OpenOffice

[master]

Has anybody used that OpenOffice from www.openoffice.org yet? Just downloading and installing it now to see what it's like. Just wondering what the catch is if it's free!

[leroys1000]

It's a good set of applications developed by the open source community.
It's free to everyone.

[rockboy]

I use it on one of my PC's. No catch, it's free and it does what it says it does.

[renegade600]

I have two legal copies of microsoft office (xp and 2003) but I do not have them installed. However, I have open office installed in all of my computers. :D

[giradman]

Using MS Office on my main home & work computers, but did not buy the package for my IBM laptop, so using a few 'free' apps, like Open Office U3 on a 1 GB U3 flash drive (http://software.u3.com/Product_Details.aspx?productId=109&lang=en-US) and AbiWord (http://www.abisource.com/) - works well, if that option may be of use to you.

[campo]

Open Office is great - I have used it for years. It makes far better webpages than Microsoft Office (which won't even validate)!
If you want great web pages, its best used in conjunction with the outstanding HTML Kit, because the html is technically correct html 4.0 but it is unnecessarily fussy. I take pages created with O. Office to html Kit where they can be converted into far neater html or even converted into XHTML Trans with a minimum of fuss. Of course, you could do everything with HTML Kit but that is not a WYSWYG facility. If (like me) you can do your own html but are a bit lazy about it (especially if you are writing a long article, which I do all the time), then you can just type it into O. Office and it will give you the full html.

campo

[master]

Great, thanks for your thoughts folks.

I have just installed it on my computer, and although I have only spent a few minutes going through all the different programs, it looks very good.