<p>What are the differences? i've always used MS Office on my old PC, but recently got a Mac for college and am hearing about this OpenOffice idea...???????</p>
<p>Open office is just a free alternative to Microsoft Office. Its not as feature rich as MO, but can handle pretty much every file type you’d work with in MO. It has applications that handle documents, powerpoints, and spreadsheets just like in MO. Open office obviously doesn’t have the support that Microsoft Office has since its freeware, but for the simple tasks usually done in any office suite (writing an essay, notes, quick presentation, etc), you’re probably not going to need it anyway. </p>
<pre><code>You could also look at Neo-Office or IBM’s Lotus Symphony which are pretty much the same thing except made by different companies. If you don’t want to spend the cash on MO, try them out first and see if you like them. Alot of people get by with them and are really happy so i’d give them a look.
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<p>I was just wondering which one is better, sounds like MS Office would have more stuff on it. My dad says he’ll get me whatever it is I need for college on my computer, so I’m not worried about finding it free. (however was looking for college student discounts on MS Office, so I’m working on that)</p>
<p>Yeah just go ahead and get Microsoft Office '11. Its the best choice anyway. you won’t have any issues with it, so the main issue now is just where to find it the cheapest. That link your school gave you at $80 seemed to be about the cheapest i’ve seen it.</p>
<p>OpenOffice.org has worked fine for all my school work. Just be aware that default margin settings may be a little different (eg. OO.o defaults to 0.75" margins on all sides, whereas MS Office defaults to 0.75" top/bottom, 1.25" left/right).</p>
<p>Also, all the action is in LibreOffice these days ever since Oracle basically killed off the OpenOffice.org development community.</p>
<p>In any case, I think it’s a $80 worth saving, not to mention that you’ll be supporting a good cause. Why should you have to pay for software and be subject to the limitations that the developers put when it costs nothing to reproduce?</p>
<p>The difference between MO and OO/LO? About 200 bucks. 
Seriously, though, you have a Mac, which means that you can’t get things like Publisher or Access, but you probably wouldn’t use those anyways. I use both, but OO/LO is more convenient, since it’s a single application.
Also, LO gets bugs fixed far more rapidly than Office</p>
<p>^Yeah like excelblue said, they’ve pretty much totally stopped development of Open Office so they’re not updating the software anymore. Libre Office is the way to go it seems on the free side.</p>
<p>Well I found a good deal on MS Office so I got that, and I’ll download OpenOffice for free as a backup in case something would happen with MS Office.</p>
<p>Thanks for everyone’s input!</p>
<p>Use Libre Office, Open Office isn’t being updated anymore</p>
<p>You should really consider getting LibreOffice, because I hear the development staff behind Open Office were killed by an oracle (?)</p>
<p>The story of LibreOffice is actually kind of complicated. It’s actually started years ago.</p>
<p>Even when OpenOffice.org was backed by Sun, licensing issues and politics meant that there were two branches of OO.o. The official branch worked but had relatively poor performance and polish compared to go-oo.o, which contained several patches made by various contributors that were unable to be included in the official branch for non-technological reasons. After a while, most of the major Linux distros threw their back behind go-oo.o, which was still branded as OpenOffice.org.</p>
<p>Then, Oracle bought out Sun, and they imposed unacceptable terms on the future of the OpenOffice.org project. Tensions have already been building with the OO.o / go-oo.o conflict, but Sun kept things alive. This was the breaking point, and everyone who originally stayed with the official OO.o branch revolted, removed all the branding, and threw their backs behind those who developed go-oo.o. This rebranded version is known as LibreOffice.</p>
<p>Now, keep in mind that while you have MS Office on Windows and Mac, it was not available on Linux/Solaris/BSD. Linux distributions used to ship go-oo.o, but after the incident, all the major ones quickly switched to LibreOffice.</p>
<p>At this point, OO.o pretty much died: most of the developers and almost all of the leadership left, their primary userbase dropped out, and Oracle was the only company backing it. Furthermore, something like OO.o is quite incompatible with the way Oracle does business. The result: it’s dead.</p>