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Why OpenOffice? Why Microsoft Office? Each one makes their argument

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zridling:
Four years ago, the OpenOffice.org Marketing Project put together some web pages to present the case for using OpenOffice.org, which we called Why OpenOffice.org? It’s a sign of the increasing level of worry in Microsoft that they have now produced their own Why Microsoft? pages.

   

The arguments each make are interesting. For example, Microsoft's biggest crank against OpenOffice is that it doesn't work with all of Microsoft's online apps:  OpenOffice.org doesn’t provide email, calendaring, companion web applications, mobile applications, or out-of–the-box integration with companion products like SharePoint and Exchange—a limitation that can impact your user’s, and your IT departments, productivity. If you're not locked-in, your company is losing out!

OpenOffice's argument is more simple: It's built on an open source development model using the open document format (ODF), it's easy to use, and it's free, free, free! Okay, we get it.

Bamse:
I don't know if they link to Youtube videos but they have a channel called Officevideos with all this "Why Microsoft" http://www.youtube.com/user/officevideos#g/c/5BA7E1E86EE6BA12 may be easier to consume and Silverlight is not required.

f0dder:
OpenOffice is slow, has been less stable for me than MS Office (in particular it sometime locks up when used in conjunction with ClipX, but can fortunately usually be tricked out of the lock-up - sometimes it plain crashes, which doesn't seem to be because of ClipX), it's macro editor environment sucks compared to MS Office, has worse documentation (article quality, cross references), and ODF sucks pretty much about as much as OOXML (whoever thought non-binary formats were a good default fileformat should be castrated). Also, it's a joke wrt. page layouting compared to MSO.

I still use OOo instead of MSO, though, because it's gratis. And I believe it makes sense for the government to use an open fileformat (which I don't really consider OOXML to be) for interchange... I just which OOo and ODF wouldn't suck so badly.

TucknDar:
SoftMaker Office :-*

I've never been a big fan of OOo, mostly because it feels very slow and I haven't been impressed with how it handle .doc files (which in a way is understandable, I guess). SoftMaker Office has done this much better for me. SoftMaker Office feels so much lighter too, can easily be made portable and has a pretty good academic license (good for students and teachers, although more expensive than OOo ;) ). There's a version for Linux, also, btw. I find the support excellent, too. The developers are actively discussing bugs and features in their forum.

CWuestefeld:
I'm still primarily a MS Office user. Of course it's the standard, but it does have good points as well.

But if I were paying myself (rather than getting it through my work), it would *not* be OpenOffice. As TucknDar says, SoftMaker's product is fabulous. The price is remarkably low, and for what I need and the way I like to work, it's just head-and-shoulders superior to OpenOffice.

So I own three copies of SoftMaker Office. One on my notebook (Windows), one on my netbook (Ubuntu), and one on my PocketPC. My main desktop machine has Microsoft.

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