A couple of months back I decided I was going to give Open Office another try. As I mentioned, I’d done this a couple of times before but never lasted longer than a week or so, mostly due to issues with Impress understanding Powerpoint files.
Well, I can report that Impress is dramatically better at this than last time I tried. In fact, it hasn’t burped for me once. I’ve opened uncounted presentations in the last two months, complete with animations, etc, without a single hitch. I’ve also created a number of presentations, shared them with the rest of the Powerpoint-using company, and not heard back a whisper of an issue. Top marks for this one Open Office!

To be honest, probably the only real issue is with Calc, the Open Office spreadsheet. In particular, around its Pivot Table equivalent (sorry, not sure what Open Office calls it). When I first opened an Excel sheet containing a Pivot Table, I was horrified. All my beautiful Pivots no longer worked. After my momentary panic, I discovered that Calc does indeed have a similar facility, it’s just seems to not be compatible with Excels. This is a bit of an issue, not just because I have lots of sheets with Pivots created in Excel (OK, I can recreate them) but because I need occasionally to share the pivots I create, and it seems to be broken going from Calc back to Excel as well. Not a show stopper, but one that hopefully will be addressed.

The other issue with Pivots is there seems to be no Pivot Chart equivalent. So, I’ve had to set my pivot up to what I think I want to look at, chart it, then if I change my mind and mess with the pivot, I have to redo the chart. Clumsy.

Still, not enough to make me uninstall Open Office, so my experiment goes on. Two months of using this in an organisation full of Office users with no major compatibility issues is not too bad in my opinion.

Note, I still haven’t sorted out what to do about Outlook. I need a replacement that deals with Exchange, including calendars. I sync my phone directly with the Exchange Server, so no need for ActiveSync support. Thunderbird + Lightning looks like it won’t be a solution until sometime after Lightning 1.0. Any suggestions?