Isn't OpenOffice a joke?

OpenOffice is such a joke.

Nothing can compare to the quality and features of Office 07'
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/defaul...

OpenOffice may be free, but it's also the worst office suite there is.

I've heard some of my friends couldn't deal with the buggyness of it, and I've heard one even experience malware associated with installing it.

Obviously, free comes with a price - frustration

Also, practically everybody has Office. If you can't afford it, save up - it doesn't cost that much. Student and Teacher 07' works great for most people, and cost less than $120 usually, depending where you look.

Also, most employers, and computer-related industries, expect you to be able to master Microsoft Office - not OpenOffice. So OO won't be any help to you there.

MS Office is also a service - free ClipArt/downloads for users!

OO files don't usually work in Office programs.

OO appears to be for cheapos. I feel sorry for them.

So what do you think?

@Gintrchs:

Loving Microsoft has nothing to do with this.

Loving a quality office suite is something different, no doubt about it.

Open source means nothing - Word and Writer's main goal is to do a document. That's it.

Office 2007 is for sure, the best office suite I ever used.

I use to use OO a lot. It was ok, but I wasn't really happy about it. I had to do hours of work to make and polish a document and powerpoint.

Ever since I saved up enough, and upgraded to Word 07' and Powerpoint 07' (the only ones I need), everything is awesome.

I get it done much more faster, my stuff looks much more amazing on the outside, just as the text is on the inside, and it's awesome. It's really easy to use, and it just works.

It also doesn't cost that much - and this is coming from someone who's under the college burden.

I bet OpenOffice users have never even tried Office 07' to understand.

Jessie S, Leslie R, and quick boy all seem to go around singing the praises of Microsoft products. If you look at their questions, they are all bashing non-Microsoft products (Firefox, OpenOffice, Linux, Google, etc...). Report It

While some points they bring up are valid (i.e. MS Vista is not the evil product some people make it out to be), they are such MS zealots that you have to carefully pick through their questions/responses to separate fanaticism from fact. Report It

That's not true at all.

That's only because some MS fans feel that other bashers bash MS for the wrong reasons. Report It

It's definitely easier to set up margins in Microsoft Office.

Many of the features you mentioned (clip art, MSWord compatibility, etc.) are present in Staroffice, but Staroffice is not free.

I think OO serves it purpose. Not everyone LOVES Microsoft. It's open source and I support that!

If you don't like it shell out the money for Office and stop wasting your time ranting about a FREE product!

First, OpenOffice is free because it's made by teams of volunteers who donate their time and effort to help provide a decent product for those who can't afford MS Office. Considering the MS Office is pretty expensive, and that most people don't need its power, OpenOffice is fine for most home users. I've been using it at home for several years and have never encountered any problems with it, and I know people who use it in small businesses and love it - and these are programmers and technical people who like the open standards that OO uses. Also, many companies (particularly those not in the US) as well as some government agencies have moved to OpenOffice. It meets their needs, they like the open standards it embraces, it's easy to train users on and it saves them a lot of money. The folks who work on OO deserve credit for creating something useful, especially given that they're doing it after work, on their own time, and investing their own time, money and equipment to making it work.

I feel sorry for spoiled brats who probably don't donate their time and effort to anything and feel the need to tear down others who don't deserve it.

Just because you are incapable of using it does not mean it is no good. I have been using it for years, it can save any of it's files in multiple formats including Microsoft, you can even set it to do so by default. It has far more powerful tools than anything in MS Office. It has a far more commercially practical and more standard database than MS Office, and not all versions of MS have any. Out of the 200 or so clients I support, about 60 % of them use Open Office in preference to MS, including their less computer literate staff. The way you are writing your question seems to be an advertising campaign for Microsoft, are they paying you to send this?

Given your list of reasons not to use OpenOffice, I really don't know that I'm going to change your mind about it.

That said, it is compatible with the Microsoft (and other suites) offerings, you just have to set the properties of the document (for example). This is not unlike MS Word 2007, needing to have document properties modified from the default, in order to "play well" with prior versions of Office.

Office 2007 proved too frustrating to me to learn, after years of using Office products. It was worth my while to learn a new application that worked with many other types of suites.

"Bugginess" ??? Microsoft excels (pun fully intended) at needing to be patched and modified after initial releases. Despite years of promising new and improved, their products still need to be improved.

sounds like you work for microsoft...
do you know what the best word processor is? it isn't openoffice or word. its gedit. here's why:
*saves plain old text files. no more worrying 'is this openxml or word 2003'.
*really fast
*do you know what annoys me even more than spammers? all that auto-bulleting indenting 57000 font crap.

also theres the 'practically everybody has Office' mentality. where's your originality? and most of the 'bugs' are just features that you aren't using correctly or are using by mistake. sure oo isn't perfect, but it works better than *some* programs. to make a file work in office all you have to do is change the filetype when saving it. it's 2 clicks.
also that part about oo being for cheapos, if I had $300 or wtf it costs now, I wouldn't spend it on office. I'd save it up to buy a new lens for my camera. I, for one, have more important things to worry about than wheather my autocorrect has shiny buttons that pop up whenever you hover over them. just my opinion, and I don't try to force it on anyone.

I have used OO on my home computer on many occasions. For the price, it usually provides me more than adequate capabilities. It also allows me to import documents and files in the Word format and read or alter them. I also find the learning curve for OO is less than MS Office. I have also successfully saved the files in Word format and imported it back into Word.