Open Office vs MS Office

[billy13]

Microsoft Office...!!!

[safeguy]

Well, it's funny but sunkumarspace has a good point there, hellnoire. OpenOffice is kinda bloated as compared to what it used to be...while Microsoft Office is improving with newer versions...

Size and price does matter but for an open-source supporter, some of us are disappointed with OpenOffice...just my two cents lol

[hellnoire]

Size wise, OpenOffice is smaller. It's just the fact it needs Java that makes it slower then MS Office.

[noaccount]

Java is not needed for the majority of operations in OO, if you want a fast OO consider using one of latest versions (3.x) and follow tweaks suggested here or here, others available... 3 seconds on a cold start, 1-2 on a warm startup... btw my portable OO 3.1 has 242mb on hdd and not 500 (my 2 cents for this discussion).

[hellnoire]

I'm exaggerating on their sizes, because Office is closer to one gig, not two. But still, for the common user to do all that... even for a power user to do all that under Windows, Linux, Mac, etc, that's a bit much. I still think they should have set that standard up for the default, not a tweak after the fact.

[noaccount]

well i agree of course... it's not a big deal for me because i download only major versions (from PortableApps) so i have to tweak it only 1-2/year... but many open-source and cross-platform software has the problem you refer, they need windows fine tunning. personaly i wish OO had regular expressions support using the excellent Java regex library, no idea why this was never implemented (not popular? yeah, maybe).

[jwils876]

Open Office is great, but I prefer working with Microsoft Office. And as far as bloat goes, open office is getting pretty bloated too, also it loads slower for me than MS Office. I usually only use the word processor in a office suite, so I also like Abiword, that's what I keep on my netbook.

[northernexposure]

I use both, but Open Office is great for portability. In addition, of course, I like the philosophy behind Open Office and its accessibility.

Oh, forgot to mention that Open Office offers some nice features that are not included with Microsoft Office. For example, for those of us involved with data analytics and graphing functions, Open Office offers advanced functions including less common statistical analyses (MS Office does have statistical functions capability through Excel) and handling of missing data, which are usually only available in separate, stand alone statistical and graphing packages.