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Gateway To Use Corel Over MS For Office Suite
djellusion writes "Dealing yet another blow to Microsoft, Gateway has announced that it will be using Corels Wordperfect office suite instead of Microsoft Office. I can only see this as a good thing because friendly competition creates drive for better(less clippy) products. Can I order my system with no office suite please?"
In another blow to Microsoft, a fourth computer maker plans to bundle Corel's WordPerfect Office with its low-end consumer machines.
Gateway is planning to include WordPerfect 10 and Quattro Pro 10 on its 300s desktops in North America.
In my opinion WP beats office any day for functionality, the downside is that it peppers my system tray with millions of useless icons trying to control every facet of my life. I like 4 icons in my systray. MBM (takes up 2), apache, mysql. At least alternatives to office are being considered.
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it - Sir Winston Churchill
Not so fast! You can order it without an office suite, but they'll charge you for it anyway.
Really? I would be horribly disappointed to find that an Open Source project produced a word processor that insists on operating on and formatting my documents the way MS thinks they should be, as opposed to the way I want to lay them out. I hope they at least put all the items on the menus instead of leaving most of them out for the user to have to discover hidden away on some toolbar (or not even accessible anywhere without manually putting on a new toolbar).
I've loved WordPerfect since 4.2, even wrote my thesis in 5.1 for VAX/VMS. I think this is terrific news because it means the product has new life and isn't going to disappear on me. Quattro Pro is a far better spreadsheet for engineering and mathematics as well - it's truly 3D instead of Excel's notion of worksheets, and doesn't have Excel's huge "business presentation" slant.
Whee! Let the the Word/WordPerfect flame wars begin! :-)
Michael J.
Root, God, what is difference?
Hey, I'm all for open source stuff and I actually even have OpenOffice installed on my work (Windows) laptop. However, you are naive if you think non-geeks can use it at present. I tried to convince a co-worker to use it on her machine at home as she had no office suite installed. She tried it for a week, but concluded that it "sucked".
Why did she feel that way? Well, 1) The keystrokes are complely different -- we can deal with that, but others are less forgiving and 2) The inevitable formating problems when importing MS documents -- again maybe not a biggie for us, but it is for "normal" folk.
There are lots of things OpenOffice can't do- it just depends on the user. I am an economist and I need to link to third party applications such as Datastream and Bloomberg- both data vendors. These embed themselves in the excel spreadsheet and I just run a macro to download the latest data. These vendor do not support OO.
Also the graphing capabilities of OpenOffice are horrible. For some reason they are extremely memory intensive so each time you scroll past a new chart the whole computer slows right down.
There are workarounds but it proves inefficient. I also need to work with others in my team and share spreadsheets, so I just have to use excel.
It sucks, but there is nothing I can do about it...I'm not familiar with Corel's products but I'm sure there are similar problems with regards to 3rd party apps.
On the gobe site: "Currently we are unable to fulfill orders for our products. Sorry for the inconvenience."
This is perhaps a sign on the wall.
Also note http://osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1520 here that: "I think it will take 90 -120 days before the broad public sees the GPL'd software. Some people will see it before that date as we work to roll it out".
Considered the news was out 2002-08-12, so it could take easily 'till newyear before we should start frowning.
I haven't used WordPerfect in while as well, but if I were to speculate, I would say that it was because many people have at least heard of WP with it being the number 1 word processor all those years ago. In fact I've believe it is still used significantly in some professions to this day.
Contrast that with OpenOffice (or even StarOffice). WordPerfect has the brand name and a good track record where as OpenOffice/StarOffice has only just shown upin recent years.
-- Kircle
You wrote: Corel, with an objectively inferior product I feel I am very objective in this. I used Word Perfect exclusively for a number of years and used Word for the past three. Word Perfect, for my uses, is a significantly better product, except for the compatibility issue. Unfortunately, the compatibility issue trumps the others. If I had to pick five ways in which it is better: 1) Tables - WP has great table support and you can use them as a mini-spreadsheet or as a great formatting tool. Word has weak table support, I suppose because they want you to embed an excel spreadsheet instead. This imposes constraints on my customers (they have to have Excel) and has caused versioning and configuration problems. 2) Flaky behavior. Whenever I make a document of any length in Word, and any complexity, it (seemingly) randomly reformats text, renumbers lists, incorrectly "correct" my formatting, etc. It happens in WP, but not nearly as often. And once you get it right, it stays that way. 3) Reveal Codes. When WP does do something unexpected, you can reveal the formatting codes it inserted and edit or delete them to get back to what you want. 4) Doesn't run VB. No macro viruses 5) Graphics. In word, once a graphic has been imported, it converts it to some weird word format. You can't go back. In WP, you can go back.
Reconfigure WP to remove everything but PerfectPrint from startup. I have WP with NO ICONs in the tray. Now, how to do that with Mozilla?
