I downloaded & installed Open Office. Am I gonna regret it?

[Jackpine Radical]

Put it on my wife's new box & on my laptop tonight. We'd been using Office 97 until this point. Did the download at work on the T1 line bacause all we have is landlines at home. No cable, too far out in the toolies for DSL, & they want $100/mo for satellite, so we're gonna be on slow lines for some time to come.

Any nightmare or miracle stories about OOo? Did I do the right thing? Did I destroy my marriage? (If the latter, any female DUers wanna move into the country with a recently deserted old hippie?)

[qnr]

1. Good choice.

I haven't used it for years, because I use individual programs when I need them, but I'd estimate a good 90% of the people I know (online and off) love it.

Edit: "90% of the people I know that use it" that should read.

[disgruntled_goat]

2. ive been happily using it a while

hell, i used it back before it was called "openOffice"

good stuff. very compatible with MS Office.

[WhoWantsToBeOccupied]

3. OO more stable for large docs than Word

I switched to OO from Word a few months back because Word kept crashing and corrupting my file. It was a large file (a book manuscript), but there's no excuse for such frequent crashes and corruption. There's a learning curve to OO (esp. its different styles), but I'm actually much happier with it. It's better designed for writing books. I've also heard good things about ABIWord but haven't tried it. Word was also incredibly crappy with even small files with automatic spell-check on. I think that was the "feature" (bug) I had to turn off to prevent my CPU from running constantly at 100%. It was really strange!) One annoyance is latency. I've heard that the proprietary nature of Micro$oft's APIs makes it impossible for others to write optimal software. OO just freezes for a few seconds, seemingly at random. I'm running mostly on Windoze though I'm slowly transitioning more of my desktop work to Linux.

[PoiBoy]

4. I've been using Open Office for several months now...

..and I really like it a lot... I still have my MS Office Pro loaded for the kids to use, but they are slowly moving over to OO as well..

It can read all the Word and Excel docs seamlessly.. I haven't tried the Powerpoint app yet, although I intend to in the near future... and I really really like the fact that I can create PDF files right in the program... that's awesome for me.. something I make use of almost daily in my small business...

IMO.., you'll have an easy time working with Open Office.. enjoy! :hi: