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New York Times Plugs OpenOffice Suite
MrNovember writes "The New York Times (registration blah blah) describes a new choice for office suites. The writer seems a bit slanted toward OpenOffice but it's a fair discussion of its pros and cons. The article has identified some interesting compatibility issues to those who aren't using OpenOffice but might. Again we see major media discussing open source as an actual alternative to a longstanding standard. The article concludes amusingly with 'Every now and then, you get what you don't pay for;' just tack on 'Open Source' to the beginning for the perfect sig." We've gotten numerous submissions recently from people whose [company/school/whatever] is switching to OpenOffice.
'Open source every now and then, you get what you don't pay for'
;-P
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I like OpenOffice. I like the fact the files are just xml files in a zip file. The fileformat is easy to reverse engineer and use. I am a big fan.
rick hightower dot com
There is a word for that. It is prepend. If this were graded there would be a -1 Word Choice above that. Come on /. Editors.
Sorry if I'm being pedantic.
I find the compatibility to be great with the exception of bullets. A bulleted list in OpenOffice.org will not appear like one opened in Word. However, a bulleted list in Word will appear as a bulleted list in OpenOffice.org. Aside from bullets, OpenOffice.org performs great with tables, spreadsheets, presentations, and documents. I have not tested any documents that contain macros or advanced formulas, since I rarely use those features. OpenOffice.org is great for users with basic needs.
Since my resume contains bullets, I have not been able to uninstall Word. OpenOffice.org is my default application for all Office filetypes.
Regards,
javajeff
http://www.majcher.com/nytview.html
So far it starts up quicker than staroffice and there is no so desktop which is nice. It failed to recognize my jvm during the install, but I'm not that bothered by that just yet. I am using it on Linux and installed it as root, and ran into a problem with permissions it seems. I had to change ownership to (chown -R : ) to then run it as myself. It would start up and then crash right away until I did this. Or I could run it as root. Not sure why though, and now I dont care as it works. It does use lots of disk space but then so does MS office and SO 5.x. So far I am pleased with it, as it gives me yet another option to deaeling with MS docs and excel spread sheets... I give it a thumbs up ;-)
Only 'flamers' flame!
It is a fact. I have helped almost all my family (no geeks in there) migrate from Windows + MSOffice to Linux + OpenOffice with no side effects. If you install a nice system, and add the OpenOffice icon to the KDE desktop, you are done.
How many times does your mom install a new printer? even when she had Windows and she got a new LaserJet she called me!. We all know all the people and institutions that are migrating towards Linux and OO, its just a matter of time to see it as a mainstream.
On the other hand, it would come handy if the WalMart Mandrake PCs come with StarOffice preinstalled and with a HUGE icon in the middle of the desktop for all users.
Life isn't like a box of chocolates. It's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.
Long and short, articles like this help my case that Open Office is becoming more mainstream. I love it!
Click here or here.
Spam: every now and then, you get what you don't pay for
Pr0n: every now and then, you get what you don't pay for
Warez:every now and then, you get what you don't pay for...
We're a small tier OEM, and myself and another tech have convinced 'those that be' within our company to include Open Office on our low end systems instead of MS Worksuite 2002 OEM.
Unfortunately the systems still come with MS Windows XP Home on them, but at least it's a step in the right direction. All of us techs now have Open Office installed on our computers and use it for pretty much all of our office app needs except for a few Excel quote sheets that have embedded macros that don't seem to function properly.
So far we've had no complaints from any customers that have purchased these systems, but then again we've gotten no rave reviews either. I would definately say that it is an option though, at least for people who aren't tied directly into the MS specifics of the different file formats. Anyone who just wants to use a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation software and do thier work from scratch should be more than happy with this software.
Duris MUD - The best pkill MUD. Ever.
1. Ugly fonts
2. Can't read ALL the Word documents
3. Still a bit sluggish
Three! I mean three major gripes!
Seriously, font ugliness is a big problem under linux and it's all X's fault. You've seen the hundreds of people gawking at anti-aliased desktops, it just looks cooler.
I believe there are many articles on exactly why fonts are ugly in linux... I also believe that the lack of cool, MS-compatible fonts (let's face it guys, Truetype was one thing MS carried from Win 3.1 to Win XP for a reason) are because of licensing issues.
The next time a big company wants to donate money to open source, get them to design or fund fonts! That'll get Linux on the desktop. That'll cause secretaries to use OpenOffice and that'll make me happy.
