OpenOffice v Office 2010?

[awa355]

Have got a new laptop. It has a 60 day starter version of Office 2010 word.

I am putting together, a family history comprising photos, Jpegs, text. All I want to do is type, insert a photo, wrap text etc.

At work, I have an option of purchasing Office 2010 at a ridiculous low price. As long as I work for this dept, I get the full works. I'm a bit wary about installing heaps of stuff I will never use.

Would downloading Open Office be an 'easier to use' option?

My old laptop had both Office 2007 installed, because it was supposed to be easier than 2010, and Open Office.

Can I transfer the O 2007 prog. via a USB stick, to my new laptop? or can it be downloaded?

[Gingin]

Ok lets answer the last question line first . No....
Now back to the real question Open Office V MS Office 2010. As always lots of opinions but In your case both would do the job its just a matter of picking one and learning the nuances and getting used to it. Office 2010 is not really all that different from 2007. For my 2 Cents if you are familiar with Office 2007, use it more than Open office at present and can get 2010 for stuff all then thats the way I would go.

[SMOKEU]

You will need to download the installer for OpenOffice and install it on the new computer if you wish to use OO. I do like OO, but if you create a document with OO and then view it with MS Office, there will often be formatting issues which is something you should take careful note of. If you want MS Office 2010 for free then use KMS activator as it gives you a 180 day trial, then you need to rerun the activator again. It takes about 2 minutes at the most to do.

[Akzle]

open source fanboy says openoffice.

[Hitcher]

Open source fanboy here says for what you need use Google Documents (Google Drive). For basic word processing tasks, that application is pretty hard to beat and doesn't require anything to be downloaded and installed.

OpenOffice does spreadsheets better than Excel (which has been a flawed product ever since it was launched) and its PowerPoint equivalents are vastly better than Microsoft's offerings. Microsoft had Word largely sorted in 2003 until it decided to revamp it completely for the 2010 offering. Now it's just a real estate hungry beast. That said, it still has a bunch of features that OO doesn't have (like vertical page centring) and a range of other features that are easier to understand and use.

I am vigorously avoiding procuring Microsoft products. However I am using its free Security Essentials (and Windows), as both AGV and Avast successfully pissed me off.

[Buyasta]

If you do decide against Office, you'd be better off going with LibreOffice rather than OpenOffice.

When Oracle bought Sun a few years back and began systematically destroying the long-term future of every Sun product in the name of short-term profits, the vast majority of the OpenOffice team forked the OpenOffice project to form LibreOffice, and then merged the go-oo codebase, which was essentially a set of patches that hadn't been accepted into the main OO codebase for mostly political reasons.

The upshot is that while OpenOffice is currently still being developed, it's long-term future is in doubt, and development on LibreOffice is a great deal more active, and due to the merge with go-oo, it has contained a number of enhancements and improvements over OpenOffice right from the first release, which they've steadily been building upon since the beginning of last year.

[awa355]

Thanks for the advice. I purchased Office Professional Pro 2010 through work. For $10.00 I get to install it on two computers. As long as I work for the dept, it stays with me. Been with them 19 years now and only have 5 to go to retirement, so cant see me moving.

It has more than I will use but for $5 a PC, I can't really lose out.

[scracha]

Sun Apache Office seems the most stable.

Anyhoo....if it's just Word and Excel then Microsoft Office 2010 Starter is completely free

[pzkpfw]

... if it's just Word and Excel then Microsoft Office 2010 Starter is completely free

Is the download of that still available somewhere?

(i.e. I thought starter only came on pre-built PC's; and the site that was available to download it had gone.)

[Scuba_Steve]

Thanks for the advice. I purchased Office Professional Pro 2010 through work. For $10.00 I get to install it on two computers. As long as I work for the dept, it stays with me. Been with them 19 years now and only have 5 to go to retirement, so cant see me moving.

It has more than I will use but for $5 a PC, I can't really lose out.

you can choose custom/advanced install & choose what you do & don't want, might be a way to go so you're not installing everything you don't need & will never use

[BMWST?]

