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ES: Netbooks, Open Office
I am thinking of buying a netbook. I will use it for websurfing, email, word processing, spreadsheets and, of course, CV programs: both practice and simulation. I know I will need an external CD drive to load MS Office and CV programs. What specs should I look for in a netbook? What other advice can you give me?
Does anyone here know anything about Open Office? Is it as good as MS Office? Is there full compatability both ways, i.e. using a MS Office document or spreadsheet in Open Office and using an Open Office document or spreadsheet in MS Office? Ditto for Word Perfect products?
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Norm Wattenberger: Re: Netbooks, Open Office
Open Office fails miserably at loading complex Word 2007 docs. But then MS can't even sell Word 2007 at the moment as they violated copyright law.
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Parker: Re: Netbooks, Open Office
> I am thinking of buying a netbook. I will use it for
> websurfing, email, word processing, spreadsheets and,
> of course, CV programs: both practice and simulation.
> I know I will need an external CD drive to load MS
> Office and CV programs. What specs should I look for
> in a netbook? What other advice can you give me?
The current crop of netbooks feature larger screens (usually 10.1") and larger more usable keyboards. Right now the bargains are those with Windows XP Home, which can be found for under $300 with a little careful shopping. These will likely be gone by summer, and new units will come with Windows 7 Starter, which looks to me, well, boring.
Of course, they will run Linux really well. :-)
> Does anyone here know anything about Open Office? Is
> it as good as MS Office? Is there full compatability
> both ways, i.e. using a MS Office document or
> spreadsheet in Open Office and using an Open Office
> document or spreadsheet in MS Office? Ditto for Word
> Perfect products?
I use OpenOffice extensively. As Norm mentioned, it can struggle with the formatting on complex Word 2007 (.docx) documents. They can usually be opened and read, but they may look pretty bizarre. However, it handles simple Word 2007 docs okay, and Word 97-2003 docs (.doc format) really well.
I've never had any problem using Excel spreadsheets with OpenOffice Calc, although the spreadsheets I normally use tend to be on the simple side.
Going the other way works fine. OpenOffice can save documents in .doc format (and spreadsheets in .xls) and these seem to work okay in any version of Office.
It is always a good idea to install the Microsoft TrueType fonts in OpenOffice. This is a free download from Microsoft. If either word processor does not have the appropriate font called for in a document, it substitutes something it thinks is close. This can wreak havoc with formatting and the overall look of the document.
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