I write good business letters; often for other people; sometimes a printed letter gets more attention than an email. The envelopes, formatted and printed in Open Office, are proper business envelopes. At a time when we are working more from home more, Open Office is a sensible alternative to expensive word processing, and spreadsheet programs. I do my company books with an Open Office spreadsheet that I designed myself. It calculates income, expenses, sales and income taxes etc. as I go. When it's time to do taxes, the numbers are all there at the bottom.

I use Open Office for at least three hours every day—usually six. It is my go to word processor. I've written two novels and a collection of short stories with it. I was easily able to format and style the layout for the paperback and eBook files, so they conformed perfectly to Amazon's publishing requirements. Most folks don't know this is possible so they farm it out and pay dearly. I didn't rate the support category above because I have never had to use it. Open Office works fine all the time. It's totally reliable and at a cost 100% less than MS Word.

Figuring out how to do headers and footers on alternating pages was a bit of a brain buster, but I got it. I'm sure it could be more intuitive.

Easy to switch from Microsoft Word and not get lost. Functionality is basically the same.

Moving documents from Word to OpenOffice always ruins the formatting. Essentially, you have to start in OpenOffice and finish here unless you have extra time to reformat everything.

My overall experience, until it seemingly somehow led to my computer now being unable to start, has actually been great. I've been using OpenOffice for many years and never really had a problem until the last few months, as the crashing has been increasing to be more and more frequent. I really like the user interface and features overall. It's been a wonderful program until just recently.

I've been using Open Office Writer and Calc for years. I like the features and user interface. Some features are better than features found in Microsoft Word. For example, you can add multiple columns to a table at once; this is not in Word and it's very convenient and helpful feature when working on a table, and I find changing the text from all caps to no caps etc. easier for some reason in Writer although they are almost identical. Almost everything that is in Word is in Writer. Besides the options of the search function, I have never felt like there was a feature that is in Word that I needed and didn't have in Writer. In Writer, the one issue is that Search feature is very difficult to learn to use. If you want to do anything slightly complicated, you have to go learn specifically how to enter it and that can take some time digging online. I have never figured out how to replace two paragraph marks with one, as an example. I do like Microsoft Excel better than Calc because I find it a lot easier to figure out how to write functions using the prompts in Excel than in Calc; I find trying to do more complex functions in Calc extremely frustrating and infuriating.

This latest version has been crashing a lot. In the last few weeks, I've lost a lot of work. When it crashes, you can lose up to 15 minutes of writing, depending on when it last auto-saved. This has been painful as I've had to re-write some important documents that I had already gotten mostly written. What happened just now is I included a word - a science word - that was not in the dictionary. I right clicked on the word and added it to the dictionary so it would not be underlined as a spelling error. The program hung. I panicked as I had just written a lot so I clicked save. The program froze - and I lost 3 documents. But this time, I could not shut OpenOffice down. Not even by going into Task Manager and clicking End Task would it shut down. I waited probably 45 minutes and then shut down the computer so that it would terminate OpenOffice. Now my laptop won't boot up and goes to a black screen. Now, maybe my laptop has an issue. This could be the case. But, I resent the fact that, whatever issue my laptop may have had, OpenOffice interfaced with it in such a way that now I don't have access to my computer anymore. Now I have to go buy a usb drive and put Windows 10 Installation on it and then troubleshoot my PC. OK, so I don't know if this was OpenOffice's fault - but, it was the only unusual thing that happened before my laptop died. Also, the fact remains that the program has been crashing CONSTANTLY, on both my pcs, for the smallest things. That is very concerning.

I am very happy overall with using this program. It is a complete and lightweight program that allows you to do almost everything it promises

It's easy to download, it's a lighter program than those on the market

it is difficult to recover data, lost due to PC malfunction, not previously saved

I depend on it daily for writing and spreadsheets and am not disappointed! Cannot beat the free price.

It does everything -- i mainly use word processing and spreadsheets -- without getting wrapped up in Microsoft's intrusive and expensive software. I can open and save as Word, can open CVS, etc. Easy and effective

What's not to like, except they leave phone apps to private developers and i do wish i could search and replace tabs and other formatting symbols, but nobody's asked this since Microsoft Works in the 1990s!

I switched from MS Office to OpenOffice and I must admit, I feel no difference. It is a good thing, though, as Microsoft Office is rather expensive, while OpenOffice is completely free! I would expect a significant quality drop between the two, but I have not found one. I can only recommend everyone to switch over as it has saved me hundreds of dollars so far.

It is good at doing what it advertises. It is a full on suite of programs on par with the mainstream alternatives. I was especially surprised with how easy it was to switch from Microsoft products to OpenOffice and how little difficulty there was.

Sometimes it lags a bit. It feels like it has some optimization issues. Larger actions make my computer lag more than it ever happened with MS Office suite. I also noticed some issues with layouts and formatting - it just won't behave as I would expect it to.

It is a great free alternative to Office and is good if you need to install on lots of machines.

It is able to be used to view and modify existing .doc files and .xml files. It is completely free and is easy to download use and distribute.

It is a pretty boring visual layout and the latest office product file formats do not always work.You must save the files locally.

Overall we had a good experience. It's a comprehensive program. I prefer OpenOffice over MS office.

OpenOffice is a versatile Office Suit, less complicated, light, and professional. The setup is done in no time and it loads quickly. Helpful for beginners.

The interface is not that unique but somehow it doesn't matter. The search option isn't that great. Not easy to recover corrupted files.

Overall experience is very good while using this application. Needs some more features like high cost applications.

Open source is the one of the great benefit they are offering. Good option among other same category apps. Easy setup. Cost saving application

More templates to be added for each file type. It feels like something is missing as compared to other high cost applications. Rest all good for this application.

I had Microsoft Office for many years, Due to business slowing down, we had to rely on another software, Apache OpenOffice was just as good a software as I had used.

I like this software, any documents made from another compatible software, will be able to export it to this cost efficient just as well.

lack of templates for useful documents to use for implementing a plan. I didn't see much of word art offers

We found OpenOffice years ago when we were first starting out and needed an alternative to spending thousands of dollars on Microsoft Excel. We use this daily for in house use and when working on projects for customers. Because so many people use Excel we simply work on OpenOffice and reload to Excel with very few changes necessary. This software saves us time and money and to continue interacting with other businesses seamlessly.

This software is very user friendly and meets the word processing and spreadsheet needs of our company. We use it daily for word processing, article construction, publication writing, and all of our spreadsheets. To say it is amazing does not do this software justice, I mainly use these two features but know it does far more, such as Drawing, Presentations, Calculator and Illustration. Co-workers use some of those other included features, but my work keeps me occupied otherwise. The word processing and spreadsheet program sections can be converter to Microsoft Office products with minimal effort. Especially nice is that Microsoft Word and Excel products can be opened by OpenOffice. This feature has saved us so much time. If we make changes to those documents they may be saved to either OpenOffice or Microsoft formats. The program is updated frequently at no cost or loss of information.

There has not been a single complaint from my staff. I personally have a problem printing envelopes, but I think that is because I rarely do so.

Overall, it's great! In a nutshell, this is a free version of Microsoft Office, for most practical applications.

The best thing is the price, as it's free to download and use the full suite of functionality! However, that wouldn't matter if the software was poor. The good news is that it's not, and OpenOffice gives me virtually every feature from MS Office that I regularly use. I don't doubt that MS Office has a leg-up in certain areas if you need deeper, more obscure features, but for day-to-day document creation, Open Office is great.

Two things: 1) I can't seem to find a way to save a document as a .docx. That might be proprietary to MS Word. 2) I'd like to be able to see more than just the last 10 documents I opened. It'd be nice to be able to choose an item at the bottom of the list such as "Show more" that would open up expanded document history.

Since my student-subscription ran out i was not willing to renew my subscription with the full paid version of Microsofts Office. So i switched to Apache and - honestly - was not disappointed. Since my last time using it, it gained a lot of functions and especially stepped up in overall appearance of the userinterface and in accessability. I would definitely recommend checking it out, before spending loads of money on commercial competitors!

It's astonishing, that Apache OpenOffice is still a freeware, if you keep in mind the incredible amount of functions it features. The "similarity" to Microsoft Office makes it very easy to switch between those products. The same goes for interchangeability of data. With Apache OpenOffice you can edit data from Microsoft Office without any loss in format and layout.

While it features a lot of features, there might be some very advanced functions, that are not availible in OpenOffice. That might not be a problem for the bigger part of users, because one might not even know about those. But for commercial usage it might fall short at parts.

I've used OpenOffice for YEARS now. There are so many things I love about it, it's hard to indicate just a few in one review. As a writer, I need a word processing software that, put simply, simple! OpenOffice has the capacity to do a LOT of complex things for other industries--like graphics, spreadsheets, presentations--and it can do everything Microsoft Office does, but I think the standout thing about OpenOffice is it never glitches on me (except maybe visually when I'm scrolling through an 500-page document) and it doesn't take up a lot of space on my computer so it always opens right away--as opposed to Microsoft Word which always takes forever to open and crashes on my Macbook Pro frequently. Also, OpenOffice is free.

I don't have any complaints. Sometimes when I'm working with a 500/800 page document, the text sometimes glitches visually, but all I do is scroll up and down a bit and that fixes it.

This Apache Openoffice is one of the better offline office products available in all platforms.

This Apache Openoffice in one of good alternative of Microsoft Office when it coming works with text documents, presentations and spreadsheets in offline. this software cost is very low compare with microsoft product. this software works all platform not only windows.

there no any biggest cons in apache open office software.

I have been using Open Office since 2007 or so. At the time I owned and operated The Computer Wizard in Plano, Texas. We supported a client base of 5,000. The newest version of MS Office that came out had a HIDEOUS interface and I decided I was done paying $$$ every version change for something I hated. I tried Open Office and liked it immediately. It is a friendly interface and easy to use.

This is a rock solid office product with versions compatible on PC, Mac and Linux platforms. It is STABLE. After setup, you simply have to change 3 settings to make it fully MS Office compatible so that it creates .doc and .xls files instead of Open Office versions.

