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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!"
that the new gtk+2 version of Abiword is not out yet. It would have fared much better. I am sure it is the same for Gnumeric. I hope they will repeat this test once they come out, I use cvs versions of both of these and imho they beat OOo in almost every department, be it looks, speed or ease of use. OOo does have slightly better MS Office compatibility, but not by much.
Hey, another reason NOT to upgrade to the new version!
I use word processors to write school papers. When it comes down to it, writing a school paper requires one important feature, spell check. That was available on the C64. I'll bet most people are like me in that they NEVER need to upgrade (no, I don't have the trusty C64 anymore, but I haven't upgraded office since 97).
You really have to hand it to the Microsoft marketing dept for making everyone believe they need to upgrade every year.
----
Squirrel
Right there is where most problems will occur. Also, after reading enough of /., lack of support of VBScript would be another obstacle.
Also, I wonder how KOffice will do after they switch their file formats and stuff. It could only help, right?
In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these. - Paul Harvey
While this is true, there is MS's movement towards XML support in the top brackets (Pro and above), which should prove VERY compatible with applications when proper support is implemented. Of course, the home, and small bus. editions are going to suffer, but then again - MS office holds a nice share of the market, why give up this oppertunity to put pressure on other developers and help maintain window's market dominance (which fits perfectly with MS removing Office from mac)
-Gwala
#!/bin/csh cat $0
This more or less confirms my experiences I've had with MS Office -> OpenOffice interoperability in everyday use. While using Windows at work, I use Linux at home, and so far I've only had minor issues moving between the two worlds. So what's the deal about the story?
-- Power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Micro$oft is not going to simply say "Hey .. here is a free / opensource version of a comparable product to our office if you cannot afford it"
/Windows Sale. Maybe that is where projects like OpenOffice need to have "boxed" releases that the public can SEE the choice on the shelves.
No, I think that they will keep there advertising campaign going and offering the likes of MS Works as the alternative to their more expensive package. And how many basic system users do you know of that have been following the development of OpenOffice ??
The average user walks into a computer store and says "I need a computer to type letters / send mail / basic calculations", and I can almost guarantee that the salesman will make an MS Office
What is really missing from the chart is statistics on MS Office :) I want to see Office 2003, Office 2002, Office ... 97 on that chart, and see how well each of them handles this 'random' sample of office files. Forwards compatibility is almost non-existent, and backwards compatibility is much more broken than you would think. I think Star Office and Open Office might actually beat MS Office * in that scoring methodology.
The article said: It is important to note that even Microsoft Office has trouble opening some versions of Microsoft Office programs, as forward compatibility has often been a problem. 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.
It's a pity they didn't include a couple versions of Microsoft Office in the comparison, so that this effect could actually be measured rather than relegated to a footnote.
MS went absolutely over the top with Office; you get "features" now that well over 99% of their user base will never even SKIM the surface of.
And yet features that lots of people would find useful aren't incorporated because they don't fit in with MS strategy.
When I tell small business clients that OpenOffice will write PDF documents just by going "save as", their eyes light up.
In fact, 6.1 seems a nice product generally and is the first version of SO that I think I can actually recommend to clients when it is released. It may even be possible to train users to export PDFs for email, which would be a big win.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Beside attempting to do table formatting with strings of spaces {I know this is acceptable, even encouraged, in programming, when monospaced fonts are used; but it totally breaks proportional spacing}, the author also had manually numbered the pages.
I was heavily tempted to refuse to do the editing on the grounds that (a) the original material was unfit to use as a starting point and (b) I was having difficulty finding a copy of MS Word.
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.
Or, maybe someone could make a USB shotgun accessory that will blow a luser's head off if they try certain effects. Such as
- Attempting to format using spaces
- Attempting to generate page numbers, tables of contents, or anything else that the computer can do for you, by hand *
- Using more than three fonts in a document
- Using the font 'comic sans MS' for anything at all
The point, part two, is that WordPad is not a word processor. It does not incorporate a spelling checker. Whose priorities are so warped that they would omit such a basic necessity while incorporating changeable fonts and colours? It matters not what meretricious decorations are applied to the text if the spelling is all cocked up! It does not even qualify as a text editor; it is a viewing tool. And a poor one at that, because its output often does not resemble the output of Word.* I have actually heard of someone creating a spreadsheet, then adding up the figures with an idiot-calculator and entering this in the total box
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Just set up a central server at your company running MS Office + An HTTP server. Write a backend so that employees can use the web interface to convert a file. Can't be too hard can it?
