any good open office alternatives?

im playing with ibm's symphony now and was wondering if there are any other free open office alternatives or variations worth looking at?? just looking at something to offer customers who cant afford ms office but require decent compatibilty with it.. any thoughts??

thanks

 

OpenOffice.org

 

Here's a Thread on the topic:

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=225024

 

that topic was from 2008 i was not sure if things had changed since then. is OO still best out there, im also trialing ashampoo 2010, the ibm symphony was bloated and very slow it was a very large install and a lot of files i tried to open were not totally compatible like with openoffice directly. though it was nice to use..

 

office 2010 is actually pretty nice though limited. opens and runs VERY fast and so far has opened all the files i have thrown at it from excel and word. ill try some really large excel files here in a bit and see how it does.

well a few small issues with a couple really large excels it will cut off the rows past what it can display and does not warn you of this. also i had a few position errors with some really graphic word files. overall not bad.

how often does OO get updated. open office is on the newest 3.2.1 and OO is still on 3.2 other then the gui what are the real differences here between the two??

 

There's Oracle Open Office (formerly known as Sun StarOffice 9) which is good. It has gone up in price $ 49.95, but still very cheap, and completely compatible with MS Office applications.

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/open-office/index.html

 

okay so i removed ashampoo first few minutes looked promising. i could not even correctly paste some images into a text file. it simply left them blank and i also pasted in 7 numbered lines of text and it added 7 more pages worth and numbered each line seems to have a lot of bugs if you ask me. also the ashampoo office is a carbon copy of softmaker found here http://www.softmaker.com/english/ofw_en.htm

they claim full compat. with all file types from ms office but i found flaws.

so far i like the gui of the ibm one but def not the bloat. OO looks nicer as far as the toolbars go. wow not sure what to test next. is open office the go to for stuff like this i mean should i even look for something else?

 

If you like OpenOffice and wanna have a sort of tweaked version of it,with some extra options and faster startup times,check this 1:

Code:

http://go-oo.org/

It's a derivate of OpenOffice and also free....

 

I noticed this review today which you may find of some use:
http://www.trustedreviews.com/software/review/2010/06/14/5-Best-Free-Office-2010-Alternatives/p1