Open Office.Org 3 RC1

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I don’t know if it’s possible to create a thread that will assist all of us in “figuring out” what the story is, but if you search The Lounge for “Open Office” you will get lots and lots of hits, some of which mention a couple of additional products that are unfamiliar to me.

I have been a user of the FREE Open Office product alternative to the Microsoft offering for quite some time. I have recently installed the Release Candidate (RC1) for Open Office Version 3 and the web page for Open Office (OpenOffice.Org) is here, including the “stable” 2.4.1 version as well as RC1 for version 3: www: OpenOffice.org – The Free and Open Productivity Suite.

In other threads there have been links to at least two other alternatives:

SourceForge.net: OxygenOffice Professional – Office Suite

Download Go-OO!

As I said, I don’t know what these other alternatives are and I’m continuing to try to wade through the web pages to figure it all out, but I will say to start that the Open Office RC1 for version 3 installed OK on my system and one quick test I did was to load a .DOCX file that had been a problem for me with previous versions. Version 3 seems to handle it fine.

You’re welcome to chime in and see if we can collectively assemble a Lounge “definitive guide” to these MS alternatives.

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Hi Al,
About a year ago I d/l OxygenOffice. About the only difference that I could tell was that this version contained more clip art and templates. Everything else seemed to be the same. The web site does say that this version supports VBA. To some I would think that this would be important.

Thanks to you I now know about Go-OO. I might give it a try just for the heck of it.

Another one that you might throw into the mix is from Google. Star Office. It is based on Open office. Just go to Google.com and click on more and look for google Pack. It is also free.
I tried it for awhile but went back to the plain Openoffice. I think it was just that I was used to it and new where everything was and did not want to go through the learning curve.

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Hi Al
My POST 731855 titled Open Office addressed this conumdrum, from the final deductios “others” are entitled to rebadge Open Office provided they value add in some way. I discover that the most common answer was to offer (at a price) support. The product at that time was version 2.4.1 but under a disguise. It is a pity there is not a warning notice on the Sun Microsystems site explaining the details.

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Al,

As I understand it, there are two main development branches of OOo (3 if you count StarOffice).
The basic downloads at openoffice.org (including 3.0RC1) are the “parent”. This is supported by Sun.
Go-oo.org is supported by Novell and is a branch which is less conservative in applying patches etc to the main app. This version had docx support and limited VBA support in Calc in its last stable release (and is the version I use at home) and has slightly reduced loading times.
StarOffice is the commercial version of OOo and includes support and some code that isn’t covered by the GPL license. Available free from Google (not sure about support if you get it this way)
OxygenOffice is built from the go-oo sources.

Complications include Lotus Symphony (free, based on OOo 1.1) and RedOffice (Chinese version) which both have radically different interfaces and other more local projects like BrOffice (in Brazil)

whew

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I thought it was more like…

Sun supports both StarOffice and OOo. The two versions being the commercial and freeware flavours. When you get the commercial StarOffice a part of the free Google Pack you are only getting the trial version of StarOffice and you’ll need to part with money to use it in the long run.

Not sure about Go-oo or OxygenOffice but they seem to be differently enhanced versions of OOo, rather than OxygenOffice being built on Go-oo.

Ken

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Thanks everyone for your comments and tutorials so far. What a complex web we have here – pun intended.

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