"Adrian C" wrote in message
...
On 13/01/2011 22:32, John wrote:
I am needing to get a laptop as I need to go away to do some work.

Has anyone got real experience of "Open Office" as an alternative to
Microsoft? It will make a difference to how I spend my budget if I don't
buy
"Office". On my desktop I use Office 2003 with Outlook - I will think of
this as my datum.


A teacher friend of mine trying to electronically submit applications
forms for new posts in OO/Linux, came rather unstuck when these forms
(common to a few education authorities) written in Word, demanded that the
entered text be placed inside word table cell 'form fields'.

These are supported in OO/Linux, but in there the fields had their own
rules on placement inside the table cells, which precluded their being any
space to actually enter the data directly and see that it had been entered
correctly. Messing about checking this took my friend hours, and there
were still some fields he could not submit.

Taking the form across to OO/Windows using the same release version of
Open Office, I found that these form fields were completable in a slightly
different way - double clicking brought up a dialog box with a contained
entry field, but not in the Linux version. Strange. Still a mess though.

In the end 'position is everything'. People are writing documents for
presentation, and the layout schema language and behavior for word
processors is obviously not as locked down universally as it is, say, for
different web browsers with standardised HTML.

If there is interchange expected with Office (or OO) users, then the only
real answer IMO is getting the same program yourself. Or, waste time....

--
Adrian C





Thanks for all the opinions. Really appreciated.