Free Office 2010 Beta Download

[Yatta]

http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/en/download-office-professional-plus/default.aspx

[Phayzon]

Awesome, I knew it was coming this month but wasnt sure just what day :)

[Hudson]

Or you could just link to Open Office ;)

Seriously though good thread call out. I'll have to check it out :)

[peoplessi]

As much as I appreciate free software, Open Office just doesn't cut it in real work environment use. Most companies have build the IT infrastructure around Office products, and going and meddling with OO isn't even possible in those cases. The interoperability of OO and Office is bad, in kind words.

For home use OO is great, or if your workplace happens to use OO. For anything else, Office is the better choice.

[Crosma]

As much as I appreciate free software, Open Office just doesn't cut it in real work environment use.Truth be told, 99% of things that people use Office for are wrong.

Writing a document that going to be viewed by the public? Use a desktop-publisher or proper typesetting (something like Lyx/LaTeX) tool. Your Word documents look like absolute crap and make your large enterprise company look unprofessional.

Sending me a specification? If you're not going to bother formatting it, just write it in text-file, you idiot! And Comic Sans is not an acceptable font for a professional document. Heck, no sans-serif font is. It's not "modern" to write documents in fonts that don't print well.

Data warehousing? Why people use Excel for this, I have no idea. It just makes the data difficult to work with. Actually, I do know why, it's because the interface is simple. Doesn't make it a good idea.

Holding a meeting? Prepare what you're going to say. Your PowerPoint presentation does not constitute preparation and has distracted you from thinking up worthwhile things to say. Now the meeting was a waste of time, and has put the team behind schedule without resolving any issues. Thanks a bunch!

Storing some information in a database? Yay, somebody knows how to use Access. Pity that we're going to have to rip the data out and put it in a different RDMS if we want to use it for anything practical. Should've used SQL Server. With all of the free tools from Microsoft, it's not much different than using Access anyway (if anything, the interface in SQL Server Management Studio is just more intuitive than Access in every way).

In other words, Office makes a lot of people's work more sucky than ever. Replacing it with OpenOffice wouldn't improve that, either.

The interoperability of OO and Office is bad, in kind words.Word isn't WYSIWIG (which is another reason why people shouldn't be using it for a lot of the things that they use it for), and OpenOffice gets it right as far as its meant to, based on the format. Opening a document in different versions of Word will often break it in similar ways to OpenOffice.

Excel compatibility isn't great though (although it improved a lot with OpenOffice 3.0), and it gets worse when you start comparing the others.

[peoplessi]

That has nothing to do with what I said. Glad you stopped by :) To add, I specifically mean structured documents, the incompatibility between OO and Office is there. So, using OO where majority of people use Office is foolish. Not to mention, Office happens to be the suite of choice for most companies.