We've been trying to switch our office from MSOffice to OO.o for about two
years now. The Excel and PowerPoint compatibility is very, very good, but
we've just had too many problems with OO.o's Writer component mangling Word
documents to let us switch.
If you share Word documents with other companies, count on the formatting to
change in bizarre and inconsistent ways when the documents go back and
forth. If the office just stores its documents internally, then the Writer
component may be fine. The PDF format helps a lot for swapping documents,
and it's generally a lot safer, but not enough companies have the ability to
edit PDFs yet. If it's environment where the document storage is fixed, then
OO.o would be a great choice.
OO.o is a lot more stable than MSOffice, and I use it full time, but for the
rest of our staff, who have to share stuff back and forth with other
companies, the Word compatibility problems makes Writer not an option right
now. I've been following things on
http://qa.openoffice.org/servlets/ProjectIssues and release 2.0 looks
promising.
We have had great results switching from Internet Explorer to Mozilla, and
from Outlook Express to Mozilla's mail client. With the recent wave of
e-mail worms, I'd imagine most MS IT guys are looking for an e-mail
replacement. :-) And yes, I am using Outlook Express right now - for
some internal reasons I have to use it sometimes. :-/
Bill Earl
Network Admin
623.516.4700 phone
623.587.7787 fax
www.bestbill.com
----- Original Message -----
From: <
frankburton@cox.net>
To: <
plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us>
Sent: Wednesday, March 10, 2004 10:32 PM
Subject: OOo question?
> I just got a new job working in a office(non IT position) and my email
using outlook express on WindowsXP was preventing me from opening some
attachments.(I have no admin permission on this box) So we emailed the IT
guy who is in MO. He got everything set up then sent me an email tell me not
to open unknown attachments and repeated the same thing over and over DON'T
open them I"M not JOKING. So I emailed him back and told him I Understand
and asked why we are using outlook as our email client and told him about my
use of linux and open source software. I received a very quick reply asking
what email client I would recommend and also wanting to know about
compatabilty(sp) between OpenOffice and MSoffice. Email was easy I
recommended Thunderbird but I having not really used openoffice that much so
I sent a link to the OOo Faq page but I was wondering what you guys can tell
me? This is my first experience with a MS IT guy who wants to start using
FOSS and I would love to see as
> much of it as I can in this office.
>
> TIA
> Frank
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