Open source fanboy here says for what you need use Google Documents (Google Drive). For basic word processing tasks, that application is pretty hard to beat and doesn't require anything to be downloaded and installed.

OpenOffice does spreadsheets better than Excel (which has been a flawed product ever since it was launched) and its PowerPoint equivalents are vastly better than Microsoft's offerings. Microsoft had Word largely sorted in 2003 until it decided to revamp it completely for the 2010 offering. Now it's just a real estate hungry beast. That said, it still has a bunch of features that OO doesn't have (like vertical page centring) and a range of other features that are easier to understand and use.

I am vigorously avoiding procuring Microsoft products. However I am using its free Security Essentials (and Windows), as both AGV and Avast successfully pissed me off.

and for spreadsheets google spreadsheets arent bad either

[wysper]

it has contained a number of enhancements and improvements over OpenOffice right from the first release,

Like what? Genuine question. I have always been happy with Open Office, so would be interested to know what Libre would offer over it.

[jafar]

Can libre office or open office be downloaded onto windblows 7 without too much drama ???

[Buyasta]

Like what? Genuine question. I have always been happy with Open Office, so would be interested to know what Libre would offer over it.

The main thing it'll offer is continued development - when I say that almost the entire dev team left OpenOffice for LibreOffice, that's not an exaggeration - IIRC, the only members of the OpenOffice project that stayed with it instead of moving to LibreOffice were the ones being employed by Oracle, whom Oracle then proceeded to fire after offloading the project to the Apache Foundation.
As a result, development on OpenOffice since has been extremely slow, and the project is fairly stagnant, whereas LibreOffice development is very active.

LibreOffice forked at the time 3.3 was being polished to be readied for release, so the first version of LibreOffice was 3.3 (by which time they'd already merged the Go-OO codebase), and they've since released 3 new major versions, for a current version of 3.6, each of which contained numerous bugfixes and enhancements. Meanwhile, OpenOffice has released one new major version, 3.4, which wasn't a release dictated by added features or fixes, but the fact that OpenOffice had become an Apache Incubator project, which necessitated stripping certain parts of the OpenOffice codebase in order to fix licensing incompatibilities between the Apache license and the GPL.

Here's a little comparison, although this is current as of LibreOffice 3.5, so there are additional fixes/features in 3.6 not represented by it.
It's also worth noting that if you were using OpenOffice on Linux, there's a good chance you were using Go-OO, rather than vanilla OpenOffice - if you installed OpenOffice using the package manager in most distros, you were actually installing Go-OO.

Basically the entire situation is just ridiculous - when Oracle bought Sun, and proceeded to kill OpenSolaris, and attempt to aggressively monetize pretty much every property they'd just acquired, the OpenOffice community got nervous, and several members proceeded to form The Document Foundation, and began working on the codebase that would become LibreOffice. They asked Oracle to donate the OpenOffice brand to them, so that they could ensure that the project could continue, free, regardless of Oracles actions.
At this point, Oracle threw a world-class hissy fit and demanded that anyone involved in The Document Foundation resign from the OpenOffice community council, which they did, and at which point everyone not employed by Oracle jumped the sinking ship, and the Go-OO project guys joined the LibreOffice team and merged in their codebase.
At this point Oracle realized they were screwed, and that OpenOffice was now effectively dead, as there was no way they were going to pay enough developers to keep the project alive, and all the corporate sponsors of OpenOffice such as Google, Novell, Red Hat, Canonical, etc. had all thrown their support behind The Document Foundation.
So, obviously the natural solution was to hand over the OpenOffice brand to The Document Foundation, and let them keep the project alive, the very purpose they'd been founded for. But Oracle, being Oracle, said f&*k them, we may not be able to win this fight, but we'll make damn sure the other side doesn't either, and instead handed it over to the Apache Foundation, and made it their problem.

[Buyasta]

Can libre office or open office be downloaded onto windblows 7 without too much drama ???

Yup, here's the websites for LibreOffice and OpenOffice, there's a download option on each page, and it's easier to install than MS Office, thanks to not having to bother with license keys or activation, etc.
As I noted above, I'd recommend going for LibreOffice rather than OpenOffice, but obviously it's your call, and either one should work fine for you.