I've been using OpenOffice 3.0 (Beta) heavily for over a week. It does a great job with "Word", "Excel" and "PowerPoint" documents. I have found it fast, stable and very similar in fell and function to the Microsoft Office products for Windows.
After 20 years on the PC, I switched to Mac last month. The Microsoft Office applications for Mac are, in my opinion, terrible! They are slow; gobble memory, are somewhat unstable and lack many of the features of their PC cousins. I would strongly recommend NOT purchasing Office for Mac.
My clients generally use PCs and Office. OpenOffice allows me complete compatibility with my clients and years of accumulated Office documents. OpenOffice also has PDF export!
For those who don't know yet, OpenOffice is free! (Available as a download from www.Openoffice.org ) Although the Mac version is still technically BETA, I've had no problems and have adopted it as my primary platform for documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
From the OpenOffice website:
I encourage others with experience (good and bad) to post their comments, learnings and suggestions.
After 20 years on the PC, I switched to Mac last month. The Microsoft Office applications for Mac are, in my opinion, terrible! They are slow; gobble memory, are somewhat unstable and lack many of the features of their PC cousins. I would strongly recommend NOT purchasing Office for Mac.
My clients generally use PCs and Office. OpenOffice allows me complete compatibility with my clients and years of accumulated Office documents. OpenOffice also has PDF export!
For those who don't know yet, OpenOffice is free! (Available as a download from www.Openoffice.org ) Although the Mac version is still technically BETA, I've had no problems and have adopted it as my primary platform for documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
From the OpenOffice website:
OpenOffice.org's Mission Statement is...
To create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format.
The OpenOffice.org project is primarily sponsored by Sun Microsystems, which is the primary contributor of code to the Project. Our other major corporate contributors include Novell, RedHat, RedFlag CH2000, IBM, and Google. Additonally over 450,000 people from nearly every curve of the globe have joined this Project with the idea of creating the best possible office suite that all can use. This is the essence of an "open source." community!
To create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format.
The OpenOffice.org project is primarily sponsored by Sun Microsystems, which is the primary contributor of code to the Project. Our other major corporate contributors include Novell, RedHat, RedFlag CH2000, IBM, and Google. Additonally over 450,000 people from nearly every curve of the globe have joined this Project with the idea of creating the best possible office suite that all can use. This is the essence of an "open source." community!
I encourage others with experience (good and bad) to post their comments, learnings and suggestions.