Or even, scan incoming/outgoing emails for protected files, and run them through it.
Still ends up a lot cheaper than a site license for MS office. Dunno how Microshaft would feel about it though?
I've been struggling with the same issue as I prepare my resume. Do I write it in OpenOffice, impressing those who get it, and save to Office and PDF and give out all three versions? ...or do I just "do the smart thing" and go ahead and write it OfficeXP and make sure that all and sundry think I'm "normal". There's nothing I want less than to start a job interview niggling over compatibility issues!
:-)
I've finally decided to just write my resume in XML (no kidding) and write a couple XSDs to turn it into an actual document. But the version I give out to people will use Visual Basic for Applications to turn the XML into honest-to-god, plain old, plain old, ain't-no-commie-bastard Word documents. But I'll also gen OpenOffice flavors and PDF for fun.
I can't see any other way out of this hell than to start doing all my Word Processing in XML in vi
I wonder that a study made in January 2003 is only published in August! In the meanwhile OpenOffice (1.1rc3) has improved a lot, StarOffice 6.1beta is available. The experiment should be redone soon.
MS XML is designed to be incompatible. You can save in two version
1)With tags and binary information in the same file - it looks like RTF
2)with only the information in the file. If you had an XSLT document you could easily translate it to other forms of XML. However, you don't, you won't, unless you build it yourself. MS doesn't save, doesn't provide it.
Have Fun
From the article:
"forward compatibility has often been a problem."
Correct, but I'd venture that most software would suffer from that, not just M$ Office.
However, please note that backward compatibility is also problematic with (some/all) M$ software.
IMHO there is no guarantee that a newer release of a given M$ program will be able to open files from an older release of that same program. Again, this is not unusual for (a lot of/some) software. But of course, with open source this doesn't pose as much of a problem.
FWIW I seem to remember running into trouble when I used M$ Publisher. I have a newer version installed on one of these machines <<gestures>> that cannot open publisher files from an older version of Publisher. These 2 different version are sequential releases...I think that is unacceptable >:\
Coherent, perhaps. Consistant? No more than anybody else trying to write the English language with the Latin alphabet.
The problem is that English actually has 20 vowel sounds and we fudge quite a bit when we use the 5 written vowels to represent them. The particular choice of vowel is often arbitrary and could just as well be represented by more than one other.
Using the wrong vowel isn't a logical idiocy like asking where the "Any Key" is. It's a simple failure of having learned every possible word by rote.
I suppose all of your code compiles perfectly the first time?
KFG
As soon as 'the boss' is unable to open your budget report written in OpenOffice, guess what he'll demand from you...
Assuming you are a Linux user, you could reply with:
"I can install OpenOffice in your computer anytime. Just let me know. You know, it does not cost a dime, and is just as easy to use as MS Office."
If boss says no, then ask if PDF is OK. And if he says no again:
"If you want me to use Office, (explain the problems of installing Windows on top of Linux) I need a new HDD or a new computer, with Windows + Office. As I haven't used Windows after 3.1, I'll probably need some Windows training. BTW, can you postpone my deadlines by two weeks?"
Now, realizing the problems of MS Office, he (just like my boss) probably settles with PDF. You might get new hardware, or more time to complete your project. (practically, reduce unpaid overtime)
MS went absolutely over the top with Office; you get "features" now that well over 99% of their user base will never even SKIM the surface of.
Clever marketing and PHB one-upmanship are what convinced the masses to go with this ridiculous and unnecessary upgrade path.
