Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2004 12:03 am Post subject: new user
hello everyone,
i am a college student and i was looking for a open source word processer that i could use for typing papers, opening documents my teachers send me etc. so far i like use neooffice but i just started to read a little more about it and was wondering if it is stable enough to just type and print genera word documents.
any other information you feel is important for a new user to know would be helpfull
Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2004 1:28 am Post subject: Re: new user
jlakser49 wrote:
hello everyone,
i am a college student and i was looking for a open source word processer that i could use for typing papers, opening documents my teachers send me etc. so far i like use neooffice but i just started to read a little more about it and was wondering if it is stable enough to just type and print genera word documents.
any other information you feel is important for a new user to know would be helpfull
Well, as far as I have used it, NeoOffice/J will read and write MS Office documents almost completely accurately. You can type in it, and print to a reasonable degree. PDF conversion is still a wee bit flaky, as the files get pretty large, but it works. It doesn't quite yet look as Macish as MS Office, but in terms of functionality it is pretty close, with some obscure spreadsheet functions missing and I still haven't found the Track Changes feature. You can also set MS file formats as the default for saving documents.
One caveat: because NeoOffice/J is a memory hog, I'd recommend a mac with more than 256 MB RAM. I currently have 640 MB and I can now switch to other apps without the annoying spinning wheel (FWIW, Adobe Acrobat Pro 6 and Mozilla 1.7 are just as bad or even worse in term of memory).
Also, I would recommend sending papers that must have a specific layout in PDF. Word documents have a tendency to change lay-out if opened on a different machine and OOo generated documents are a bit more prone to this.
Joined: Sep 18, 2003 Posts: 434 Location: London, UK
Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2004 5:44 am Post subject: Re: new user
ovvldc wrote:
I still haven't found the Track Changes feature. You can also set MS file formats as the default for saving documents.
In 1.1. alpha 1 or 2, Edit>Changes. Turn on record if you want to track changes.
IIRC, it's in the same place for v0.8.4
Seemed fairly obvious to me!
When viewing other people's .doc or .sxw files, you can see their changes using the same menu options... such a security hazard as so few MS Office users seem to realise this, nyuck, nyuck!
To the original poster. If you are a concerned about using the current 1.1 builds which are labelled alpha, then you could use v0.8.4 until the 1.1 builds are out of the alpha stage. From my experience, v0.8.4 is very stable - I would even hazard that the latest 1.1 build is very stable (I haven't had a crash with it yet), but that could be because I am not stressing it enough with what I do. _________________ PBG4, 1.5GHz, SuperDrive, 1GB RAM, 128MB VRAM, 5400rpm 80GB HD, MacOS X 10.4.5
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