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MS vs. Open Source Office Suite Compatibility
Anonymous Coward writes "Though Microsoft may soon be blocking Office suite compatability with open source productivity tools, in the mean time Hal Varian (of Berkeley) has conducted the Microsoft Office-Linux Interoperability Experiment which shows a surprising amount of interoperability. Hey, another reason NOT to upgrade to the new version!"
It is important to note that even Microsoft Office has trouble opening some versions of Microsoft Office programs
;o)
Sad but true
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
The submitter meant that the generally good compatibility of other office suites with Microsoft Office was a good reason to switch away from Microsoft.
We have a mixed office, with most users running MS-Office and (mainly) the developers running OpenOffice.org.
Most of the problems are with word document are with imbedded graphics. Sometimes they show up in funny places. Sometimes not at all.
Large spreadsheets can be a problem (export from something). OOo has a limit at 32000 rows, it does give a nice warning about it, thought.
Haven't had any problems with powerpoint presentations.
If I could get the rest of the house to spend the time to learn to use OOo, MS-Office would be dumped in a second.
One thing is sure - we will not be buying new Ms-Office licences (but as we have already payed for those we have, I'll not be forcing something new on exsisting users, when it isn't nessesary).
TC - My Photos..
One of my engineers switched to StarOffice a few months ago and nobody noticed until he told us. His documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoints, and emails all open fine on our PC's with Office, and he reports no problems reading the stuff we send him. He gets lots of PowerPoints from vendors and reports no problems there, either. So it's good enough for routine office-type use. Serious tech writers don't use Office anyway, so minor glitches with table formats are not likely to work their way into formal product documentation.
They used StarOffice 6.0. OpenOffice is based on StarOffice 5.2 (at least the version they tested).
School papers need one other important features: the ability to quickly repaginate after changing fonts, margins, and spacing!
Actually, circa 1985-1990, was sorta pre-WYSIWYG. While the classic 8bit systems had "fonts" you couldn't really see them on screen. For the most part fonts were not proportional, as in print was typicaly in the form of a fixed number of characters per inch.
Some printers did have an option for proptional fonts, but this was not commonly used because you had to change your habits like using a tab rather then spaces.
There was NO real need to re-paginate if you just recycled your paper and just printed the number at the approperate point on each page. In fact, you can still do this in the 21st century if you had to.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Maybe that is where projects like OpenOffice need to have "boxed" releases that the public can SEE the choice on the shelves.
They have: StarOffice.
I think you'll find that features in modern office software that make creating 'Lovely Documents' (I think Dilbert coined the phrase) easier, very helpful in both academia and buisness. That's why MS-Office is such a killer app. People recieve attractive documents better irrespective of their content. Make your papers look nice and you'll get better grades.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
We used Office 2000, which succeeded in opening all Office files, but we venture to guess that Office 98, say, would have had difficulties with some of them.
The only version of Office that is called Office 98 is for MacOS, as far as I know. For Windows the more recent versions are 95, 97, 2000 and XP.
It is also very interesting to see the difficulties for Microsoft's Office suite when it comes to the interoperabilities between Office 97 on Windows and Office 98 on MacOS. At a company I worked at in 1998, we had both Macs and Windows machines, and amazingly enough, it was not trivial to make some documents written in Office 97 on a Windows machine work in Office 98 on a Mac (and vice versa).
What I don't understand by this is that under the US anti-trust settlement, Microsoft were made to release the specifications of their communication protocols to competitors.
That's true, in spirit. In actuality, if I remember correctly, the conditions under which MS is required to open the protocols for the office products contain at least two rather difficult obstacles:
1 - Licensing fees
2 - J. No provision of this Final Judgment shall:
MjM
Oops, they did it again...
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
StarOffice 6.0 is based on OpenOffice.Org, which in turn is based on StarOffice 5.2
The reasons for the difference might be small differences between the OO.o version they tested, and SO6.0. If they use OO.o 1.1RC3, I suspect the results would be very different, as the MSOffice import filters are hugely improved in the new release.
Random documents on the net do not necessarily correspond to documents used internally.
It would be interesting to see how the non-MS products coped with semi-embedded documents which are references to network shares.
Office isn't 4 disparate applications it is an application framework that happens to have some pre-configured applications.
There might be an application you know as Word but it is quite happy to live as an ActiveX control instatiated in your IIS Application.
I used to use it as a report generator, fill in some web forms and out spits the documentation.
The ability to open every word document on the planet is only part of the journey.
Sad but troo.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
"On the other hand, I am surprised that the numbers for StarOffice are greater than the numbers for OpenOffice... How come?"
Money. StarOffice costs some.
No, I'm not just being snide ( that's just a value added bonus), SO contains propriatary filter code that Sun distributes under third party license, thus SO has always been a bit better at compatibility.
The OOo people are having to reverse engineering these propriatary filters themselves so they're still playing catch up. They get a bit closer with every release.