'nuff said.
Defeating Linux and open source apps - strategy
- identify strengths and weaknesses of opponent (done)
- ???
- Defeat linux and open source!
They must be tearing their hair out. Nelson "Ha Ha".I don't know about VBA from Office, but OpenOffice has an Autopilot that does mass conversions. Run OO's word processor, go to File, Autopilot, Document Converter. Seems to work pretty well for me. It also imports templates and such and automagically guesses where you're keeping most of your Word files.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
here is a page I made showing how Windows/MSOffice, Windows/OO, Linux/OO, and Mac/MSOffice handle the same document--a document, as it happens, that comes straight from Microsoft.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
It's OpenOffice.org, not OpenOffice, OpenOffice is trademarked.
From the faq: 8. Why should we say "OpenOffice.org" instead of simply "OpenOffice"?
One great trick I found for converting excel files to HTML files. Excel does an awful job, writing an html page 10 times the size it needs to be, and the code is IE-centric. However, openoffice can open .xls files, and then save as html, and it outputs nicely formatted, standard HTML at very respectable sizes.
Travis
It brings a smile to my face too. MS is in a frustrating (for them) spot because they do in fact get it: they know that open source is a threat, they know why people like it, they are ready and willing to do whatever it takes to fight... they just can't figure out what to do. It's like the master buggy-maker watching Henry Ford set up shop.
Miko O'Sullivan
You also have to take into account the possibility of failures and delays (sort of like drug companies). Although on a much lesser scale, how many DaiKraptana's can a game company experience before it has to jack up the cost of its decent games indefinitely. Without extended high game costs, how do you think 3DRealms could support a development schedule for Duke Nukem Forever that will probably provide employment for the current developers' children?
I spent already a couple of times registring my legit copy of MS Word 2002 talking to MS droids on the phone to get a new activation key. The people were nice and all was done smoothly (for the exception of spelling 2 numbers of 50 digits each on the phone which took 10 minutes each time) but the pain it takes just to be able to reinstall a software I pay for is just one last drop I can think would move people to Open Source. It's this feeling of making me look like a thief begging for a new key that tells me that MS is not making it easy for people to stick with their products. Not to mention the time you have to waste each time just to be "granted" the right to you MS products.
PPA, the girl next door.
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
To my fellow OOo users running under GNOME, you may have encountered a problem where the program will often fail to start properly. This is not a crash. OOo is simply being purged by the GNOME session manager due to its relatively long startup time. I was a bit surprised to encounter this problem in 1.0, having thought it an OO bug. However, this article led me to search Issuezilla for a solution, which thankfully was determined.
There are a couple ways around the purge. The easiest one is to add "unset SESSION_MANAGER" to the soffice startup script. One file, all GNOME users happy. A somewhat more intrusive and wide-ranging solution is to add "exec $PATH_TO_GNOME-SESSION/gnome-session --purge-delay=0" to ~/.gnomerc. Supposedly, this will solve a similar problem with Opera, according to the bug comments.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
I wind up doing a lot of work with some larger spreadsheets (storage system implementation documentation), as well as some fairly massive CSV imports from perl scripts. I haven't needed to do a lot of formulas/macros in the spreadsheet (since most of my spreadsheets are a result of perl scripts, I just make the script do it!), however, I've found that OOo has wound up working much much better than Excel for me. It's faster, it has better importing, great interoperability with my cow'orkers using Office, and the file sizes are smaller. Plus, I can install a copy on my laptop, both work desktops, and my three PCs at home (running Win2k, WinXp, and Linux across the 6 boxes that I use) without any fear of Microsoft Visual Gestappo Suite XP coming down on me, or my employer. I've been playing around with StarOffice for the last few versions and found it a bit cumbersome and broken (imports not working right, limited versions of Office formats to export to, really slow on my dual P2-233 linux box). OpenOffice, however, has completely impressed me.
One wonders why the high-priced lawyers and accountants at MS and the BSA gestapo haven't figured this out.
Econ 101 - consumers purchase things because they perceive value > total cost. If the VALUE of MS Office lies in its perceived ubiquity (since the software functions of the two products are practially the same), the moment that this "value" the opportunity or real costs of BSA Audits, harrassment, and the fear of that 'disgruntled employee' narc'ing sometime in the future, well DUH people are going to move away from these 'excessive costs' whenever they can.
