Open Office for Windows XP?

If you like Word Open Office should be no problem. I ditched MS Office for it a long time ago. It’s pretty close to a clone of Word.

Thanks!

The Open Office suite is going to be a huge improvement over word perfect. And chances are if you were living with that then you don’t need the full MS office and it would be a waste for you spend money on it. Open Office does everything a home user could need and more. Also Open Office 3 is on the horizon, look into the beta for it if you are feeling adventurous.

I’m another Open Office advacate. Everything that’s in word is in open office. It helps that you can read and save Microsoft Office formats. I rolled Open Office out at work to all my users and it saved the company $27,000 easy.

I use it at work and home. It’s great.

This is the second open office question in a few days. RAWK ON! So go for it. It’ll be the best $0 bucks you ever spent on software! I don’t even install MS Office on anyone’s computer anymore and every college or high school student or parent I talk to I always recommend it. Their favorite part isn’t that it’s free. It’s that it works. On XP I’ve had OO crash on me twice. Both times I think it was my fault though. =) MS Office. Have you ever not had to recover a document?

sidenote: I don’t think MS is evil. I just don’t like their products

Open Office is good but like MS Office I find to be too bloated for my needs. I personally use Abiword, and even then I’m more likely to use Google Documents, but I don’t do very much. I like Abiword because it’s fresh and lightweight, and Google Docs because it lets me save into multiple formats, edit anywhere with an internet connection, and allows me to share documents and such. But both lack the multitude of features that OO or MS Office can provide sadly, but then if they did have all those features they wouldn’t be so lightweight would they? Open Office is a very good alternative to Word, and although integration between the two via document formats is bettering on the OO side (opening and saving .doc files accurately) MS aren’t making it any easier, but that’s the same with all non-MS products :)

@Skyrail Unfortunately the problems that Open Office has with processing back and forth from MS Office is due to the fact that MS sucks at adhering to ODF which was approved back in 2006. Instead they continue to push the OOXML format that is proprietary to them. Amusingly enough though they have said that they were adopting the ODF format earlier this year. They also said that back in 2006 as well though. Hopefully the format wars will end soon enough though, and with a great deal of countries pushing Linux instead of Windows now (especially in developing nations like South Korea, Brazil and India) I think we’ll see a much different MS in the future.

Aye, I recognise that (“MS aren’t making it any easier”), which is a huge shame, because I’m not too bothered about them having proprietary software, but it would be lovely if they adhered to open source file format standards like ODF, because that is small but so useful. But I suppose if MS can lock users into their products then they will do so :(

Like the Mac commercial where he’s on the throne!

All the above is true. Plus, OpenOffice reads old Word files BETTER than Word itself does.

Microsoft’s next Office will be free for home users, but OpenOffice is almost perfect, right now.

@Kraigmo Thanks, and welcome to Fluther! I’ve been using OO since shortly after I asked this question and I love it!