KFG
Quote from the public comments on the revised proposal to final judgement:
373. However, the major comments concerning file formats request disclosure of the file formats of Microsoft products such as Office. Office does not meet the definition of Microsoft Middleware, and so it does not fall under Section III.D. Nor is Office implemented natively in a Windows Operating System Product, so it does not fall under Section III.E. Thus, the file formats for Office will not be disclosed or licensed pursuant to the RPFJ.
Paragraphs 371-375 on the page contain more information about it but that's the main point.
Karma. Moderation. Is my
The latest release candidate from OO.o does a fine job of exporting to PDF. It's handled all the different Office files I've thrown at it with ease and panache.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
When I'm in a position like that I'm thankful everyone can read RTF. Its not feature rich, but it works for just about anyone. Also its becoming a de facto rule to make any 'fancy' document a PDF anyway. Personally, I prefer PDFs for something that isn't supposed to be edited by anyone else. I can pull this trick off because I can make PDFs free with PDF995, Open Office, or in Linux. Way too many people assume it will cost them $250 for the power of making a pdf and Adobe isn't quick to correct them.
Not to mention the office copier at my only client site is Red Hat based and will take a scanned copy and email you a PDF. Very handy.
What I'm very curious about is will MS make Word be able to open sxw files by default? Perhaps when OO hits critical mass? Something tells me sxw support, if it comes, will be in some hard to find converter pack that asks you for your original office CD.
I've billed thousands of consulting dollars writing and fixing Excel VBA macros. It's not a pleasant way to earn a living, but it does pay the bills. In the case of the companies I worked for, this was not a Gee-Whiz feature but an integral part of their business.
I have successfuly deployed OpenOffice at several of my clients' and they seldom complain about having problems with MS Office files. A little training did the trick and they're very happy with it now. Furthermore, it seems their contacts (who use MS) have less trouble (if at all) opening .doc or .xls files produced by OpenOffice than ones made with various versions of MS Office.
Now, we just need to squash a few annoying bugs (like the print preview in the spreadsheet module, still not fixed in 1.1rc3), make a native OS X build and we got a free, open-source, efficient cross-platform office suite that works, no matter the OS it's running on, with a consistent UI. Hey, Netscape got popular back in the days also because it was available on all platforms...
Furthermore, the openoffice file format is so easy and straightforward (just zipped XML) it could just become the ideal ubiquitous file format we're looking for. Btw, I wonder why no other open-source office application can read and/or write it. Shouldn't be hard writing an import/export filter...
Just my 2 cents there...
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
You're kidding, right? Compare the appearance of documents created with LaTeX to Word documents. LaTeX wins.
Most academic papers (al least in math and CS) is still done using LaTeX. It let's the author concentrate on the content and let's the computer concentrate on beatiful output.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
And now, the point, part one. What I'm really looking for is a word processor that can take such childish attempts and format them properly. Work out where the author was trying to line up the tabs, and change the space-spaced stuff to proper tabbed columns.
Excel does this, does it very well.
I often use Excel just for its ability to take data and organize it, assuming it's delimited by a common field. Wonderful for adapting documents. In theory star office offers this in their calc, but I have never actually found that option in the menus.
If excel is not your poison... then TSE edit, formaly qedit. it's more advanced then notepad, has a dos version, and it's very easy to pop in macros in order to actually convert data into pretty much any form you like. www.semware.com
On a side note... Wordpad is indeed a word processor. It's pretty full featured for a microsoft freebee. While it has no spell check that i'm aware, it does actually allow you to create documents, move words around, basicly the same sorta thing that sold people on the apple IIe in the 1980s.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
You can do that in MS Office on OS X - but only because "save as PDF" is built into the entire OS, so all apps have the ability to do so.
I have found this to be an invaluable feature, since I use AppleWorks. I use the pdf features to create my CV and cover letters, and the rich text format to share with MS Office users.
I have to disagree with the office interoperability results as applicable to all. As an academic at a university, I find that most Word or PowerPoint presentations I open with StarOffice or OpenOffice are unusable since equations are powerly loaded. Sure, StarOffice and OpenOffice may work on 93% of documents but I'm guessing these are mostly memos or simple papers.
For us in the scientific community, until equations are imported with a higher accuracy I would have to put the interoperability more at 50% then in the 90 percentile range. The testing really needs to indicate where things failed and why. Perhaps that will focus the StarOffice and OpenOffice developers on some important points where interoperability is lacking.
Believe it or not some companies actually use excel spreadsheets in their supply chain control. Toyota does. Office 2000.
Commodore 64 had the GEOS desktop which did have a word processor with proportional fonts.
why wouldn't you upgrade? office 2003 will let you save and load xml formatted documents. they're even publishing their schema.
whitepaper
i've used the betas, i've seen it work. it's not a proprietary binary stream wrapped in xml headers - it's a fully ascii, 100% fidelity xml represented word document. with schema.
the binary formats always change every major version. it's doubtfully due simply to malice, it's more likely due to increased business pressure to cram more features in.
but all that aside, compatibility is the primary reason to upgrade to 2003.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
However we would be much better off trying to improve the stability of the existing applications, rather than trying to catch up with the level of functionality of the proprietary competitors. Go easy on the new features (exporting to PDF is a great idea, though); concentrate on enhancing the stability of OOo, KOffice, Abiword and so on; enhancing/debugging the import/export filters is an important point as well.