____________
I have seen war. You won't like it.
Mine does (WP8). Since MS is a major stakeholder in Corel, I expect this will get better. Or disappear.... ;0}
It's not my word, although I'm not sure where it was first used. Obviously, it's a reference to the facehuggers in Alien The canonical piece of facehuggerware is, and pretty much always has been, RealPlayer.
God, I hate them so much.
In word go to :
Tools
Options
In Formatting Marks check All
Well, this is somewhat true. However, I've had many an occasion when I tried to open up a word document with OpenOffice, and it mangled all the graphics. I then had to spend a long time fixing hte document so it looks right in OO. Text always converts fine for me, but when you're involved in a research group where M$ word documents with graphics are being exchanged regularly, OpenOffice just doesn't cut it. Until they get it to where it flawlessly converts word files, I don't think it will be feasable for people in a situation like mine. This is my last hurdle to completely freeing myself of Microsoft products forever.
Project Steve
(in a "my co-workers don't have it installed" kind of way) Save your documents in word format...
(it puts about 63,000 little icons in the system tray. yuck.) Don't install D.A.D. (Desktop Application Director) or uninstall it...
Access for free
Well not quite access but it's getting there, an Open Office DB driver is also in progress.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
As I said above, Word can show someformatting but not everything(fonts, language, line spacing etc) like reveal codes can. In WordPerfect you can also search and replace codes like fonts.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
The 63,000 little icons that you're talking about is their "Application Director" which is very annoying but easy to remove. I think it's just a program in the Start group, just delete it and it won't bother you any more.
It is about time WP starts pushing back crappy office
Yes, since it's been nearly a decade since Word pushed out crappy WP.
I agree that MS has gotten a lot of it's influence through shady dealings (undocumented calls, blackmail via OS monopoly, etc) but you also have to go back and look at the early days of GUI Word Processors. WordPerfect was utter shit. It lost the market share because they didn't transition from DOS-based word processing to WYSIWYG GUI word processing fast enough. And when they finally did make the transition they released a crappy product that was full of bugs and missing features.
If you want a real competitor for Word, take a look at Ami Pro. The only reason I can see for it's failure is the miserable marketing out of Lotus (and later IBM). It had most of the features before Word did, it was faster, slimmer, and worked great. Those ubiquitous button bars that are in GUI apps nowadays? Came from Ami Pro. I'm sure it had some technical shortcomings, but I don't know what they were offhand.
I used to work for a modem manufacturer and it's mindblowing how much we paid for software we bundled. When we had 'Quick Link II' it cost us $1.40 per copy. Of course, our marketing people switched to WinFax Pro and it's communications software when we got the chance because it was $.80 per copy. Incidentally, if we included AOL or Prodigy CD's they paid us kickbacks for each customer that signed up using the 'free offer' included in the box.
My guess is that MS Office was probably about $50 and Corel Office goes for about $5. That's the reason for the switch...Also, look carefully at the PC you buy. You'll notice on the CDs that they say that all tech support has to go to Gateway instead of Corel or Microsoft--that's to make up for the ridiculously low cost of the OEM bundle.
> My wife hates Star Office 5.2 for many reasons.
> The two biggest are:
> 1. Crappy online documentation
I can't speak to the database issue, since I have absolutely no need for database connectivity. I'd agree with your wife that SO5.2's online help was, well, useless.
The Open Office team has been working to fix that little problem and has actually produced some USEFUL (imagine that) documentation in their package. Their docs aren't complete yet, but at least I could find the things I needed in OO's help rather than merely overviews of the different components that didn't tell you how to do anything.
-- Rick
Microsoft (and Corel also I would presume) foist tech support for OEM software onto the PC manufacturer. To get Microsoft support for a product bundled with a PC, one has to pay by the minute. I would be greatly surprised if Corel and other software makers did not have the same policy in force.
At the time that my company used AmiPro, I was co-writing a large book. AmiPro couldn't handle the formatting and kept corrupting the subdocuments and MS Word (at that time) could not handle the document size. When the company switched from AmiPro to WordPro, the inital versions of WordPro were so slow we gave up on it. Except for the initial Windows 3.1 and Corel 7 versions, WP has been a great product.
Since then I've played with WP, MS Word, and OpenOffice. WP still wins. MS Word has lots of features but is most efficient for office drones writing short memos and letters. OpenOffice doesn't have enough features to do anything but replace MS Word for memo writing.
Just whatever you do, if you have Windows XP with Corel Wordperfect preinstalled on the machine, don't uninstall it, because it is written to where uninstalling it rips out the ODBC keys in the registry, so if you need anything that uses them later, even reinstalling MDAC won't fix it.
This makes me wonder if these manufacturers are aware of this behavior when they agree to put this on their machines.
Microsoft owns a big chunk of Corel. As part of the deal, Corel dropped support for all operating systems other than Windows.