OpenOffice.org Reviews 28

Absolute dog water. It can't paste an image properly at all. And crashed on me three times while I was trying to write my coding document and made me loose progress.

It crashes and then it doesn't save any documents.
And then you end up redoing the days of work. Nice

Quite a reasonable wordprocessor, it did everything I wanted BUT you can not save documents in .docx format.
That was a big no-no for me, so I reluctantly uninstalled it.

I have become Death, the destroyer of words

So it would come in very handy if you could update the software with a function where one can write a text in the document and then link the name of the photo to a file located in a folder. Could you please do that? If you make that available then one can send a folder with the letter and the images in either a letter on a memory card, disk or online in a zip file. It would be very helpful.

You get a 4star, you got many good functions, they are just well hidden and not where one is used to find them I guess. I just have to find them and learn more. But as I said many of the functions are hidden away in deep menus and if one need to repeat the use often it get tireing. I have been sitting adding photos like crazy 'til my hand hurt, and then well then the software broke down, it just got to big of a document for it, I was not aware of it. My thought was to make a pdf. of it when it was done. But I will have to do with writing the file name and the folder name so they will have to find the photos themselves. But if you can make a update so people in the future can just click the file name and the photo pops up to be viewed would be smashing. :) You already have a link box by the photo adding to the document so just make it able to link a word to a photo and we got it. :) (Yes I checked it is not possible to link a word to a photo.)

The letter coloring got a strange fill function suddenly? Look in to that. I pushed the letter color and it got the color bucket like when you fill an area, and then when I tried to write it remained the color i chose before not black I chose back to. When I press black it should go black when I start writing. Yes I double checked I did press the right button.

I've been using it a while now, but I'm still learning, and I like it so far, I'm sure there are much to learn still.

Looking at the old comments on here You must have been working hard to fix those bugs because I only get bugs when the document gets to big and my Java does not load when I was in looking for the linking options. I got a message telling me I had to approve Java and the darn thing didn't want to close. But in the end I won. :)

By the way I tried to make an accound to contact you at Bugzilla but it was not possible so I put it here instead and hope it finds you.

Have a nice day!

Very stupid and primitive apps. Better to use microsoft office

I love open office, I use them since years. We use it in our office to, always.

In many respects, Open Office is a boon and, of course, it's genuinely free. For straight word-processing it works exceptionally well BUT, once you start integrating images into documents, then it can be prone to all manner of corruptions and crashes. You only have to look at the OO forum to see how many problems people can encounter. I recently put together a set of complex documents with many, many images in the text - some locked inside frames, others 'floating'. All was well for a long time and then the corruptions started. Luckily, I ALWAYS kept a backup of every document at the end of every day so I could usually CTRL C and CTRL V to copy images back into place. Gradually, I found the OO crashed within minutes of loading, irrespective of what I was working on. Clearly, something gets reset in the profile or innermost parts of the program. Finding these can be a nightmare unless you're a real 'techy'. On the forum I've seen the advice "the problem is in your computer" which is no help at all unless some sort of pathway or debugging tool is built into the software to help non-technical users solve issues. I also found that updated versions could make matters worse, so I uninstalled the most recent version and went back a couple of versions. Quite often, the only solution to serious issues is to uninstall and reinstall and that is NOT a good way to promote any program. So - Open Office Writer is fine for basics, but I avoid it for anything complex which involved images.

Enough functionality for most people, and free. Makes up for it being a slightly lesser product.

I know it's free, but at least make it good. there so many bugs with this software that you don't get when using Microsoft office. For example, there is a bug where you can't paste images, and where your images suddenly disappear. These are only some of the very annoying bugs that cause a nuisance when using this software

I won't be using Open Office again, but it's not terrible.

It seems to have a problem formatting many of my documents and it's crashed/frozen several times and I have only used it about 10 times.

I did manage to create a few documents, but I think I will stick with Apples own iWork apps.

I don't want to be too harsh, because it's a free service. It's just not good enough to rely on for work.

I use this for all my story writing and I love it! Although not as advanced at Microsoft Word, it still has it's virtues! :)

Its a free product you can download with only one condition - you need an internet connection. Perfectly replaces many other office software when in need, and you dont have to pay for anything

One thing I found really fantastic about the OpenOffice applications is that it is readily available and downloadable from the internet and to think it offers the same features that one has to pay for in other products. You can have the word, presentation, spreadsheet, database, drawing and reviews. I can readily make charts, tables and graphs. I can easily come up with reports, memos and newsletters. I can make presentations almost instantly.

The icons and buttons you need are present in the interface. As in it's like right before your eyes. You do not need complicated keyboard character sequences. There are also built-in templates for letters and other documents. OpenOffice has a very lightweight design, requiring very low system resources for it to power up.

This is definitely a necessity for all computer users. If your office has it, then you're office document needs are all covered.