Just discovered OpenOffice - WOW

dave010203 · Newbie Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 1

I am setting a laptop for my daughter who is starting college. Of course, with all the expenses, I was looking for any way to save money. I got a decently priced laptop($500 1.3 GHz AMD Sempron, 40 GB HD, 512 MB RAM, DVD-CDR, Wireless, 15" screen, Windows XP) but of course it didn't come with MS Word for that price.

Searching for a reasonable alternative I came across OpenOffice. I installed it, and was immediately impressed with everything about it, features, desgin, compatibility. I have not used it yet myself, but it looks like it would serve perfectly well for a college student's needs.

I am going to try using OpenOffice myself, but until I become knowledgeable about what it can do, I was wondering if someone tell me if OpenOffice is lacking anything that would make it impractical for a college studentto use.

9point9 · Moderator Joined: 31 Aug 2004 Posts: 3875 Location: UK

I'm a student and find it does just about everything I need. It does of course depend upon the subject being studied. I'm studying Physics so I find the plotting functions rather lacking which is why I use gnuplot for graphs.
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Arch Linux
OOo 3.2.0

OOoSVN, change control for OOo documents:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ooosvn/

Nico · Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2005 11:11 am Post subject:

I've come across OOo this week and believe me, in computer terms, it is the best thing that came across my path in the last decade. See my comments in this thread:http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=21868 I also made one or two comparisons with MS Word in that posting. This program beats MS Office hands down, and it's for free, unbelievable! For general use, and even for most specialised uses, you cannot beat it. Do not even consider searching further. Browsing through the bulitin board, you might come accross a couple of individuals who try to make a point about Laytex. Ignore them, they are biased. OOo is not intended as a printing layout program. It is a very powerful word processor, and nothing in the maket beats it currently. Enjoy the program, it pleasently surprises you all along as you work with it. (I hope you are using ver. 2.0?)

Best regards
Nico Smith

Nico · Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2005 11:21 am Post subject:

O yes, and make sure that both you and your daugter read the sticky titled: ": Text Formatting with Writer" which is currently posted on the board. In text processing terms, it is of crucial importance to learn the correct formatting protocol right from the outset. One tends to be lazy and too easily just go through a document making local formatting changes all the time. This is wrong! Especially if you regularly create longer (more than two page) documents, this way of working will cause you infinite agony in the end.

Regards
Nico

David · Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2005 12:07 pm Post subject: