Originally Posted by
HiYoSilver
Apples and oranges. Gnumeric is only spreadsheet. OpenOffice is a suite similar to MsOffice and imports/exports well all MsOffice file types.
Biggest changes with 2 are
1. oasis file format, i.e. open file sharing format for greater compatibility. On track to be the html standard for applications. First suite to meet this new standards. More coming next year.
2. spreadsheets are now full length and Excel sheets are now on one sheet instead of split over two sheets.
The OO ver 2 right now is beta, but expect full general release soon.
If you want more details, see the information about the parent Software -- StarOffice 8.
http://www.sun.com/software/star/sta...e/features.jsp
It's only $69 and comes with 60 days of free support.
The ability to export to PDF from the menu is really cool. Here's a SO vs MsOffice quick comparison. 52 million users. Notice how Microsoft is now scrambling to improve MsOffice because of this competition? Did you see how Mass is replacing MsOffice with OpenOffice?
http://www.sun.com/software/star/sta...itive_view.jsp
Other things that would be good to add to sheet comparison is:
1. type of battery used: LA, Ion, Nimh, etc
2. weight
3. mount: bar, head, both
If you are looking at a free or cheap Office suite, you should be aware that SUN was bought by Oracle, and that OpenOffice development is now controlled by Oracle.
Most of the developers have left and forked OpenOffice to create a new codebase, LibreOffice (Free or Liberty office).
One comparison:
http://www.infoworld.com/d/applicati...e-716?page=0,2
LibreOffice is now what is being shipped as standard by some of the major Linux distributions in place of OpenOffice, and already the shipping version has some improvements over the new OO version.
General feeling in the open source community is that LibreOffice will improve at a faster rate in future than OO.
You can download LbreOffice from
http://www.libreoffice.org/ at no cost.
Either one of them are a good choice, and work very similarly.
As for the StarOffice variant of OpenOffice, I've never bothered with it. Oracle now provides paid support at various levels for OpenOffice, so I would suspect that StarOffice will go away given that Oracle owns SUN.