Re: WTF: Free parts database inquiry

On Jan 8, 10:45 am, seymour-shabow <seymour-sha...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
goatdan wrote:

Essentially, Open Office is a free, open source editing program that
has pretty much one of everything that Microsoft has in their Office
suite, and you can import anything from MS Office and convert it very
easily. You can learn more about it and download it at
OpenOffice.org, I believe. If not, just look for Open Office in
Google. It's quite outstanding. The Excel-like database tool I
believe is called Calc, and works just great.

Wordpad comes with windows and is more than enough word processing power
for anyone in need. The majority of people don't need more than
openoffice offers or various other freeware/open source programs
offer..... microsoft's marketing is so good though that people who do
not know anything about computers beyond the basics think that's what
they have to get.

98% of users type and 98% get annoyed with the automated grammer check,
outline formatting, etc. in office.

-scott CARGPB#29

While I agree with you mostly, I think that what Microsoft really has
going for them is just that the vast majority of the installed
userbase uses their products. At work, I use Office. If I work on
something at home and need to send it out, it has to be in Office
format. At my last job at a University, I used office. Professors
only accepted papers (through online methods, which is common now) in
Word format. We had actually tried to get the college to switch to
Open Office (including installing it on all the computers there) but
no one used it. Office is just the standard, except for certain small
groups that still use WordPerfect. If you ever want to really feel
disgusting about how much you're spending on programs like that,
install on a computer both full versions of Office and WordPerfect.
Bleech.

I had never used Open Office in that setting only because no one else
did. And that's where Microsoft's marketing really comes into play.
Unless we can somehow get a bunch of big businesses to decide to
conduct business cheaper using a program like Open Office, we'll all
keep using it and buying it.

Having said that, Office 2007 which I use at work is actually quite
the nice step above the last level of Office, and I really quite enjoy
it. Open Office is great for what it is, but Microsoft has something
good going with this latest version...
.

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