MS vs. Open Source Office Suite Compatibility

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MS vs. Open Source Office Suite Compatibility

Posted by timothy on Tuesday September 2, 2003 @09:51PM from the file-formats-are-what-matter dept.

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!"

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Plenty of reasons by Pompatus · 2003-09-02 21:58 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

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Squirrel ... It's not just for breakfast anymore
features by KingJoshi · 2003-09-02 22:00 · Score: 4, Interesting

Most of the Microsoft Word files that we downloaded, for example, did not use mathematics, outlines, tracking changes, or other such features.
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?

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In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these. - Paul Harvey
Maybe it's not just compatibility - but exposure by MadX · 2003-09-02 22:10 · Score: 5, Interesting

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"

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 /Windows Sale. Maybe that is where projects like OpenOffice need to have "boxed" releases that the public can SEE the choice on the shelves.
missing data? by Sparr0 · 2003-09-02 22:14 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.
Re:Office 97 - All You'll Ever Need by pubjames · 2003-09-02 22:21 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.
SO 6.1 beta has PDF output by panurge · 2003-09-02 22:23 · Score: 4, Interesting

It's worth noting that the Star Office 6.1 beta has PDF output available, which works nicely. It has also managed to cope rather well with the Office stuff I have thrown at it, including Powerpoint. The main problem is the lack of support for certain Excel structures (PivotTables, anyone), though privately I think that these have no place in a properly designed IT system- if you need this stuff you should be using a proper database engine and front end to give control.
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.

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Features by ajs318 · 2003-09-02 22:27 · Score: 5, Interesting
I was made to do some text editing in MS Word in my last job. I had to modify a document somebody else had started.

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
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Re:important to note by madmarcel · 2003-09-02 22:54 · Score: 4, Interesting

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 >:\
Re:Office 97 - All You'll Ever Need by azaris · 2003-09-02 23:14 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.
Re:Results not valid for everyone by WARM3CH · 2003-09-03 00:07 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.
I work as researcher in a university. I use Word with EndNote and MathType. In Excel I write lots of VBA scripts and I embed all these in PowerPoint presentations as objects. In all these three cases I can almost never successfully import such files to Star/OpenOffice. Maybe it works fine for simpler documents but when you start to make more complex documents, the open solutions simply are not matured yet. Besides scientific applications, there are other areas that Microsoft Office is yet much better. My mother language is Persian and I create lots of documents mixing Persian and English (Persian is written from right to left). Eventhough recent versions of Star/OpenOffice have started to support Unicode, yet when you have LTR (left to right) and RTL (right to left) languges in the same paragraph things do not go very smooth. And what about outlining, creating table of contents, indexes ... in a RTL language?
Re:important to note by Laur · 2003-09-03 01:00 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

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When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
Get this... by duncanatlk · 2003-09-03 02:34 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.