brumdaisy

Anyone got any experiences they want to share?

Rather than buy MS Office Im tempted to try open source equivilants to stuff like Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint etc. I'll be using them to run a business so cant afford any problems (well no more than the usual u get with MS).

Im no techie so please dont reply in geek speak but any plain english thoughts welcome....

NotoriousREV

If these are for internal use, you probably won't have any problems, but if you're sending documents to customers/suppliers you may have compatability issues.

Most people will cite support as the main reason for using "normal" software, but MS support is expensive and poor whereas Open Source has large communities of users behind it.

brumdaisy

Yeah thats another thing Ive got to understand more about

In terms of sending out my documents eg quotes I can get around incompatibility by converting them all into pdfs but if Im using opensource does that mean I wont be able to access documents such as stuff in Word or Powerpoint that are sent to me, or is there a way around it?

I dont particualarly want to be an expert on all this stuff... just wanna save money if i can

TopBanana

How much is the cheapest copy of office? You must be able to get an out-of-date copy on ebay for peanuts. I'd say save yourself the headaches and concentrate on the rest of your business!

brumdaisy

Yeah I thought about that but when you come across copies of photoshop for £1.99 on ebay u get a bit dubious.... knowing my luck Id pay alot more than that and still get shafted

andyr

We (my wife far more than me) used Office Org as a freeware alternative to Word/Excel (more Word than xl) and it was a pretty decent.
We did have the occasional issue with someone with Word having problems reading docs we'd created but in the main it was a very usable product.
http://www.openoffice.org/

stevencotton

Open Office is lacking some features of MS Office, which is where the incompatibilities lie, if you're sent a document containing objects that aren't supported, that's where you'll get problems.

But if you're sending things out, created by OOo, then as long as they're not 'complex' documents you shouldn't have a problem at all. You might as well give it a try since it's free

TopBanana

But one's time isn't free Steven!

stevencotton

Takes less time to download OOo and test it out than earning the money to pay for MSO

GaryK

Yes the compatibility thing is abit of a smoke screen really. Unless you have really complex document formatting (which most people dont) you will be fine. lets face it most users of Word/Excel probably use about 10-15% of the available functionality and word 2.0 would suffice for 90% of users, me included! If Im doing section breaks with different page layouts I think Im getting smart with Word!

TopBanana

Maybe for you

Still, it's the problems 3 months down the road when you're trying to get a proposal out that will bite you in the butt

stevencotton

What problems? Unless you do "funky" stuff there just aren't any.