Apache OpenOffice Reviews

It is open source, low cost and highly capable! Open Office meets the requirement for any business team that wished to adopt document management software - Document generation, Spreadsheets, Presentation and even Database management - available for free or close to free, with no strings attached.
This package delivers value to any team and has several similar feature to populate and leading packages eg. MS Office.
Additional benefits includes the easy of obtain this software online, downloading and installing is easy both on Windows and MAC/Apple.
The system works excellent, and file formats are compatible with Google docs and MS Office, providing useful ways for working.

Main drawback is based on lack of real time sharing in the software. This will be a big requirement but today such drawback will be seen by many as a no no.
However, in my case, team member uses the popular drop box for sharing and collaboration and this work great for sharing files across the organization and having an organized form of file collaboration, via web or desktop.
So with an investment into a sharing platform eg. GDrive or Dropbox, one can have some good collaboration for open office files.

I love the point that this whole suite of project management is available for free. This feature-loaded software can compete with any paid software. New startups do not have big requirements, for them, this is a good start. Instead of paying extra for other software, We can use all the apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. for free with it. I also marked that unlike other products it does not require much RAM space.

The design of this software is amazing and robust but the UI is very verbose and dull. Even with other skins, the UI is not much appealing. Users coming from Microsoft Office will face some problems with mouse gestures. Also, cloud-based editing is missing here.

OpenOffice is excellent for a free and open-source office application suite. It offers all the essential core functionality of MS Office for the low low price of absolutely free! When I was a student and began my career I was using OpenOffice exclusively. If offers excellent capabilities right out of the box and is available even on Linux (my preferred operating system).

The lack of an online collaboration feature really is the only reason I had to switch away from this with my company. It's a much-needed feature, especially at this time, with everyone working remotely.

OpenOffice is fully compatible with Excel, Word, Powerpoint and Access solutions. Since this is a free solution, we are saving years of subscription costs for each employee. We also liked that Open Office is a light program.

We found issues with using the design in the following documents; DOCx, XLSx and PPTx. In addition, some VBA codes cannot be executed for certain APIs. Performance have some problems when uploading or working with elaborated Excel documents.

I have been a daily user of OpenOffice since its earliest versions. It has been THE alternative to Microsoft Suite for many years, and at no cost. Its vast number of developers around the world made it easy to find solutions to your problems in any language, and to install flawlessly a wide number of plugins.
But the situation changed in 2010 when concerns arose around the management of the project. Actually Apache is the owner of the project, and also if it is still free, I wouldn't recommend to spend a second on it.

Its development has not been updated in the last years, if not for minor updates, and community support is falling down. Also if a strong community is still existing, it has majorly moved to LibreOffice project, a suite which is the choice if you are looking for an (inexpensive) alternative to Microsoft.

Having to chose between OpenOffice and LibreOffice (both based on the original OpenOffice experience), there is very little to discuss: the second one is the only alternative you should consider.

I use Open Office for at least three hours every day—usually six. It is my go to word processor. I've written two novels and a collection of short stories with it. I was easily able to format and style the layout for the paperback and eBook files, so they conformed perfectly to Amazon's publishing requirements. Most folks don't know this is possible so they farm it out and pay dearly.

I didn't rate the support category above because I have never had to use it. Open Office works fine all the time. It's totally reliable and at a cost 100% less than MS Word.

Figuring out how to do headers and footers on alternating pages was a bit of a brain buster, but I got it. I'm sure it could be more intuitive.

The thing I like most about this product is probably the price. It's free and works well.
Outside of this though I really like the development that has gone into OpenOffice. When it started out it was hideous, limited and buggy. More importantly compatibility with Office programs (e.g. Word and Excel) was incredibly iffy and lagged behind each update. There was very little reason to use OpenOffice aside from the price. Nowadays it still doesn't look great (it's better though!) but it's such an improved experience in terms of the rest of those issues. For example Writer does everything most will want from Word and I actually prefer the way that it handles pasting images and formatting tables. There are now legitimate reasons to choose OpenOffice in terms of the programs on offer, and if opensource is appealing then I'd recommend it as the default work-suite.

OpenOffice suffers the same issues as most opensource software. It is written by people that have a very good understanding of coding and perhaps are not as good at UI or understanding how to ease relatively new users into an experience that differs to Word. OpenOffice generally works on the function over form approach and so the best that can be said of most of the offerings within is that they are "not hideous anymore" The UI is both stark in aesthetic and a little merciless for newcomers though; options are packed in and occasionally something requires a little more "under the hood" work to get going (e.g. getting the default list of recent documents to be longer can be a bit of a chore)

OpenOffice is drop-dead simple, light and efficient. Long are gone the days where I had to use expensive suites from proprietary software. As soon as I installed the OpenOffice suite I knew I wasn't coming back. To start with the software is as easy as to download the package installer from their site, run it and you will be done in no time. No spyware and sketchy offers, no subscriptions, just the tools you need. OpenOffice isn't as resource intensive as it's major competitor, so you can run it in machines with less powerful setups and still it will load quickly. I appreciate that Apache has made such a contribution, a simple, easy to use and fully compatible software for free.

Often I have to play a bit with the .csv encoding screen to see the file properly, but it's not really a big issue. It's often annoying the prompt window asking you to save in ".ods" format instead of the default .doc that it's better known, easier to identify and best if you are collaborating with people that use different tools.

- It's a full office suite - Word processor, spread sheet, drawings & diagrams, databases, etc
- Relatively easy to use & full featured
- Some items are available in OpenOffice that paid office suites are missing (e.g. Draw has more extensive diagram features than any equivalent in Microsoft Office
- Fully compatible with MS Office and other industry-standard formats
- Lots of help available online
- I believe plugins and language packages for LibreOffice come from OpenOffice (not 100% of this)

- It is not updated as often as LibreOffice
- The interface is quite outdated
- Sometimes it's hard to find the features - they can get buried in menus
- Some compatibility issues - e.g. Powerpoints are sometimes formatted unusually when you open them, but I believe this is improving