The problem is, there are a lot of heavy-duty Office users who do use those features that somebody who just writes one research paper a month never uses. For example, some companies run their whole production and financial planning in custom-built Excel spreadsheets, and if Excel 2000/XP/2003 offers some feature OpenOffice doesn't they'll never switch in a million years if it requires them to rewrite the whole shebang.
Just because you don't use a feature of your Office suite, don't assume no one does. One percentage of ten million Office users equals a hundred thousand people who absolutely depend on that feature.
TextMaker promises "to seamlessly read and write Microsoft Word documents" but I haven't heard anybody's experiences with it. Has anybody here tried it?
Karma. Moderation. Is my
Home users typically don't care about VB macros. For companies, it's different.
There must be thousands of little "business applications" that are Word or Excel macros. Each of those might contain only a few lines of code, but in a large organization, there are a lot of those.
WWTTD?
That's really good. No more compatibilty issues to worry about and the open source folks can now actually concentrate on their product and not mimic MS office suites.
:)
After they've blocked the compatibility two opposite forces will act:
1) People will stop migrating to Linux because all of their old data will become inaccessible.
2) The current Linux and Windows users, both, who need to exchange data - will start pressing for a common open file format.
Let's see which camp wins
Nandz.
Macro code and applications targeted to the platform are a major impediment to moving from MS Office. It seems obvious that you need it in Excel -- after all, it's just extending the spreadsheet formulas, but while there's only a few macros/apps we've created in PowerPoint, automation of Word is almost a neccessity.
The number of Word features we change, replace or enhance is enormous: "Wizards" to guide creation of tables with their captions, startup items to ensure option settings, repair commands to fix things when you've messed up your own document, etc. etc.
Without at least source compatability with VBA and the object models, moving to any other platform would be a tremendous undertaking. We did it 8 years ago from WP to Word '95 (and to a lesser extent from Word '95 to Word 2000 four years ago), and we don't want to start from scratch.
Design for Use, not Construction!
is no longer a part of my system, though all my workstations are Windows 2000 (no XP for me, thank you M$), backed up by a RedHat 8 server setup running s/w RAID5 and samba. OpenOffice has taken over, though I haven't had much opportunity to use it yet (school hasn't been demanding papers...yet), I find it far superior tyo M$ Office, yes it has bugs, fortunatly there's an entire team of Devs with RAID cans in hand squashing more every day. PDF integration beats the hell out of distributing raw .DOC and .XLS files (which my BusTech classes 2 years ago insisted on doing for distribution (running M$ Office 2k under 98 or 2k), now the same department is considering going to a redHat powered L.T.S.P setup running open office (w00t).
Inter-organzation distibution via DOC, and XLS et. al. is the worst idea ever, since not everyone runs OXP, O2k or O2k3, usually a combination thereof within the same office just becase they got new boxe with OXP and their old ones came with O2k, I still get the occasional call about interoptibility failures... oy.
Logistical Chaos Officer http://www.slagg.org - LAN Gaming in Sarasota FL,USA
This is the question I want to ask Microsoft:
Have you ever seen a hand written letter made by a pen of type X that was not readable or adjustable by someone owning a pen of type Y?
What I'm trying to say is that the times of closed doc. formats is over. Doc. processors have become a standard tool in this world, we can't efford anymore to have just one company making pens.
DTD the damn format and send it into the world. SOBs.
Excellent point. I deal with several companies since we are a Health Care Provider. Almost EVERYTHING that comes from these vendors, etc is in the latest greatest MS Word, or Excel format. End-users arent always the brightest stars in the sky when it comes to software, but neither are 3rd party vendors.
Which raises the question - if you pay a vendor for updates, information, etc.... should they be required to send it in a "unlocked" format? Or at least a openly accepted format that all systems can read?
MS Office aside - Pennsylvania's Department of Health now REQUIRES you to use IE 5.5 or better to do MANDATORY submissions to them as of the end of August. It doesnt matter what browser you use, or how compatible it is - they wont work with anything else. So basically - if any healthcare organization based in PA wanted to move to Linux, they can't. After all - MicroSnot isn't ever going to do a browser for anything other than themselves in the future.
And to think.. there are still people who think they aren't a monopoly, or that the government put an end to it.
