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Peter Creasey
January 26th, 2009, 04:25 PM
Can anyone discuss what the tradeoffs are among the free office processing applications e.g. Lotus Symphony, OpenOffice, (and others?)?

Thanks for any opinions as to which might be more viable or advisable.

Judy G. Russell
January 27th, 2009, 09:08 AM
Can anyone discuss what the tradeoffs are among the free office processing applications e.g. Lotus Symphony, OpenOffice, (and others?)?There's a good series of comparison charts in this Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_suite#Comparison_of_general_and_technical_i nformation).

Peter Creasey
January 27th, 2009, 10:39 AM
Judy, Thanks! That indeed is a very good source of information.

Now if I can find someone who might have firsthand knowledge working with Lotus Symphony and OpenOffice for a hands-on type of assessments.

Judy G. Russell
January 27th, 2009, 11:24 AM
Now if I can find someone who might have firsthand knowledge working with Lotus Symphony and OpenOffice for a hands-on type of assessments.I've used OpenOffice and it's fine for everything I've ever wanted to do (mostly word processing). I have no experience with Lotus at all.

dgermann
January 28th, 2009, 02:09 PM
Hi--

I use OOo under Linux and WindowsXP and like it. I came to it from Ami Pro, and it was a steep learning curve, but I suspect it would not be anywhere near as steep if you came from Word.

I use it for word processing and spreadsheets, mainly, some presentation viewing.

Since it's a free download, pull it down and take a look. Look around the http://www.oooforum.org to see what kinds of questions, problems, and helps there are. Pretty robust community.

ndebord
January 29th, 2009, 10:18 AM
Can anyone discuss what the tradeoffs are among the free office processing applications e.g. Lotus Symphony, OpenOffice, (and others?)?

Thanks for any opinions as to which might be more viable or advisable.

Peter,

Another way to go which won't muck up your system is to try the open source portable apps suite.

http://portableapps.com/

Peter Creasey
January 29th, 2009, 01:34 PM
Peter, Another way to go which won't muck up your system is to try the open source portable apps suite.
http://portableapps.com/

N, Thanks for this info!

I scanned the info at the site you provided the link for.

Why do you feel that this approach might be more favorable for my system than, say, OpenOffice?

ndebord
January 29th, 2009, 09:48 PM
N, Thanks for this info!

I scanned the info at the site you provided the link for.

Why do you feel that this approach might be more favorable for my system than, say, OpenOffice?

Peter,

Less favorable in terms of capability than OO, but won't take up anywhere as much space, run as slow or insert itself in your registry.

OO is a good thing. Used it for some time, but found standalone apps to do what I needed and haven't revisited it for some time.

Peter Creasey
January 30th, 2009, 08:42 AM
Peter, Less favorable in terms of capability than OO, but won't take up anywhere as much space, run as slow or insert itself in your registry.
OO is a good thing. Used it for some time, but found standalone apps to do what I needed and haven't revisited it for some time.

N, I am obviously missing something.

How is it different from OpenOffice? Why will it not affect the registry? What do you mean "standalone apps"?

Thanks for taking the time to explain!

sidney
January 30th, 2009, 08:43 PM
Now if I can find someone who might have firsthand knowledge working with Lotus Symphony and OpenOffice for a hands-on type of assessments.

I just now downloaded Lotus Symphony, as IBM very recently released a Mac version of it. It is OpenOffice under the hood, so there should not be very much difference in speed and functionality. However, the choices of what to put in menus and toolbars and so on, the user interface, are very different. Since both are free, you can download and install both and see which style of user interface you prefer. As I mostly use word processing programs to be able to open documents I get from other people and perhaps fill out a form if I receive one in such a format, I can't really offer an informed opinion. I'm using LyX to write my thesis, which you don't want to even consider unless your documents contain things like
http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/7/b/a/7ba978d0aaf1aa70809d0577f9639431.png

Peter Creasey
January 30th, 2009, 09:33 PM
Sidney, A concern I have come to be aware of is that Lotus Symphony reportedly needs 512 MB of RAM which makes for a tight fit on the 1 GB Ram desktop.

Despite my IBM bias, I guess I am leaning toward OpenOffice.