[zachman1094]

You can run MS Office 2007 in Linux?
That was one of the big things holding me back from Linux, but if I can run MS Office (I use it a LOT), then I might give Linux a try.
I've heard of programs such as WINE, that let you run Windows programs in Linux, how does this work out?

[shekharc]

You need to install WINE and then run the M$-Office using WINE!

However, doesn't matter how extensively u use the M$-Office, u can do same things using the Open Office also. Give it a try and I am pretty sure it will stand according to your expectations.

Besides, if u use the Open Office, you are out of the M$'s prison. You can use many OS' and many applications to access your documents because Open Office uses open source format to save the documents and therefore, a plenty of options u will be having to access your documents.

However, if u stick to M$-office, u will always have to pay and look for M$ in future....u will always be dependent on them. And mind it: many times, older M$-office documents are broken in newer ones and vice-versa.

Remember one thing: In case of M$-apps, "u" behave according to them. And in case of Open Source apps, "they" behave according to you. I am not joking, this is very true. Just give it a try.

[zachman1094]

I've tried OpenOffice before, and it's okay, but I don't think it compares to MS Office. Sure I have to pay for MS Office, but to me, that's not a big deal. I've never had any problems with MS Office, so I don't see any reason to switch, at least right now.

[yankeeDDL]

If paying $800, being subject to MS EULA and using a bloated, slow software with a "revolutionary" interface which differes from any other software you have ever used are not good reasons to swithch to a free, quick, constantly improved, standard software which lets you open all files, including the non-standard ones created with MS Office 2007 ... then keep using it: you deserve it :)

[zachman1094]

I don't know where you got the $800 price tag, but I got MS Office 2007 for $60, and no it wasn't illegal. As for the interface, I had to problem switching from MS 2003 to MS 2007, it may just be me, but it was an easy transition for me.
The EULA? never had a problem with it. Maybe I use it differently than you, but it's never been an issue for me. But like I said, I've tried Open Office before, and didn't see anything special.

[shekharc]

hmmm, doing same things what M$-Office does, but in a consistant, open and transparent way, without being subjected to imprisonment of M$, and all these available for free (both as in FREEdom and FREE-beer), seems to be quite compelling to make the switch to Open Office (for a reasonable person, of course)

And, just to point u out the benifits of using Open Office over M$-Office, here I go:

1. Any version of Open Office can open documents prepared by any other version of the Open Office.

2. It can also open documents prepared using the M$-Office. This is not true with M$-Office.

3. The documents can be read on any system, be it MAC, Linux or your beloved Windows. It means, u r a free guy, out of M$'s prison.

4. A plenty of apps are already available to access Open Office documents, as it is an open source product. It means, u r a free guy, out of M$-Office's prison.

5. What do u do when u need to convert a M$-doc file in a pdf-document? I couldn't find a free way to do it!! Use Open Office....it's just a matter of one clickand there the pdf version is ready for u.

6. An easy-to-find, reasonable, and consistant interface for Open Office. You don't need to learn the use again-and-again as the Office's version changes.

7. Plenty of AddOns => enhance the functionality and usability the way you want.

Are these not compelling enough to make the switch??!



By the way, is there anything that M$-Office can do but Open Office can't?? I suspect if there is any!!



I guess, u r just a typical M$-Office user psychologically bound to it but without any valid readon. Go ahead, sir, and do yourself a favor by doing some reasoning before discarding the Open Office in favor of something worse, the M$-Office.

[yankeeDDL]

The equivalent of OpenOffice is MS Office 2007 Professional (includes Access 2007).

Sells for ~$400 at Newegg. http://www.newegg.co...N82E16832116161

If you are talking about a student edition then it's a different story. I cannot imagine what you can buy for $60: Microsoft indicates that the cheapest version is the student edition that sells for about ~150: http://office.micros...1754511033.aspx

You will be missing other free software (OpenOffice Math does not have an equivalent in MS Office: kind of funny if you think about a "student" edition). You also have DIA which is a free version of Visio ($219 at Newegg: http://www.newegg.co...2E16832116091).