This point has already been made, it needs to be repeated time and time again... Just my 2 cents anyway.
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
What would they sue them for? From Adobe's web site (http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/adobepdf.ht ml):
"An open file format specification, PDF is available to anyone who wants to develop tools to create, view, or manipulate PDF documents."
Well kword and others just export to rtf, but give it the extension .doc - so word should always be able to handle it.
OOo was thinking of doing the same iirc.
(btw for those that say rtf is less powerful - it's not. rtf can do everything the latest word can do - even ole objects etc)
Okay, I posted this in the other story about this, but here it goes again....
OFFICE 2003 DOES NOT BLOCK ACCESS FROM OPENOFFICE UNLESS THE USER TELLS IT TO!!!!
FFS, RTFA next time, people! Not only does the user have to tell Office2k3 to implement DRM and jumble the format, but there has to be a Win2k3 server on the network running the DRM manager application.
In order to use IRM (Information Rights Management), according to the article, the customer has to spend boatloads of money.
This feature is not about closing off office applications. It's about protecting IP and controlling access. M$ isn't selling O2K3 on the basis of "Hey, it's not compatible with other applications and that's why you should buy it!" They're selling it on "Hey, you can control who gets to read, print, and modify your documents, and that's why you should buy it!"
It has nothing to do with OSS, FOSS, Slashdot, or anything else. It's just a feature they want to sell to the intellectually paranoid at an extremely high price.
For the second time, there is nothing to see here, MOVE ALONG...
Did you forget so quickly that Adobe does sue people/companies too?
PDF is an open format. Microsoft don't incorporate it in their products because they don't control it, not because of any legal reasons.
In fact, the lack of VBA is one of the main reasons why I won't switch away from Word right now. Try finding a developer that can understand Corel PerfectScript.. :)
Anything involving crossreferences is bound to end up in the unusable area IMHO. Openoffice currently only supports a subset of the crossreference functionality in ms office. As a consequence, editing large technical or legal documents in ooo is problematic. Sadly, the ooo developers are either not aware or indifferent to these issues (I've been all over issuezilla on this thing).
I must be a power user by the way because I have very few word documents that import correctly in ooo. IMHO ooo is perfect for the kind of stuff you could also use wordpad for (i.e. 80-90% of what business people use it for). Anything involving more complex layout stuff, embedded objects, complicated tables etc is almost certain to cause some degree of problems when importing from word. As a rule of thumb, if it needs to look good on paper don't use ooo to print a word document. If you need to do round trip editing (import, edit, export), make sure you don't lose information in the process. Both the import and export process is imperfect.
Jilles
Word/Excel/PPT 97, 2000, 2002 and 2003 all use the same default file format. The only features that don't 'round-trip' are the ones that didn't exist in the earlier versions.
I would love to see openoffice take off, but after months of trying it, there are often time when "minor" formatting changes make all the difference. In the minds of most people, having MS word on your computer is an assumption. Along with that assumption is that everything they send in the doc format presents just the way it looks on their screen. As wrong as you may feel that is, its a fact that you have to live with. They can spend enormous amounts of time to get that formatting correct. For example, I write research papers on occation. There are almost always co-authors. Almost all of them have MS Word and assume I do too. Yet when tables format incorrectly and need to be adjusted constantly, when the headers/footers are lost in conversion, when reference links get out of order, etc, etc... -- ITS A PAIN IN THE ... In word processing more than anywhere else, I need it to just work. Asking everyone else to switch to be compatable with me is not an option anymore than asking everyone in France to speak English for me is an option.
I realize that many people don't see this as typical use, but its probably more common than you think. Business documents get mailed back and forth all the time, and formatting is important.
BTW, yes there are forward compatability problems within different versions of Word (also a pain...), but they are no where near the magnitude the article talks about.
yes..
OO even blasts those pesky M$ office document passwords right out too!!
don't believe me ? TRY IT!
had some *protected* spreadsheets sent to me, I opened them up in OO, turned the "document protection" on in OO, then back off again.. save your file and....
VOILA!! no more password in your document!
iF yOu WAnT to C YOUr iP agaIn gAThEr tWO MilLIon dOLLArS IN Non - cONsEcuTivE TweNtY's AnD AWaiT FuRThER iNstrUctIoN
Just a little tip. If you have to do school papers check out LyX www.lyx.org it comes on most distros and will make you look like a genius with about a third of the effort that a word processor requires. Spend about a half an hour with the tutorial and you'll never use a word processor again.
I used to do timesheets with Excel as I work remotely and have to bill my time to various jobs. I had some formulas that would scan the spreadsheet and calculate day totals and so on.
Recently I took the Excel sheet and started doing the timesheets with OO. I then save-as Excel and email it to the office for processing. I noticed a couple of problems in the process: