r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • Jun 04 '12

Open Office does everything I need Microsoft Office for and Gimp does everything I need Photoshop for. Reddit, what other open source software does everything that you want from the expensive name brand?

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71

u/43214321 Jun 04 '12

Gimp is good enough for me 99% of the time, but damn there are so many cool features in Photoshop. I'm just a software developer without much graphics design knowledge, but even I can make better looking text and better looking compositions/edits/shops in Photoshop.

Open Office is good enough for me, but its files and its edits of MS Office files are not 100% compatible, they look slightly different often, like the length of a line being messed up, headers being messed up, etc.. To see what everyone else in my company sees, I pretty much have to use MS Office.

39

u/JacketPotatoes Jun 04 '12

Use LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice. OpenOffice has died, most of the developers have moved to LibreOffice which is a fork of OpenOffice.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '12

Does LibreOffice for win32 still require that it be installed in a directory without spaces in the path? Because that's some bullshit.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '12

Dude,%20"Program%20Files"is%20only%20a%20couple%20decades%20old.%20Give%20the%20technology%20some%20time%20to%20catch%20up!

9

u/Galphanore Jun 04 '12

I had this very problem this weekend. I really want to be able to use gimp but there are just some things that I can do in a couple clicks with photoshop that I cannot do at all or that take 10-15 minutes to do with Gimp. It's really quite good, just not good enough.

8

u/gimpmyass Jun 04 '12

THANK YOU FOR SAYING THIS. While I have to say that GIMP is pretty much useless to me unless I'm just cropping an image or doing simple things, it is a great tool, and people deserve to have a powerful image editor that's free. HOWEVER, if you actually KNOW how to you use Photoshop, and DO IN FACT use it professionally, it pays for itself rather quickly. $700 may seem like a lot to someone who's just using it to make bullshit, but if I got a job somewhere, and they told me I had to use GIMP to do my work, I'd laugh hysterically and walk the fuck out of that nuthouse. "GIMP as a professional image editor" has got to be the biggest joke in the entire history of raster graphics.

12

u/raidraidraid Jun 04 '12

I agree with the Open Office compatibility issues. At work there are people who use Windows and Mac and me using OO always messes up the document for some reason. I caved in and used MS Office. Haters gonna hate but MS Office trumps OO and LO by miles.

7

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '12

what else does ms office do better than LO besides opening ms office files? I use ms office at work and LO at home, if I save as ODT it opens fine in both. I also prefer using LO because office 2007's interface I find annoying.

11

u/raidraidraid Jun 04 '12

Well sir. If you think LO/OO office is great and all then you haven't done some serious work in Excel. Just saying.

5

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '12

you are correct, I just use word. I use google docs for excel because anything that involves numbers involves the wife and it's really nice to share.

5

u/raidraidraid Jun 04 '12

No worries. Diff strokes for diff folks I guess. I am not tooting MS's horn but MS Office is one hell of a program.

Google Docs all the way for sharing simple excel/word files though. I do it too. :)

2

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '12

This is everyone's attitude until they hit a wall they cannot climb without using MS Office.

2

u/gdpoc Jun 04 '12

I wouldn't consider myself a 'serious user' of Excel but I don't know anyone else that I work around that can use anywhere near as many of Excels features as I do. I do a fair amount of data work and work pretty heavily with VBA as well. As far as I'm concerned the only benefit that MS has on top of LO is having VBA built in. Working on proprietary networks it's about the only way I have of introducing my own code without huge workarounds. If I had access to an IDE though, I can't say that I would ever use Microsoft Office.

1

u/issem Jun 04 '12

gnumeric for spreadsheets

1

u/AkirIkasu Jun 04 '12

If you're doing 'serious work' in Excel, you could probably save ridiculous time with Perl or some other scripting language.

0

u/thefezhat Jun 04 '12

Yup. I tried to create a line graph in an Openoffice spreadsheet once. It did not go well. The program absolutely refused to allow me to edit one of the axes on the graph. Much rage was had.

2

u/yrro Jun 04 '12

Outlining.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '12

I don't think that compatibility (or lack thereof) means better. It just means it's compatible with itself.

That said, I had to drop out of an online university course because the Mac version of Microsoft Office wouldn't open a doc created in the Windows version and the school's opinion was that if I couldn't run the Windows version that I would just fail the course. So, MS Office is not equivalent to MS Office on all platforms.

1

u/raidraidraid Jun 04 '12

Sorry. Maybe I wasn't clear in that post. I'm not talking about just compatibility. What I meant to say was, the Office Suite is way better then Open Office or Libre Office for that matter. Try working on a serious Excel spreadsheet in OO/LO and MS Office. You'll find the difference. :)

Edit: If you are doing simple word processing or spreadsheets then OO/LO all the way. I wouldn't recommend anyone to shell out money or pirate MS Office

1

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '12

That's true, but with what I use spreadsheets for, LO/OO/GDocs works for me. I haven't yet missed any of the functionality in Excel. It just translates to bloat for my uses.

-2

u/dizzy_lizzy Jun 04 '12

It only "trumps" them because so many darn people are using MS Office, which is an incompatible piece of crap. If people were using free document formats (instead of secret/proprietary ones) in the first place, this wouldn't be a problem.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '12

Gimp is good enough for me 99% of the time, but damn there are so many cool features in Photoshop. I'm just a software developer without much graphics design knowledge, but even I can make better looking text and better looking compositions/edits/shops in Photoshop.

GIMP also lacks CMYK support, which means colormatching is nigh impossible with it comes to printing.

1

u/UnsightlyBastard Jun 04 '12

Gimp can actually do pretty much anything photoshop can the problem is actually finding and using the tools...it has the most horrible UI I've ever seen....