So I overdid it a bit, but the point remains: MS Office is not free, in general. And while you may be one of the "lucky" (?) ones to have access to it for a low price, in general, this is not true.

It is true though that MS Office is a resource hog: http://office.micros...68651033.aspx#5 (1GHz CPU + 512MB of RAM) vs http://www.openoffice.org/devdocs/source/sysreqs_30.html (256MB of RAM, no CPU speed specified).

I have an Athlon 64 3200+ (2GHz) with 4GB of Ram. Under Windows XP 64bit MS Word takes just less 1minute to start. OpenOffice starts in 10 seconds under Ubuntu 64. Using the two side by side makes the comparison almost unfair. OpenOffice has some limitations but you will be "frre" from the EULA.

What's wrong about the EULA? Have a look in the "License agreement" section http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CriticismofMicrosoft.

Every EULA from Microsoft forbids you explicitly from making negative comments about Microsoft or any of its software. So had I bought a copy of MS Office (I haven't: I use it at work because I have no choice) I wouldn't, legally, be able to write what I just did. Regardless of how good the software is, for me, this is enough NOT to buy it. BUt that's just me.

[zachman1094]

How come I can't see any of the comments anymore?

[shamil]

Wine is the key to running office 2007 in linux. There's plenty of things that office 2007 can do that openoffice can't. And there's also plenty of things that openoffice can do that office 2007 can't. Openoffice and office 2007 are getting more equal as time goes by. I'd say if you already have office 2007, or are going to buy it, go ahead.

For me there is absolutely no folley in running openoffice. It does everything and more than what i need. If i needed office i'd probably have bought it. But, that's the thing, there's no reason i need office 2007 for anything becuase openoffice has me more than covered and for free. Openoffice does work great in college too. Openoffice also lets you export to pdf (it's a built in features...handy). Then again there's cutepdf for Windows, but it doesn't come bundled with office 2007.

At least the good news is that either using openoffice or office 2007 with cutepdf free pdf printer, you still don't need to pay out the bunghole painfully with extra splatter and drippage for adobe acrobat pro (which people just use acrobat pro just for making pdfs).

[dragon69]

well who is paying for the win xp home license for these netbooks ? shouldn't netbooks without winxp home be a 100 bucks cheaper (if they had the same hardware)than those with the free and open source operating systems ?
when the acer aspire one first came out there was a 100 dollar price difference but now the win xp ones seem to be price the same

[Charbax]

Android laptop: $100
Windows netbook: $400
End of story.
Also, the Android laptop will run 20 hours on a standard sized 3-cell battery, it will be lighter, boot instantly, it will come with much better optimized software including a full Google Chrome browser.
Also, Linux was shipped on 5 million netbooks in 2008, that is pretty good considering nearly NO laptops before that were ever sold with Linux pre-installed. From 0 to 5 million on year 1 is pretty good.
Fact remains Linux is on about 25% of currently shipped worldwide netbooks. That is a before that the Android netbooks being available.

[zachman1094]

Finally figured out what was wrong, and why I couldn't view any of these comments.
@shekharc, I'll give you answers to your benefits below:
1. I can do that to, it's called saving as .doc instead of saving as .docx, not that hard.
2. I have to agree with you about this, but I've never ran into that problem. It's not because I don't know anyone who uses OpenOffice, but all the people that I know who use it always save their documents as .doc.
3. You can read any word doc on any computer, I send .doc and .docx files to my friends on Macs all the time, and if they had Linux? then I'd send it to them in .pdf form.
4. I don't get what you keep saying about being in microsoft prison, it's NEVER been a problem for me, EVER.
5. I use a FREE tool called PrimoPDF. And I didn't download this only for MS Office, I also use it to convert web pages to .PDFs, and all kinds of other docs to .PDFs, and they look fine.
6. Maybe you have a hard time adapting, but I welcomed the new Office interface with open arms, it's so much better than the old one.
7. I've never said to myself "wow, I wish I could get some addons of some sort for MS Office "so I could enhance the functionality"", MS Office has always been perfect for me.
No, these are NOT enough to make me switch! I've never ran into computability problems or anything! EVER! if I know someone who needs a document and doesn't have MS Office, or something that can open those docs, I just send them the .PDF or upload my file to Google Docs if I have lots of people that want to see and edit it.
I'm not psychologically bound to anything. I like using MS Office, that's just how it is, I've never had a problem with it, so I don't need to switch.
@yankeeDDL,
I'm not sure which edition I got, all I know is that I got MS Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OutLook, that's all I needed. All for $60. Brand new. It takes your computer 1 min to start Office? jeez, I've got 512 MB of RAM, and it doesn't take my computer half that long to open MS Office, I don't know what your talking about.
@Charbax,
Where can I get an android netbook? I've been looking around for a cheap, strong computer and haven't found one yet, but an android laptop sounds like a great place to start.

