#OPENOFFICE IMPRESS REVIEWS FULL#

I have also seen some very nice presentations done in Apple Keynote.

Along those same lines, Robert Nyman has released Ajax-S, which is also very nice. If you are a web guru, you might also want to consider Eric Meyer's S5 method, as it only requires only a web browser to make presentations. After some tweaking, the MP3 played just fine, and the music slideshow went without a hitch. I was disappointed to find that the video did not play, but I was not entirely surprised, since it is a proprietary Microsoft format. I tested it out with a 35mb presentation I did for a seminary class, which contained embedded WMV and MP3 files for an opening video and closing music slideshow. I was impressed, pun intended, to find that Impress handles every single slide transition animation that PowerPoint can throw at it. In fact, a major accountancy firm in London recently dumped Excel in favor of Calc ( source). This means users can import very large spreadsheets, without significant risk of data loss.

#OPENOFFICE IMPRESS REVIEWS FULL#

In version 2.0, Calc now supports the full 65536 that Excel is designed to handle. In previous verions of OpenOffice, Calc was criticized for being under-powered compared to Excel, due to it capping off data rows at 32000. I don't know about you, but I've never been fond of those green underlines anyway. It has full spell check, but won't hold your hand like Word does regarding sentence structure. The one significant omission in Writer is the lack of a grammar checker. I tried opening a few older papers I wrote in Word, that contain funky Greek and Hebrew fonts used in seminary, and Writer handled them just fine. The interface of Writer and the rest of the OpenOffice suite closely resembles that of MS Office XP. Wordįor the most part, these two applications function pretty much identically. Let's take a look at why OpenOffice puts Microsoft on their heels… Writer vs. They seem to be clamoring lately just to keep up with the progression of Yahoo and Google in 'Web 2.0' technologies, and are losing ground in the desktop market to Apple OSX and OpenOffice. If anyone is holding back the evolution of technology, they are. This attitude is extremely ironic, because if you work in web development, you are well aware that it is Microsoft which exists in a bygone era, having not made any significant improvements to Internet Explorer since 1998, other than bug fixes and security patches. The safe assumption: There aren't significant reasons to upgrade. This is both insulting to the consumer, and shows a complete lack of consideration for presenting their product in the best possible light. Rather than try to sell you on the features, or show that it is somehow a better product, their initial pitch is: If you are not using the newest Microsoft Office products, then you need to evolve. Marketing Idiocyįirst of all, consider how Microsoft has chosen to market their current version of Office. I'll go over areas in which OpenOffice beats MS Office, but also be clear about where it falls short. Okay, so maybe you need a little more proof, fair enough. That being said, I would propose the next time you find yourself setting up a computer, perhaps a hand-me-down for a friend or relative: Rather than force them to buy MS Office, or being lame and using a pirated copy, hook them up with OpenOffice and see if they don't like it just as much. Microsoft themselves admit that 80% of Office users need only 20% of the features. If you're anything like me, you use the basic features to get your work done, but could care less about any of the new bells and whistles added with each release.

If you have a computer of any kind, chances are you've used some form of Microsoft Office. In other words, they sat complacent for so long that other products are simply better, and people are starting to take notice. Personally, I find this amusing: Microsoft was taken to court some years ago for anti-trust issues, but nowadays it's open source that's chipping away at their dominance. On a related note, the state government of Massachusetts ditched MS Office in September, due to it not being compliant with OASIS guidelines. It was rumored that NASA recently ditched IE in favor of Firefox, and New York University does not allow their employees to use IE for sensitive material. My referral logs show that 56% of the visitors to my site use Firefox. By now you have probably heard that Internet Explorer is junk.

Openoffice impress reviews