It's my conviction that the widespread piracy of Win95 (and thus its widespread adoption) KILLED an arguably better competitor, OS/2. If every single copy of Win95 had to be paid for (the theoretical goal) it would not be the dominant OS. The tighter they squeeze, the more systems will slip through their fingers, indeed.
Sure piracy costs Microsoft; if IBM had recognized this at the time, and been handing out FREE OS/2 versions MS probably wouldn't have to spend the $$ to buy the Justice Dept today.
-Styopa
Finding God in a Dog
Open Source works great for common software. Specialized software will always be propriatery (Thinking of the Unicenter, OpenView of the world).
How many geeks are going to write software they're not going to use themselves?
Je ne parle pas francais.
That'll get Linux on the desktop.
How often have we heard this phrase.
The speed of time is one second per second.
Sun has Enterprise licenses that drops the per-user cost the more licenses you buy. They have various levels from $50/user for 150 users to $25/user for 10,000 users. At 1,000 users, a company would pay $40,000 ($40 per user). (SOURCE: http://www.sun.com/service/support/sw_only/star_pr ogovw.html click on "StarOffice 6.0 Licenses")
I couldn't find MS's volume licensing, but even if they gave a huge discount from retail (say 75%off the retail price of $450 for Office XP Standard), the 1,000 user company would still wind up paying $112,500.
In other words, Star Office would save the 1,000 user company $72,500. (Companies might shy away from the free Open Office because there's no official support channels whereas you can call up Sun with tech support inquiries.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
The article poses the question, "Who do you call for tech support?" if your office suite breaks.
That's the big bugaboo question with corporations: Who do we blame if something goes wrong? That's the question that MS wants to stick in your craw, to give the perception that open source software is unreliable.
However, if you're using Microsoft products, when is the last time you got tech support from Microsoft? I've been supporting Microsoft products in a Helpdesk environment for over six years now. I have never even thought of support from Microsoft as much of an option. Am I missing something?
I do know that every time I have submitted bug reports to Microsoft (which I've done on multiple occasions) the report seems to disappear into a black hole. I've never got even so much as an automatic confirmation or anything. And always, the suggestion to correct the bug has gone unanswered, with no bug fix. Yes, I rather resent the poor service back to me, when I was trying to help them.
Every open source project I've submitted bug fixes for have almost always sent feedback back to me. Usually in the form of a personal email from the author. Now how's that for service?
--Yekrats
Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
3. Still a bit sluggish
Last I looked, the Linux version of Microsoft Office didn't exist. When given the choice between "cake or death", most everyone will choose the cake.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
I seem to remember that TrueType was an Apple product with MS collaboration.
...)
Whatever, the basic idea is so good that its worth is obvious. And I beleive that progress is underway. Don't both KDE3 and Gnome2 support "anti-aliased" fonts? That's a partial answer. Now what is needed are some decent tools for building those fonts. If I recall correctly, the idea of a font is a collection of objects that know how to draw themselves are various sizes and resolutions and which can be mapped to a keyboard. One way to specify this is with Bezier curves (+ hinting), but I don't see any reason that it shouldn't be possible to specify programs that would do the same thing:
draw(char#, rect=(top, left, height, width), weight, color=false, solid=true, underline=false,
FontMaker used to show one a rectangle and allow one to specify which dots were black for which letter (rather like an icon designer). Fontographer, it's sequel, changed this to specifying the same thing in terms of what appeared to be Bezier curves, with hints for things like how lines ended, how you specified holes inside of letters, etc. These programs allowed the Mac to have MANY custom fonts that did just what was needed. The pixelated fonts looked ugly at every size but the design size, and appropriate reductions, but the bezier fonts looked good at many sizes. (There were scaling problems with things like serifs, size of dots, etc. which created esthetic problems if you deviated too far from the design sizes, so even scalable fonts look better at appropriate sizes.)
I haven't gone searching for projects like these, but they would certainly be a "good thing(tm)".
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
A couple quotes from the article that made my jaw drop simply due to their mention:
OpenOffice can't run macros written in Microsoft's programming language, either. (On the bright side, you're therefore safe from Word and Excel macro viruses.)
I don't know if macro viruses are still floating around in the wild, but in a computer-illiterate, yet paranoid user culture, this may prove to be an important selling point. Time will tell if StarBasic can be used for similar abuses.
