OpenOffice

I'm considering replacing Word 2000 with OpenOffice, but I have two concerns.

1) I heard that OpenOffice takes up a lot of memory and is very slow. Is that true?

2) A bigger concern is with regard to attachments. Will I be able to open all Word documents I have save and all attachments emailed to me? Will people to whom I send OpenOffice attachments be able to open them with Word? Recently I received an attachment, and when I tried to open it, I got a pop-up and link that said I first had to down-load OpenOffice. I don't want that happening to people to whom I send documents or attachments.

Thanks for any experience or advice you can give me.

Claude

Open Office is a little large and sluggish on some machines, but so is MS Office. And Open Office is completely compatible with MS Office. You'll be able to open and save MS Office compatible docs.

Originally Posted by FadedMaster

And Open Office is completely compatible with MS Office. You'll be able to open and save MS Office compatible docs.

This isn't true. It's compatible to some degree, but depending on how advanced the MS documents are, some conversions isn't made successfully.

Personally, I really like Open Office and you have 2 great Open Office forums where you can search for more information: the Open Office forum and the Open Office.org Community forum.

Also, you have YouTube. Check this out. I would suggest the Open Office training video for a start.

I've never had any problems with Office documents in OpenOffice. But then again I have never used extremely advanced Office documents. It's good to know that it's not completely compatible, albeit disappointed.

Open Office have had problems keeping up with all the latest releases which comes from Microsoft.

I think it's cool that they are trying and that it works to some degree. I myself am not too happy to pay for office software,

At the present I'm using Open Office 3.0.1 together with my old powerbook G3 where the models were produced in 1999. Works pretty good! I definitely feel that this program get's heavy on the resources, though.

So if you're going for Open Office, you can be pretty sure it will run on your hardware, unless you're very low on RAM. My Powerbook has 320MB of RAM in it. Operating system is Debian Lenny.