Open Office

No, Microsoft invented Microsoft Office for that purpose.

Now, Mr. B, just take your meds and go back to your room before the Blue Meanies get you.

It's clear whom you serve, Mr. Opium.

I serve NightBringer, Lord of Darkness. Whom do you serve, mortal?

I serve burgers-n-brats on some weekends.

Do they come with waffle fries? I love waffle fries.

No fries, beans with chopped onions, dash of seasoned salt, little beer and one whole pepper on top, smokes for about 3 beers. No need to rush it.

Be right over!

May it also mean "burgers-2-brats"?

Yes, always.

On a side note, wasn't MS Excel a derivative of VisiCalc, I think they purchased it, but that's hard to believe because of the secrecy of Apple operating systems and how they (Apple) frowned upon third party developers. VisiCalc was an apple spread sheet, at least that what I learned off of in the 80's.

VisiCalc was written FOR Apple computers originally, but not by Apple.

I understood that VisiCalc was the basis for excel

VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet.

Then, IIRC, in no particular order, came:

SuperCalc, Lotus 123, Quattro, Excel.

And probably another 1/2 dozen. I think Excel was the last entry chronologically.

Thanks,

still the way MicroSoft and Apple have been 'stealing' or taking advantage from others, including each other, ^{Apple from Xerox, and then Microsoft from Apple on the Windows apps} my original post of was Excel a direct derivative of VisiCalc?

Maybe two Masters' Servant - if my suspicion turned wrong?

Ask your Masters.

Just what did you find dreadful about it? Was it too much like Office1997, and did not have the convoluted Office2010 'change for the sake of change' with no improvements in it's user interface? Where you have to use F1-help to find where the hell they put the document control menu items you knew by memory of their location.

I was forced to use MS Office at work, I would use Open office to read in a word file that had become corrupt in MSoffice, and repair it to continue work.

That and the bugs in STYLEs, HEADINGs, TABLES and TOC generation.

I'm guessing you like MS Win7/8 OS, and it's obfuscation of the file directory.

To each his own. But then I like DOS, which is stolen from CP/M.

MS stole or purchase every idea they integrated, and they still produce a horrible OS that has done nothing new for the human interface. Still don't have voice recognition integrated, or eye tracking input.

What they did do, that was great was making an OS that could use any hardware platform based on IBM PC knockoffs.

I am not so advanced as you are and my needs are very modest.

Only every copying /pasting ends in the pc hanging up then follows "document recovery" process. Cannot make a sum of a column numbers in a table. Little things like that which MS Office makes superbly.

I don't know how integrated java is with openoffice, but I recommend down loading the latest version of this from the Oracle site to see if this fixes your problem. I've seen the same issue in calc vs excel for summation, it just works differently sometimes.

Or do as NIGH has (see #7 in this tread), and download LibreOffice via the link he provided. I just tried this and will see how it works. Looks like the complaint of the development team was the control that Oracle was dictating.

There is also KingSoft, but they want $69 USD for a copy, and it's based on the openoffice code.

I liked your post. GA.

I use Open Office at home.

My only complaint is that it takes a long time to open. Otherwise it's fine.

Otherwise, I still prefer it to the crap that the richest man in the world sells, which is prone to fail and way too expensive.

With his money, you'd think Bill could offer software that was a working product when released and one that didn't crash and create havoc on unsuspecting users.

I used to hate how long it took for Open Office to start. Somewhere along the line with newer distros I made the switch to Libre Office. As someone else stated, it is a fork of Open Office. I don't know if Libre office starts faster or if I just ended up with faster machines. Bottom line, I no longer have a long wait for it to start.

My favorite was Word 97. Now that Open Office upgraded to Libre Office and Word downgraded to this cloud 365 stuff it is about a tie. Both have good features and both have drawbacks. Only one has expense as a drawback.

I hate the way some of my VERY USEFUL Word 97 macros will not run under the 365 cloud. After hours of Googling I finally gave up. There were commands in my macros that just can't be supported in the cloud downgrade.

Hi Bruce,

You said "only one has expense as a drawback". I guess since I just registered a copy of MS Office today, I can add another drawback to the list. Loss of privacy!

I've used openoffice.org for years and now LibreOffice, but whatever the secretary wants to use is fine with me. I don't even really care that it was $109.00. What I was appalled about, was the personal information that Bill wanted in order to register the program.

"... some of my VERY USEFUL Word 97 macros will not run under the 365 cloud"

Gutting their feature sets is yet another Microsoft hallmark.

Really, I think the only thing keeping Microsoft going is sheer momentum. They're not innovators and never have been; they buy others' ideas in the form of acquisitions and put their name on them. Were Microsoft a new company introducing their products today? They wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in Hell. Sheer momentum, and what is momentum? Inertia in motion.