Forget forward or backward compatibility, how about current compatibility? As in opening a file created in that version of Word and having it look the same! Just a few days ago I was working on several complex documents. They're about 100 pages each, and are an electronic revision of older hardcopy documents, so there is lots of formatting (manual page breaks, weird line spacings, custom margins and such) in order to closely match the hardcopy. I closed it down in the evening on one day, and when I opened it the next morning the formatting had changed! Text that used to fit over a single page was now spread over two pages, things like that. I had my coworker open the file and it looked correct on his computer, but was screwed up on mine. And according to Word we have THE EXACT SAME VERSION, down to the minor version numbers, and as far as I know nothing changed in my configuration overnight. Very irritating, I can tell you, but there was no other choice but to waste several hours going through page by page correcting margins, line spacing, etc. until it was once again correct. A program which can't even open its own files reliably is a total piece of crap, IMO.
When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
Using the wrong vowel isn't a logical idiocy like asking where the "Any Key" is. It's a simple failure of having learned every possible word by rote.
No, it is the logical idiocy of failing to RTFM. Standardized consistent spellings coincided with the rise of dictionaries, which are the authority on spelling and usage of words. Every child should have learnt in grammar school (they did in *my* day, by God!) that if they were not absolutely certain of the proper spelling or usage of a word they should consult a dictionary. If you do not, you have failed to RTFM.
Dictionaries are there precisely because humans cannot necessarily be expected to remember by rote every word which must be spelt, particularly in English or French which mutually created insidious spellings on purpose and then infected one another with them. People using computers attached to the internet have no excuse, since almost every application, even on Linux, has at least the possibility of using a spelling checker automatically, and there exist a plethora of reference resources on the web including Merriam-Webster and Google which can be used for free (gratis).
Slashdot has no spelling checker but you are attached to the internet and there is a preview button for a reason. If you misspell things you are just being lazy. Now, if you go over my posts you will see typos because sometimes I am being lazy myself. Personally I blame computers for getting people used to automatic spell checks instead of making people proofread their work, and ephemeral communications like email and chat in which typos are acceptable in the interest of expedience, thus training people to be lazier typists. Perhaps we should go back to the old days when people got rapped on the knuckles with a ruler for making writing mistakes.. ;)
'Spelling' is a good filter mechanism.
There are a few people whose ideas are worth exploring and considering who have poor spelling. To a large extent, however, poor spellers are also poor thinkers.
So, poor spelling is a handy indicator to filter on when deciding wether someone's written thoughts are worth the read.
I am not talking about the occasional misspelled word or typographical error, BTW. I'm talking about corn-pone ignorance.
In a way, spell-checking is a negative feature for this reason. It lets people ascend to PHB who have no business being there.
A Good Intro to NetBS
How come Hancom Office (http://en.hancom.com/index.html) wasn't included in this discussion? I haven't used Hancom myself, but have heard good things from people who swear by it ...
Sure, Hancom isn't free, but neither is StarOffice...
And according to Word we have THE EXACT SAME VERSION, down to the minor version numbers, and as far as I know nothing changed in my configuration overnight.
Do you use the same default printer? Word pulls a lot of functions from there.
In any case...
If you want to replicate a printed document, you should use word to make PDFs. (There are free PDF makers that are almost-but-not-quite as good as Acrobat.) Word is a word-processing program, to be used for writing and "I don't really care about the specifics" document layout. If precise formatting is important, then _don't use word._ It wasn't designed to do more than "good enough" in that job.
A user here just complained they couldn't open a Excel spreadsheet. I couldn't open it either - no error message - just a new blank workbook. I suspected file corruption, but could see the data with a Hex editor. So I tried to open it with OpenOffice 1.0.1. Voila! Resaved from OO in Excel format and the document is now usable again.
"RTF is the format from hell. All existing readers interpret it differently "
That's the formats fault? Sounds like people aren't coding compatible RTF readers to me. I like RTF except for the ineficient way it handles graphics (some sort of lame, wasteful UUE style encoding).
