Microsoft Office exce: open office sun office?  

Lets put in simple...Excel is an ocean...Open office and other offices are just a pond of water....there is no comparision at all...

Hi, i had used both Openoffice and Microsoft Office to the latest version. I'm a user of Microsoft office for the past 12-13 years since Office 97. One thing i had to say is, never do compare Openoffice applications with those in Microsoft Office suite. Openoffice had a way long to go to reach MS Office in many areas. My personal opinion is i will never recommend Openoffice for any professional use. Some Excel sheets prepared in MS Office if loaded in Openoffice and rendered poorly and sometimes weirdly. So, it cannot be advised as a complete replacer for MS Office.

Because Microsoft is a commercial software developer, they takes more pain in developing more and more features which helps them attract more customers. Openoffice is a free open source suite where several developers from different parts of the world spares their freetime to input their own code and spent time for research and debugging. So, it is normal openoffice would take more time to reach MS Office which is a completely dedicated project by a group of programmers at Microsoft.

The popularity of MS Office on Linux and even in Macintosh shows the demand and usage of the product worldwide. If Openoffice is anyway better than MS Office the time is already exceeded for openoffice to hold over a large marketshare and userbase. But the leading of MS Office clearly tells users are ready to pay for a product which they cannot get free in every functionality. Lets hope Openoffice will improve. Till that time i will keep giving bucks to MS.

I myself prefer MS office, one of the main reasons is most of the files you do work on to convert them to the other free office programs, just doesn't work out to well. You always seem to have to redo the project. This also poses the same problems when you convert from the free ones to MS office.

Another reason is all the features you have with MS office, doesn't compare to the the free ones. Sun office I have not tried though. So I can't say to much about it.

Openoffice I tried using when I was in college, thing was it always had to be converted to MS office because that is what the school ran.

For personal use if you any of the free ones would probably work well. If your looking for the professional look MS office is the one I choose.

I've been using Openoffice for a while and it seems do the job well. I think the latest version of Openoffice has more comopatibility with MS office suites. So if you are just using it for your college stuff go ahead and try it.I think Ms office is too pricey for just a small requirement it does not do justice on you as a student.