Which office program you use? One uses the standard Microsoft office which comes with a box or the OS you are using. The other is from Sun Microsystems called Open office. The main difference is Open office is free to use. You can download it. Downside is it uses ODT and PPS formats. Microsoft allows .doc format and standard powerpoint, ppt. Microsoft for some time did not allow crossover from the open sourced Open office. It may have changed now. Some years ago Birmingham City Council switched to Open Office saving thousands on licence payments to Microsoft. Both are so similar and both do the same job. The formats and layouts are the same. Creating documents is similar as well. Basically it is a "copy" of the other depending on the way you look at it. So with this do you use the free software or the one supplied from Microsoft in Windows? There is a poll for this to see what percentage uses what.
I use MS Office at home. It's great and I love to keep my notes in Onenote. It's one of the very few things that Microsoft actually got right. Having said that I hate using OpenOffice. I like Google Documents better.
Open Office isn't 'there' yet for me. I seriously considered switching at home about 18 months ago, but then Office 2007 got released, which, quite frankly, rocked my world. I like the idea of open source software, but quite often all you get is an unstable imitation of proprietary equivalents.
I use both but OO more than M$ Office these days, OO 3 is pretty good I think for most stuff and has support for Office 2007 file format too. I really didn't like Office 2007.
I agree. The new interface was like WTF when I first saw it, but when I thought about it, it was so much more logical and faster!!!
I only counted the software I use at home since that's all I have control over. Either way I don't have much use for office apps. A word processor is a word processor. So at home I use the Ubuntufied version of Open Office. Don't think there's any difference with the main line version other than it's in the Ubuntu repositories. In the past I've used Microsoft office, Microsoft Works, WordStar ... or StarOffice ... or whatever it was called, something else I can't remember the name of right now, OpenOffice and the Lotus Office thingy IBM had out years ago (Not the present OO based version). So far as I can see, they all do the same thing. They all look exactly the same. I'm not really sold on gimmicks like the "ribbon" toolbar. That sort of thing was being done on web pages as soon as Flash became a standard. I'll bet MS still filed a patent for it though. At the end of the day if I get my work done I'm happy. I've never really found office suits that exciting.
There was an article in a PC magazine in 2004 regarding this move. But it will have been one of these district area that done it for cost cutting.
Open Office at home and on my laptop, MS at work, do have to remember to save as doc. etc. when taking work in from home. OO will open ms formats though.
Must have been a short lived publicity stunt, they are definitely using Office at the moment. Shame really.