The epitome of the phrase, "the best things in life are free!"
Pros: Open Office is the logical choice for anyone who does not absolutely require MS Office. It has most of the options that MS Office does plus several more (ability to print to save as PDFs, Flash presentations, on-th-fly spell check). The drawing tools are also very impressive, making easy to add shapes and objects in presentations and text documents. Alhough its native XML document format is superior to Microsoft's, it easily handles and saves as documents from Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and formats from other office suites as well. The open source nature of the program ensures community input into the project, which is a huge boon for future development of the suite. Open Office is a wonderful tool that, while great now, has a wonderful future and is a credible rival to Microsoft's dominance in the office productivity world.
Cons: Impress, the Powerpoint-type presentation component of Open Office, is missing a few of the the bells and whistles of MS Powerpoint, most glaringly dictation and audio support. I hope it will be remedied in the future. Also, Impress is devoid of presentation background templates...but this is easily fixed through a couple of downloads, which yield some impressive user-made results. You can also import ones from Powerpoint if you must.
Posted: 25-Apr-2006 12:22:15 PM
AT&T Tech Support 360
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