Part of the reason it 'takes so long to open' is that it does not 'pre-load' on bootup like MS Office.

Gates realized that everyone has gotten used to the slow bootup of Windows(1), and decided that ALL MS products would take advantage of this and pre-load into memory during that time, so that they would come up 'quickly and effortlessly' for the sucker- er user.

LibreOffice, the fork of Open Office that gained significant steam after Orical bought Sun and decided to give a cold shoulder to the OO.org comunity, loads much quicker than OO.org

Notes:

1) In the way someone can 'get used to' the constant irritation of heat rash, bed sores, or leeches chewing through the skin.

I installed Libre yesterday, and having it load on system boot was one of the install options. I did not select that. I did do a quick test of startup time of OO vs Libre, 20 seconds and 8 seconds (3.2 GHz single core running WinXP).

Switching to MS Office 2010 from the earlier version made me want to choke the life out of Bill Gates. Now, I just hate him with the white hot fury of a thousand suns.

Nothing new or better, everything was just shuffled and hidden from view. Come on people, you hid spell check? Spell Check that everyone uses, and they hid it!

Oh, but wait. Office 365 is subscription so you don't even get to own it when it's forced on you.

Ya but, it has that "ribbon" thingy. Look at how much more productive you are with this.

*winces*

Ow, be careful there, you overloaded my sarcasm detector and it blew up in my hand.

While you're hatin' on M$, howtogeek (and many others) has a nasty article about all the malware in the Windoze app store. Apparently, to get their app numbers up, they paid people by the app and reviewed/tested them very very lightly. The results, as expected. http://www.howtogeek.com/194993/the-windows-store-is-a-cesspool-of-scams-why-doesnt-microsoft-care/

From the article ...

"While doing fact-checking to verify this article, we've discovered the problem is even deeper than we had initially imagined. Within half an hour we managed to find fake paid versions of Adobe Flash Player, Firefox, Pandora, IMDB, Candy Crush Saga, Wechat, WhatsApp, uTorrent, Picasa, Bluestacks, Minecraft, Spotify, Google Hangouts, Picasa, Clash of Clans, Blender 3D, and a lot more."

Not only are customers being burned, but so are the organisations who own these trademarks, by fostering distrust of the genuine articles. "How do I know this version of Blender 3D isn't a really a trojan like the last time I downloaded it? Maybe this is where they got it. How would I know? I'm just an ordinary person, not an effing security expert!"

The organisations who own these trademarks should pool their resources and haul M$ into court for harbouring these knockoffs. As money is the only thing Microsoft truly values, hitting them where it hurts - deep in their very deep pockets - is the only way to get their attention, and this is exactly what Microsoft would do if the tables were turned. Imagine Microsoft's response were a malware-packed MS Office knockoff to show up suddenly in Google's Play Store. Well, Microsoft, I'm here to tell you that that sword cuts both ways.

I have not been here for so long, gone from Electronics related work to pushing a weld gun around some huge chunks of metal, I hear its called welding...

Ok, Flash player, Blender3D, firefox are all free, and a few of the others (or are most of them/all free)

Blender - http://www.blender.org/

Open Orifice I have stopped using, but it has been replaced with LibreOffice.

I also have a copy of Kingsoft Office, which does a few things that I like better, I also have a fully paid up legal copy of Office 2010, because I prefer its version of Excel.....you won't get me on the cloud.....

I need all three.....

No created by StarDivision and acquired by Oracle by acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Oracle made it open software and renamed it. Oracle gave it to Apache. LibreOffice is just a spin off of OpenOffice and it's open source software.

Did not know there are many other "Offices" around.

Dedicated about an hour today and empirically found how to sum in the "Open". Take my words back - in principle, is not so bad as I imagined.

It's all about learning curves. Just like driving different makes and models of cars, there's a 'settling in period' where things seem 'wrong' or 'missing' until you get used to the arangement. Gear selector on the steering column vs gear selector above the transmission, Hi-beam control under the left foot vs Hi-beam control on the turn signal stick, Wiper control on the dashboard vs Wiper control on the steering column, any change seems 'bad' until you develop the muscle memory for that vehicle.

One of the nice things about OpenOffice/LibreOffice is that the document, even it the native format, can be read by any text editor. It's basically an ASCII document, with Hypertext-style markup to indicate formatting, compressed with .zip to reduce the file size. (ASCII compresses really well under ZIP, and the compression/decompression routines are practically part of every OS these days.)

And none of them come with Red Staplers!* What are these people thinking!

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* obscure pop-culture reference.

At least it USED to be obscure, but since Swingline started making red staplers after the box office success of The Office, when before they were in 'any color you wanted, as long as you wanted black,' it would appear to have ascended from obscure status to Trope, or at least Meme.