3.....2....1......

Open Office, drone, drone drone, Zzzzzzzz

Oddly it won't accept 3.....2....1...... as a title!

Be free, Use Linux.

Please remove the friggin' ribbon thingy and give me back my main menu.

The fact is that OpenOffice CAN handle MS Word documents that you need to deal with on a daily basis - don't let this be the reason for continuing to use MS Office bloatware. It's intuitive to use. Try it, you can always uninstall it if you don't like it. I spent years swearing at MS Office - I am so very glad I changed.

Seems to be a pattern emerging here...

They are going to finish off Vista, but call it Windows 7.

Now they are finishing off Office 2007.

I want to see the ribbon everywhere in Office!

Be free, Use Linux and have to relearn how to do everything.

I was trying to use Open Office this week to produce a document template. Simple enough I thought, I was wrong. It's taken me far less time today to learn my way round the ribbon bar (which I now think is a great UI despite my initial WTF thoughts) and create the template and 2 sample docs than it took me to fail to complete the template in OOO.

side note: We have BG and Steve angels and devils, where's the tux devil?

take a computer that can do 2billion calculations a second and turn it into a filing cabinet!

Office software - the red flag walking slowly in front of your computer.

MS Office - the red flag walking slowly in front of your computer and leading you to the cash machine!

Well, at least for as long as i can get genuine a copy of office enterprise for a tenner through work anyway.

Don't tell me the big wigs at Redmond are that superstitious

I have oOO3 installed, and it's a good job that I don't have to open Word documents or spreadsheets very often, because it talks the better part of a minute to open them with Open Office. If I had to do this a couple of times a day, instead of a couple of times a week, I'd install the free Microsoft Office Viewers instead.

(I've used Open Office on a range of systems, from XP systems with a Gig of RAM to Vista boxes with 3Gig - it's slow on them all).

The last time I tried OO, I needed to open a XML document in the spreadsheet... Easy-peasy, Excel does it without batting an eyelid, and surely Calc would be so much better at it (and perhaps even figure out the datetime type)?

No go.

At least not a year and a half ago.

Have they fixed this now? Or does OO still insist on opening XML data in the word processor?

shocking as it may seem, Microsoft office is used over open office because it really is nicer to use(admittedly not 2007 with its silly ribbon, i mean the real one, 2003)

no matter what you may think about the file format being stupid, ODF *is* a much better format, so far Microsoft office* is more productive for it's target market, and as much as i hate it, if there is any one application that pushes user experience over technical superiority, it's the word processor.

With any luck, this new version will scrap the insane interface and go back to being usable again, but give us performance enhancements and some added features.

*before you think Microsoft office is the only word processor i have used, I started on folio on the bbc, Fireworks on RISC OS, have used hardware word processors, wordpro, word-perfect, open office, star office, plus many more (even Microsoft works!) and still have settled on word 2003 as being the nicest to use.

Another product that no one seems to really be looking for. It's not as if the last 3 or 4 versions of MS Office do not work or that OO is such a dog, nope, it's really all about the ribbon. You know you like it, you just can't admit it, can you? Perhaps you need to spend a quiet weekend alone with the ribbon and you too will know the awesomeness that is in store for those who submit. Hail to the great Microsoft, may the ribbon rule us all!

I'm down with Paris on this one, and Paris with ribbons really knows how to go down....

Have you tried Go-OO? Turns out that several Linux distros(such as Debian) ship it instead of OOo.

www.go-oo.org

The load time is such as it loads the full program into memory not just a tiny little bit to let you get started, I'm betting the quick starter is off, loads it a little bit faster.

Also since OO isn't an MS product it has to load a lot more as there is less dll hooks involved..

Try Open Office on a *nix box you'll see it's faster - well *nix is faster anyway.