OpenOffice.org 3.3.0

Rated 50/50 by xprotocalx at Oct 10, 2008

This is an excellent piece of open source software. It has certainly progressed since it's initial release like 7 years ago. Despite the quick-launch feature being a tad slow (perhaps on a slow machine) it's quite fast. There are many reasons to use this suite, I've picked to the I like the most: a) ability to export to PDF b) a free office suite that is backwards compatible with MS Office! 5/5

Rated 50/50 by sx66gns at Oct 11, 2008

The Best of the Best right here , International Standard is no small feat. Installed on more than 5,000 Machines since 2.0 without issue and with this release added support for big capitalist proprietary formats , amazing.

Rated 50/50 by molumen at Oct 12, 2008

The GUI has been updated since version 2 and is now much more friendly. I like it. Also, I specially enjoy the new extension system. Reminds me of the Firefox approach. Installing languages, export and import abilities, and many other things is very easy now!!

Rated 50/50 by DACWILSOL at Oct 13, 2008

Finally! OOo has done an excellent job with powering OO up to meet and surpass MS Office. This new version is everything I wanted and needed. The .docx imports are perfect. I did not have any trouble importing other file formats and the wizard is even better than before. On its own, OO has been easy to use and has simply the best. I use Mozilla Thunderbird for e-mail (PIM). The pdf import is another excellent feature of the program. By the time of this posting, I will officially uninstall MS Office student/teacher edition and use OO only. The way of the future.

Rated 50/50 by retpyrc at Oct 13, 2008

FYI, The website has just been updated, OpenOffice v3.0 is official now, enjoy

Rated 50/50 by Sven123456789 at Oct 14, 2008

Pretty damn good. Has everything i need except one small feature i get with Word (in Office XP)involving labels. I can type in an address to print on a standard envelope in word. Its under Envelopes and Labels in word. Thats about the only gripe. For the people who have any complaints about this. Are you nuts... If you work with old pc's like me, allot of them dont have a full Office product. This gives you a chance to put it on there and it works on older versions of windows. I would imagine the people who complain had some form of the newer version of a office suite already on there pc, but tried this for the heck of it and don't think its up to snuff. Name another free software package as good as this for the nay sayers....

Rated 50/50 by PagingDrLeoMarvin at Nov 11, 2008

OpenOffice is fantastic, I'll never use a Microsoft Office program again, ever!

Rated 30/50 by Ian C. at Dec 23, 2008

Really? Not ever? Imho this got less intuitive with version 3, but did speed up a bit. Enough for most people, but really can't hold a candle to MS Office.

Rated 10/50 by netean at Dec 24, 2008

rated 1 for being nothing but a minor bugfix (it's a .0.1 release) but insists you download and install the whole suite - Just sheer lunacy... can't they just develop a patching system or let you update certain components. When the download is 142mb each time it sure stacks up. Never mind how long it'll take to download this via dialup!

Rated 40/50 by testman@wimberley-tx.com at Dec 24, 2008

So, you think it opens slow, well you just need to make an adjustment to how much memory it uses. It is easy to do so, just go to the menu and choose, Tools, then Options, then Memory. Once there you change the number of steps to around 5 and then the number of objects to around 4 and most importantly, you change the number of Graphic Cache for use by Open Office to 64 MB, then hit OK and then close down Open Office, now reopen it, it should open a lot quicker. Love the program, keeps improving over time, but you got to know how to set it up so it is not a slug.

Rated 30/50 by robmanic44 at Dec 24, 2008

I use its big brother, StarOffice 9, and I'm not thrilled about it. It's definitely not superior to Microsoft Office. In fact, it will probably be uninstalled.

Rated 50/50 by bobad at Dec 24, 2008

Great office suite, free or not. I use the portable version from portableapps.org. I hate to bring up the "MS" word, but there will inevitably be comparisons. I do light documents and occasional spreadsheets, and it's perfect for me. I never want for more. My wife does more heavy duty work,including some honking big spreadsheets, and she gets along fine with it too. It launches a little slowly, but you get used to it. The only thing I really miss about using MS Office is the Document Handling, specifically OCR scanning directly into the word processor. But I use my printer's OCR just fine.

Rated 50/50 by mjm01010101 at Dec 25, 2008

netean So don't download it then.

Rated 50/50 by cgcrawford at Dec 26, 2008

Testman - thank you for the information on how to adjust the memory to speed up the program opening. Why are these settings not the default?

Rated 40/50 by netean at Jan 14, 2009

superb if you run linux, just above average for windows users. Linux users get incremental upgrades (if they have apt-get style package updating). Windows users have to download the entire suits for even slightest bug fix. It's slow in windows and looks hideous. MUch more visually appealing if using ubuntu et al.

Rated 50/50 by aloishammer at Jan 14, 2009

@Aegis69: Hate to point this out, but if you think back to XPSP2 and previous, there's a required download before you can use Windows/Microsoft Update: it's Microsoft's own in-house binary delta patch applier. It was written to make patches much smaller. Crack open any HotFix, Service Pack, or any other kind of patch, and you'll see entire DLLs, EXEs, and the rest-- sometimes multiple versions for multiple SP revs. Binary deltas? Missing in action. I haven't seen binary deltas since RTPatch on DOS-- and I once saw someone use RTPatch for Windows.

Rated 40/50 by DudeBoyz at Jan 14, 2009

Still a great suite. But this wacky long RC to Beta to Release stuff takes forever.

Rated 40/50 by Aegis69 at Jan 14, 2009

I have to agree with netean, can't they build a patch system for this application? Getting sick of 140meg downloads every time.

Rated 50/50 by gehtnix at Jan 14, 2009

excellent free office suite that comes with everything you need. ok, not really "everything", but still unbeaten by MS, no matter what they have tried and will try. i rate it 5 for being being open source, not "only" being freeware.

Rated 50/50 by craigun at Jan 14, 2009

This program just keeps on improving. Thanks for the memory tip Testman!