Open Office 2.3...

...A "Review" and a Warning!

While I am a great advocate, and you will all come to realize that in my posts to come, and I do use and like Open Office in general, I must advise anyone against installing and attempting to use the latest version of Open Office, namely, version 2.3.

For the second time I have upgraded Open Office 2.2, which worked perfectly, to the latest version (as the program kept telling me that there is a new version available), version 2.3, and it still is about as good as the first version of 2.3 that I installed about a couple of months ago.

The Open Office Writer in Open Office 2.3 takes several minutes – still – on my Compaq Evo Pentium IV with XP Pro and then, when it is finally open, and you start typing away it stops after a few characters and sits there for another couple of minutes thinking about what it is going to do next. There appears to be some serious flaws and bugs still in that version of Open Office and that is the reason why I would advise anyone against updating/upgrading. Or at least, if you intend to do so, ensure that you have a copy of your previous version available so that, should you have problems developing, you can revert back to the older version. You will have to “manually” uninstall the updated version however before you can revert to the older version.

I have used Open Office Writer (and other parts of Open Office) on Linux Ubuntu “Dapper Drake” on the same type of Compaq PC (I run two of them with the two different operating systems) the way it came installed for the last year or so and I have come to really like it and I also find on the Windows XP Pro machine the Open Office Writer at times can be more useful than Microsoft WORD 2000 that I run also.

I am not certain of the version of Open Office on my Linux Ubuntu PC but I believe it to be version 2.0 and it works a treat.

I hope to be able to contact Sun Microsystems with the fact that there seem to be bugs or whatever in Version 2.3 of Open Office and maybe someone will have a way of finding what is wrong with it. I am not programmer and no geek who knows how to trace such fault. All I know that the program is probably the slowest version of Open Office that I have ever encountered. In fact version 2.0 and 2.2 are performing very well.

© Michael Smith (Veshengro), November 2007