The article notes a few things that, if I understand correctly, OOo does better than MSO:
It's nice to have a proper Font menu (showing font names in their actual typefaces) at the top of the window, instead of on a toolbar that may not be open. It's also a pleasure to be able to open any kind of OpenOffice document (text, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing) from the File menu of any of its programs. [...] Both Word and OpenOffice Writer let you set up abbreviations that when typed expand into longer words or phrases. But only OpenOffice offers to complete frequently used long words automatically, which quickly becomes a huge timesaver.
If you listen to Bill's Legions, MSO is the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world that can do everything you can think of and more. I would appreciate being corrected here if MSO does the above, and I'd be surprised if it didn't.
Fortunately, the open-source nature of OpenOffice.org holds tantalizing promise for improved versions. Anyone is permitted, even encouraged, to submit bug reports, wish lists of features and other feedback via the Web site. As a new droplet in the tidal wave of the open-source movement, you may even experience the thrill of watching your tiny input have an effect on the next version.
*jumps up and down like a moron on speed*
This is what keeps me coming back to OSS efforts. I may not be able to program worth a lick, but I can still directly contribute to the improvement of a program I use and interact with the programmers as if they're human beings, instead of distant gods on top of a mountain of C code somewhere. I think this aspect of the Mozilla project should have been screamed to the heavens even more than it was to the users, the idea that Joe User could make a solid, tangible contribution to making their computers easier and better, rather than waiting for God Gates to bestow His latest Blessings upon the unwashed masses. Maybe it's due to my anarchist leanings, but I think we're better when we work together and listen to the people affected by our decisions and our work, instead of assuming I, and I alone, know what's best for everyone else.
Give a person a taste of the power, freedom, and agency s/he can have as an individual among many, and that person will never want to give it up. It's a liberating feeling.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
I downloaded and installed OOo right after it was released. I generally like the software. However, there is one show stopper issue that keeps me from migrating completely. It is currently not possible to make crossreferences to paragraph numbers. If for instance you have a document with a numbered list of references at the end, it is not possible to insert a cross-reference in the text to one of these numbers. The same applies to tables, figures, sections, formulas and headings.
Since I write scientific articles and need to be able to do all of the above, I can't use OOo (I use framemaker right now). I checked with issuezilla and this is something they are aware of, even though there doesn't seem to be much activity on the issue. I really hope they fix this soon.
Jilles
I suspect that the engines of games will eventually be open source. But look at this:
When you are buying a game, you are buying entertainment, and that content will likely still be proprietary (plots, etc). A compelling game is like a compelling movie, and it is not just the rendering, etc, but it is also the plot, the innovation, and the rest of the content.
Think of games as being part programming and part litterature
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
More like "Windows: every now and then you pay for what you got"
-no broken link
If 1.5-2.5M federal desktops switched it would be disasterous for Microsoft. Go write, now
Yes, it is technically true that OO doesn't ship with a database program.
However, it has some darn nice database features. If you have existing odbc sources defined in windows, you can access them. However, unlike word, which let's you access them via the mail merge function only, OO goes one better: you can see and edit the tables as tables. You can create new queries, that are then available to all the OO components.
Let me say that again another way. You get everything MS Access gives you except for the ability to create custom forms. And they say that OO doesn't have a database.
You can also use jdbc or just link to an existing excel file. That's right, you can access an excel file as if it were a set of records and columns. I just linked to an excel spreadsheet with 17,000 rows and 30 columns, viewed it as if it were a table in a database, wrote a custom query that will now be available to all the OO components.
And they call this not having a database.
I've got users using OO to edit mysql tables that hold data for our website because MS Access couldn't work correctly with the myodbc drivers.
I really wish people would cover that aspect more in their reviews. It's a very important feature to us here. Our hidebound faculty will never move to it of course, but for some tasks like basic mysql database entry, that's what I'm going to have them use.
The interesting thing about Microsoft is that until now, they've been able to beat their competitors without talking about them. They always compare the new releases of each software package to _their_ old releases, and just pretend the competitor doesn't exist.
Until now, the customer has had little way of knowing there is competition.
Now, with Linux/Open-source, Microsoft is in a position where they have to compete directly. This means their marketing material will probably have to mention Linux. And with each mention, Linux will gain more and more headway, because it is big enough to be in Microsoft's marketing material.
It's pretty sweet for those of us in open-source.
Engineering and the Ultimate