Open Office or Office 2008?

I have a G4 PowerMac and will be upgrading very soon to 10.5 Leopard and will need an Office suite. Was wondering which I should get for my Mac?

Well that is not Open Office as it has been discontinued. What do you need it for? Just letters etc go with LibreOffice, or studies get Office 2008. If you purchase second hand make sure unused keycodes are available.

Make sure you download PowerPC version for Mac OS X:-


http://www.libreoffice.org/download

So Libreoffice is based on OpenOffice right? I basically will just be using this for school, need something compatible with Word and Excel and have been using OpenOffice on the PC. Libreoffice should work fine right?

OpenOffice development hasn't been discontinued - it's just changed hands (from Oracle to Apache). Nonetheless, I'd stick with LibreOffice over OOo given that there seems to be more active engagement in the LO community.

Office 2011 won't work on a PPC Mac so assuming you're upgrading the Mac in your signature, you'll need to keep that in mind. Make sure to look at system requirements for Office before purchasing it.

Open Office Spreadsheets

I have a new MacBookPro, which is OSX 7, Lion.
Naturally, I can no longer use Appleworks, so I am trying to figure out how to build spreadsheets that suit my purpose using Open Office.
First, I need to eliminate a lot of rows & columns, which I haven't bee able to do!

Is Appleworks any good? I haven't used it since the 80's and it was on and Apple IIe.

Apple Works is no longer supported. The iWork applications are being sold individually from the Mac App store for $19.99 each and all have been updated for Lion. (Pages, Keynote, Numbers)

I have been getting used to a new macbookpro, with lion.
Try openoffice.org it is free and can replace appleworks (i think)!

For the best suite with your MBP go Office 2011.

Just to avoid any confusion, OpenOffice is NOT COMPATIBLE with existing AppleWorks documents, so it is not really a "replacement."

The last versions of AppleWorks came with some ability to translate the word processing and spreadsheet files it produced into MS Office compatible formats which OpenOffice (et al) can read, but you have to have done the conversion in AppleWorks first.

I've had trouble with Open Office munging Word and PowerPoint documents so I stick with Office for Mac 2011.

west1 said:

I have a new MacBookPro, which is OSX 7, Lion.
Naturally, I can no longer use Appleworks, so I am trying to figure out how to build spreadsheets that suit my purpose using Open Office.
First, I need to eliminate a lot of rows & columns, which I haven't bee able to do!

Click to expand...

You mean rows and columns that have data? Or just "get rid of them"? The former is simple. The latter misunderstands spreadsheets. You can delete 10,000 rows and the spreadsheet programs will still have all the rows and columns there. Appleworks was different in that regard. But all spreadsheets (MS Excel, LO Calc, etc., except Numbers) operates with always-available the number of rows and columns to its max limit. So trying to "delete" them is impossible.

You can "fake" that by hiding the rows or columns, but you have to hide all the way to the end.

Open Office Spreadsheets

My Step Children (God bless them), have shown me how the spreadsheet will only print the necessary "print range", and how to select it!. Tra La!
I even figured out how to use "landscape mode"!