Anyone use Open Office?

[Matt]

So I went to the pirate CD store today to buy MS Office and they sold me a disk that didnt have Word, PPT and Excel on it (had all kinds of Frontpage things and Outlook)

I installed Outlook and couldnt be bothered going back to the store, so downloaded and installed Open Office.

Never used it before. Any users here? Any tips/tricks/things to be wary of with it? Is for business use, so compatibility is crucial...

 

[skalogre]

Generally compatibility is good. Excellent alternative to M$ Office.

 

[tiecollector]

Recently checked it out. It has come a loooong way since I used it several years ago for Linux. It is cross-platform and pretty impressive. The GUI looks just like M$ Office. Some formatting from documents generated using M$ Word might look funky sometimes (margins etc) if you have lots of custom formatting. Had a little problem with powerpoint too. Doesn't seem to be as much of problem going the other way back though.

If you want people just to read your document then save it as a pdf and send it out, which is what you should be doing anyways. I hope office offers this feature in their latest release (taken long enough). I use OS X mainly so the pdf thing is already native.

If you want an email client similar to outlook, I used to use Ximian. It was a Linux thing when I used it but I would hope there would be a Windoze version by now, looks like it got bought by Novell though, that is when I stopped using it. I have only ever needed exchange for work, and they provided Outlook.