I'm afraid I have to disagree with you here. As a college 200 level Chemistry student, I wrote every lab report I did in OOo (1.0.1 and .3). I have never had a problem expressing complex formulas, setting up tables of calculations, or any other formatting. I would -not- use WordPad for my lab reports. OpenOffice.org also worked well for writing essays and other such papers. No, I didn't use complex headers/footers or such. However I have opened documents with tables and they generally open fine. I also have opened such odd things as SVG files from Publisher, embeded in a PowerPoint file, and been able to edit the SVG -grouped- graphic entirely. All the way down to entering the group and editing the elements. The biggest trouble I've had with OpenOffice.org has been with a rather large document I wrote up (20 pages) that used footers. OOo couldn't render them in the 1.0.x versions very well at all, the 1.1 beta was believe it or not, worse! Now, before you smugly fire-up MS Office and not think about switching, consider this. I made my footers in MSOffice to begin with, and every time I open it they look a little different, the way I have automatic and manual numbering is something MSOffice has a terrible time with, and it keeps reverting my manual numbers and lettered pages to the automatic ones. I don't feel this is a failure on the part of OOo, I believe this is a failure in the way MSOffice creates footers.
As a bonus note, I'm the Media Team Lead at my Church, and we have been using OpenOffice.org Impress (I love being the Team Lead) for every presentation shown on the projector since 1.0.1 came out. I've had very few problems with this setup, no more than when we first started using PowerPoint so many years ago. On top of that, when someone brings in a true PowerPoint file to project for something they're doing, I hardly ever have any trouble rendering it as true as the RealThing (TM). In fact, the biggest complain is Impress has too many features! it has several more transitions available over MSOffice, and so when someone sets up random transitions for text fields, OpenOffice.org does funny things that look terrible sometimes, but it's only doing that because that's an option in OOo, whereas it isn't in MS PowerPoint.
No, OpenOffice.org doesn't have absolutely every single feature Microsoft Office has, and it may not be 100% compatible. But I dare to say that Microsoft doesn't have every single feature ours has, and get this, it's 0% compatible. Granted they don't have to be as they are the standard, but if you're going to choose one, why not choose the one that gives you options? If you can't use it for your current documents, well, give it a go the next revision. If you can though, arguing features isn't going to get you anywhere.
They should have tested OpenOffice 1.1rc3 instead of 1.0.1. There have been massive improvements to the MS import filters since and it probably would have ranked a "99" in all categories, besting whatever StarOffice version it was they tested. It's still not perfect, but plenty good enough for most people. So far I've only run into one Excel spreadsheet that was problematic (it contained a bunch of complicated diagrams and graphics along with some scripting.. kinda an abuse of the whole spreadsheet concept anyhow)
How often do OSS contributors show real interest in software usability? It seems more like a common disinterest to me. OSS contributors are primarily coders; sometimes this can be a hindrance. Do you choose the user-friendly behavior that's many times harder to code, or do you choose the less-friendly behavior that's easier to code? Everybody hates writing GUI code, so few people are willing to write good GUIs.
Furthermore, many developers don't know how to make good user interfaces in the first place. Do most OSS contributors design software with usability as a focus or as an afterthought? Do they design the code around the interface or the interface around the code? Do they design UI mockups and prototypes? conduct usability tests? get heuristic feedback from usability experts? take feedback well from users?
Much of the attitude I've seen is user-neglect. If a user doesn't like the way something behaves, the response is an elitist "use the source, Luke." If you don't like it, change it yourself; if you can't change it yourself, too bad, because no one's interested in improving usability. It's a lot of work with little instant gratification, even though it pays off in the long run.
Or maybe they throw in skinnability--a poor substitute for a proper UI design--and say, "Hey, it's skinnable. If you don't like the interface, you can change it." (... often ignoring that interface usability involves much more than aesthetics.) Or maybe they're just ignored completely.
I'm sure someone must have brought this up somewhere in the discussion, but reading the silly grammar war above wore me out, so I'll just ask:
Why isn't changing document exchange formats to exclude other operating systems a prosecutable anti-competitive act? This sort of thing seems a lot worse than bundling a browser with the OS.