PC World: A Month Without Microsoft Office

Sep 06, 2005, 13:45 (4 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Harry McCracken)

"Back on August 3rd, I installed the Beta 1 version of Windows Vista on my work desktop. That meant reinstalling all my software... but I didn't have a copy of Microsoft Office handy. So I installed a beta copy of OpenOffice.org 2.0--the leading open-source office suite--figuring that it could serve as a stopgap.

"More than a month later, I'm still using that OpenOffice.org beta to do my everyday work... and it's been a remarkably smooth experience, especially considering that this is a pre-release product running on a pre-release operating system. I've wrangled lots of Word and Excel documents in OpenOffice.org's counterparts (Writer and Calc, respectively), and as far as I can tell, the only tip-off that my colleagues have noticed is that my documents have funny icons rather than the universally-known Office ones. All in all, this is a considerably more polished product than the version of OpenOffice.org I wrote about back in May of last year..."

Complete Story

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• SearchEnterpriseLinux: OpenOffice.org 2.0 Reviewed [Parts 1 & 2](Aug 23, 2005)
• NewsForge: OpenOffice.org Writer vs. Microsoft Word(Jun 23, 2005)