'll be damned if I'll pay for it. When I next upgrade my home PC, I'll find out.

I still use WordPerfect.

0ld skh00l 4tw!

WP5.0 skeered the p00p out of me... no menus, only function keys

I've been to cheap to by Office so I've been using open office. I like it pretty much. I think I'll wait to order microsoft office and see if I can get by with open office instead. I remember why I always dreaded the thought of college, its so darn expensive. I'm all about grants and scholarships.

Getting in good with the IT guys got me MS office 2k3 pro for free =)

yay for working for a Microsoft Gold Partnership member! I can legally install any MS software for "evaluation".

Get a part-tine sales job at a CompUSA, Fry's, or some other retailer that sells MS products. You can then join their ePUP program and buy a select list of products damned cheap. They have these programs to get salespeople to use their products and be better able to sell them. The only stipulation they have is that the products can only be registered to you so you can't resell them.

When I was working for CompUSa a few years ago, I picked up WinXP Pro full version for $125 and MS Office Pro (Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access) for $150. Intel also had a special for retail salespeople and sold a bundle (D865GBF Mainboard, 3.0 GHz P4 with HT, and WinXP Pro ful version) for $199. Some of the best benefits for working retail computer sales are the vendor provided ones.

Does the installing on multiple computers thing apply to Dreamweaver too by any chance? I didn't realize how completely crappy Dreamweaver 4 was until I tried out 8 and it's on sale at the bookstore for 100 cheaper than the website. I'd like to use it at home and at work though. Or is that ok anyway since I'm the only one using it?

OO vs MS Office.

MS office has some nice features and when run in MS Windows it is stable enough. seldom have i ever had a crash with Word or Excell. many times ive had Access crash and PowerPoint is just IMHO a waist of time.

OO is very stable no matter the platform i use it on (windows, linux, OSx) and have yet to have any of it crash.

feature wise they are about the same. people claim that OO can not do everything that MS Office can. that just means they do not know how to do it and do not fully understand all of the tools available to OO. the bottom line is there are very few things that MS Office has that OO does not, and vis a vis. OO has features like single click to creat PDF files WITHOUT paying $700 for Adobe Acrobat (not the reader) as you need with MS Office. to me that right there is worth not using MS OFfice again.

Price you can not beat OO as it is 100% free vs MS Office ranging between $150 - $450 depending on what vs you buy.

OO can open and READ all word and excel and powerpoint documents but MS Office can not do the same with OO, even though OO uses the ODF (open document format) that is free for anyone to use and read.

now just in the last few months MS office has created an extention that can supposedly use/access ODF docs. i know very little about this and personally do not care to learn much about it other then if it costs money or not.

the reason i moved to OO away from MS Office are as follows:

1. CTFmon.exe this has been with Office 2003 and newer. its a bit of spyware that when removed from the computer will trash the OS and cause windows to NOT BOOT.

2. hundreds upon hundreds of viruses. sick n tired of all of the viruses in all MS products.

3. no backwards compatability. ever try to use MS Office 98 or 99 to open an Office 2000 or newer doc? cant do it. and if you use the newer vs to open an older vs you can not change anything or save it. if you do you can never go back to open the doc. with the older vs of office. that is a major issue for a business.

4. FREE PDF creation. cant say much more then that. Adobe Acrobat Pro $449 that is what you need to make PDF files in MS Office. dont know about you, but i do not want to spend roughly $900 for 2 products when i can spent NOTHING for 1 that does the same as both. yes i know acrobat also alows you to edit pdf documents but there are FOSS tools that alow for the same thing if not as easy.

for me those are the reasons i have not been using MS Office in almost 2 years now. with OO 2.x things are much nicer and more stable in windows. the older 1.1 vs of OO was known to be a bit unstable in windows from time to time depending on what was going on in the background, but i have yet to have any issues since 2.0 moved out of beta.

there are links for that kind of thing, but none are legal. it is legal to make backup copies of XP Pro if you already own it to protect the original CD. that is what i do. i never use my original CDs except to make back up copies of them. then they get put away and i use the burned CD to do installs as need be.

I've found that Open Office does everything I need for basic word processing and spreadsheets. I haven't tried any of the other features.