No graphics export in spreadsheet. I had to create screenshots to get graphs exported.

I liked the fact that the product is an open source software and is very easy to setup and use. OpenOffice did a fine job handling every office tools that any company needs to have. It is free and always will be

The downside of the product same as other open source document tool is that sometimes content on OpenOffice is not really working with MS Office, you must modify the contents you made just for it to become the same

I really like to use free softwares when they are available because I agree with the free movement point of view. I have used Apache OpenOffice everyday for several years and I was fully satisfied until a big bug made me loose important work files. I tried to find out a solution to fix it, but I could not find it, so I was forced to change this software for another one.

It's a complete software that fully replaces the Microsoft Office pack... and for free!!! I like its interface, the fact that it's easy to use and the possibility to use shortcuts.

This software has been the perfect substitute of Microsoft Office pack for several years, but during the past year I had several problems due to some bugs that haven't been fixed. I tried to reinstall it several times, to contact their help service, but I could not find out a solution to my problem. That's why I had chosen to uninstall it and to use another similar software. It's a pity, because I really liked it.

Apache helps many who require software for work, school, and other major personal use. Apache are great for projects, and I look forward to seeing it go the distance. It needs an update as soon as possible though, because I find looking at the same features tiring. All in all a wonderful experience!

The most important feature on here is the menu. From there I am able to run multiple software at one time. Its very nice to have software that puts the multitasking skill to good use. I highly recommend this for anyone looking for an alternative suite software with easy access. This software is trustworthy, reliable, and very helpful!

The software itself needs an update as the features on Apache are obsolete. The loading speed for opening the software needs improving. I need to have the software opened within a minute to two instead of five minutes. Apache needs one new software added to its menu!

OpenOffice is a very good application for small to medium companies. Although it lacks few features overall the experience is great. It works very well and smooth without any lags even on low end pc.

First of all, it is free. It is the best free office suite application that is available in the market. It has documents, slides, sheets compatibility. It runs smoothly even on low end PC. It consumes very less memory and ram making it more efficient and quicker to load. Online community is great and wide to get any support. Deploying the software is easy and user friendly. It great to run test script using its Calc app.

No browser support, we have to download application in order to use. Sometimes the format gets messed up when we open files that are edited on other office apps like Microsoft Office. It doesnt support few file formats like docs. UI looks outdated.

I have used it for years for all word processing and spreadsheet needs, without dependence on purchasing Microsoft. It makes life a lot less complicated!

it's free, reliable, serves perfectly as word processor and spreadsheet (I've never really got into the database or other features) and I can save documents however people need them -- for one publisher, I simply send the OpenOffice document; others need Word so I write in OpenOffice, then save as Word no problem. Spreadsheet works perfectly so I use that a great deal as well. There's a privately created Android app that allows me to use OpenOffice docs on my phone, such as my password-protected list of passwords!

Same thing I like least about Microsoft Word -- you can't search and replace formatting characters (I have to actually go back to Microsoft Works 1995 to do this!) but otherwise no complaints.

I've been using Open Office for a long time, and it covers most needs in an office environment, as well as being easy to export to other universal formats used by most businesses. In this sense, there is a high degree of compatibility and usability.

Open Office has proven to be a great alternative, in open source systems, which avoids generating higher licensing expenses, since it guarantees an unrestricted implementation that satisfies multiple functionalities, in addition to the fact that it is constantly being updated by members of the community, which that guarantees support for bugs or updates in operating systems, and because it is multiplatform it has been adopted by many people worldwide.

The functionalities that open office has are excellent, and it is important to spend time specializing in this open-source platform that can be used in various operating systems. In addition to that, it has been extensively tested by the community, and the reported bugs are corrected in the following versions that are released on the market.

I started using Open Office in college. I was over at a friend's house and we were working on a project but he did not have Microsoft Office. I had heard people talk about Open Office, but to be honest I was a Microsoft fanboy. But that's an easy life when you are not directly responsible for paying for it. My friend downloaded and installed Open Office and we were able to create access the saved data files from class. No longer in college, and solely responsible for my finances, I have ditched the fanboy attire, and now I wear the FREE is for ME lifestyle.

The thing I like the most about Open Office is that it is a FREE alternative to Microsoft Office.

The thing I like the least about Open Office is trying to figuring how to do tasks that I am familiar with Microsoft Office, but I will say that Open Office did a wonderful job on the icons. Their similarities to Microsoft Office's icons and icon placement does help out alot.

I started using it while I was a student and it helped me a lot with all projects and presentations. I use mainly Apache OpenOffice Writer,Calc, Impress and Math. I use it on Windows(however, it's available for Mac and Linux) and it has good integration with my OS. It's free software, a great substitute for the paid versions. It has good functionality and compatibility with the different file types. I love that there are a ton of extensions that can be downloaded for free. Apache OpenOffice is not heavy and runs smoothly. It's perfect for personal/ non-commercial use.

I found only one con of Apache OpenOffice and this is the software design. It reminds me of 1999 MS office, however it's free and I do not ask for more.