Open Office

[DFuture]

anyone ever heard of or used Open office? I was over at the Apple Discussions message board (doing more reading before I decided to buy a Mac Mini) and some of the people were talking about it over there. the site for the program is http://www.openoffice.org

It looks like a pretty decent program for windows but for the mac it was calling for some X11 software in order for it to run on OSX. you can see that page at http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/ooo-osx_downloads.html

any comments on this thing? Anyone have it and currently using it? Just something else Im thinking about, software-wise before I jump into the world of the mini and need to buy software all over.

[Patrick Shannon]

I've never been crazy about running software under X11, it reminds me all too much of launching OS 9 classic in OSX and using software that way.

I haven't really used OpenOffice very much, the only thing I tried to install under X11 was the Gimp, and that was a pain in the ass. There was plans to port Open Office to Aqua (basically, OS X native), but plans for that has been cancelled, according to a recent article on Slashdot. I was disappointed to hear that.

Patrick Shannon

'Dear valued customer, go home and die. Signed, your friendly graphic artist.'

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[Broacher]

Yessir. It's a great one to have on hand. It sometimes is the only way to get certain things out of a Word document for me. Plus, it does tons of things that MS Office doesn't-- but generally, it's the superior graphic control I like. Though, not everything it does can go back and forth with Word, and likewise for the vice versa.