[gafisher]

The relative merits of MSOffice vs. OpenOffice are really somewhat peripheral to the Android Netbook, but FWIW I've got MSOffice Enterprise Edition (the pricey one) on my business computers and I still use OpenOffice more often. OpenOffice is quicker, more flexible and better suited to writing than MSOffice, though MSOffice has plenty of its own features. By the way, the current version of OpenOffice handles docx and quite a few other proprietary formats just fine.

I wouldn't say either OpenOffice or MSWord is inherently, universally better than the other; what IS better is having a choice.

[zachman1094]

Just to appease you all I've downloaded OpenOffice to give it a try for a few days. It's good to know that OpenOffice can handle .docx files. I've used both in the past, and I stuck with MS Office because it was a better choice for me, but maybe OpenOffice has changed enough to change my opinion.

[yankeeDDL]

Just FYI, there's version 3.1 release candidate which has several cosmetic improvements over 3.0, some of them are copied from MS Office 2007.

If you're only going to try it out, the release-candidate can be downloaded already. For example you have the sliding +/- zoom in Calc (=Excel), while you only get it in Writer (=Word) in version 3.0. Just a suggestion.

[tek101]

Are you kidding me....? c'mon ........
You can do a whole lot more with MS Office 2007 than OpenOff.......Even my 12 year old son knows the difference......He does all kind of presentation for school from Power point , publisher .....and alot of calculation formulas from excel.....

And yes....I agree ...Its expensive .....

(BTW....I have nothing to do with MS ......)

[asiafish]

Only Google wants one.

[yankeeDDL]

Why would he be kidding? I do the exact same. Makes a lot of sense.
MS 2007 can do "a whole lot more" than Openoffice? Really? Care to make some example?
I use office applications quite heavily. Embedding images, drawings, tables, videos. Files could get quite large in size and OpenOffice handles them well. The add-on can make complex work much simpler. It also has a (beta) import filter for PFD. Saved my day a couple of times already.

As a normal/power user, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that MS Office 2007 can do which I cannot do with OpenOffice as well. Compatibility for heavily formatted documents is a concern. I never really had a problem but other on this forum feel strong about MS Office being the only answer in some cases.

We're drifting off though. The point is, does it make sense for a netbook to use any OS other than Windows? I would say that Office is not really the target application of netbooks. Infact, I would think that a lightweigth OS (Android, or Linux) is more suitable for a low-powered computer.The Atom is based off Pentium 3 architecture and it's not the most powerful of CPU. Can you run Windows XP on a Pentium 3? Yes. Does it run "zipppy"? No.

So, to answer the question in the article. I, for one, would like to have an Android Netbook.

[gafisher]

> {quote:title=tek101 wrote '}{quote}... my 12 year old son knows the difference......He does all kind of presentation for school from Power point , publisher .....and alot of calculation formulas from excel.....'
[/quote]
I don't think I'd tackle desktop publishing on a Netbook, but OpenOffice handles both reading, editing and creating PowerPoint and Excel files just fine. In fact, I think it's "a better PowerPoint than PowerPoint" because it does some things PowerPoint left out, without sacrificing compatibility. If your kids' school is suffering from budget woes it might want to consider an office suite that doesn't crush the budget and which students can actually install and use (legally) at home for free.