Yosemite anyone?

[Dave2002]

Does it ... ?

I use Libre Office which is basically a newer open-source alternative to Open Office.

I've never had a problem with compatibility and as long as this continues there is no way I'll be forking out hundreds of pounds to Microsoft. Furthermore there are clear compatibility issues with Word itself regarding other office systems!

The following link is useful. The writer's conclusions appear balanced and therefore highly credible.

http://lifehacker.com/battle-of-the-...bre-1147940828

Thnaks - that's rather a good review of the systems. I use Libre Office, Open Office and MS Office. Mostly I use Open Office Writer, and if necessary convert to MS formats and load into Word. I find Libre Office very similar, though I did have a couple of bad installs of that on my Macs, which were dreadful as the on screen characters did not follow the key strokes. Fortunately newer versions seem to have overcome that problem.

I use Open Office to produce programme notes which are converted to PDF and sent to a local printer. A few years ago I used Word, but I hardly ever bother with that now as I don't have too many problems with OO or LO now.

You have to believe me that sometimes MS Office is necessary for compatibility, though I will agree that 95% of the time, for word processing at least, there are many other tools which will do the job, and most cost less. I also dislike the new trend of MS to try to get a regular subscription and to not supply stand alone versions of the Office Suite. Who cares if software is 10 or more years old if it does the job? We have one machine which still has a workable version of MS Office from around 2003 - though we don't use it much.

The Lifehacker review mentions that Base - the database component of the open source software does work with SQL. I've not tried that, and of course since the cheapest versions of MS Office (do not / no longer) include Access that could be useful for some. Most of us don't use SQL, though in fact I have done so, and for large scale applications it's probably essential - when one gets into database joins etc. Simple databases work fine for many fairly simply applications. The SQL in Access was certainly not a great implementation, at least as regards the interface, but the SQL mostly worked. I don't know whether Oracle has been improved interface wise, but I think that for serious server applications it's probably still top of the pile (stands back, and waits to be shot down ...) just as Unix/Apache is still in wide spread use for network/web servers. It could be that the SQL implementation in Base is good enough for someone to test out SQL, and maybe knock up an application or two. Perhaps I'll give that a try out.

None of the packages does very well regarding drawing, and I still use Appleworks for that. At first I didn't like that much, but then I realised that I could make diagrams with that much faster than with most other packages. There are other graphics packages which may produce better graphics results, but my requirement was for being able to construct acceptable diagrams within a few minutes, rather than near perfect diagrams which might take hours. For me Appleworks has provided the best compromise between output quality and production time for graphics. The so-called compatible and equivalent and more recent software just isn't, and isn't as good.

I did use some of the packages from Serif for a while - such as PagePlus - and that was quite good, but it's PC only and I've moved on.