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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's what slashdat needs. Spalling is not "compatable" with nerdness. At least the British are coherent in their massacring of the latin vowels.
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.
"Hey, another reason NOT to upgrade to the new version!"
New version of what? The Microsoft or the OpenOffice?
If OpenOffice, is there something wrong with it? Please, tell me, why shouldn't I upgrade?!
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
As they say themselves, this was based on files downloaded from the Internet, which were probably designed in order to be viewed by the greatest number of people.
Hmmm... Then again, putting MS Office files on the Internet, instead of PDF of plain HTML probably means the user do not have enough computer knowledge to optimize said files. So, it's a good point.
On the other hand, I am surprised that the numbers for StarOffice are greater than the numbers for OpenOffice... How come?
Anyway, this is good news, and should be a valuable lesson for most people with PHBs... =)
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
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.
Clearly, the intention of this settlement wasn't so that everyone could simply see what's in, for example, a word document (which is a communication protocol in itself), but how to build program which interoperate with them. Shouldn't the developers of Open Office then be able to simply download the DOC specs off of Microsoft.com and build it into their system? Or, am I assuming that the "settlement" was an actual binding agreement?
Word 97 is a perfectly adequate word processor. So was Word 95 for that matter.
Word 2004 can't be many lines of code from self-awareness.
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.
Operating Systems progressing through research and improved hardware I can understand; but you DO NOT need a new version of a bleedin' word processor every year.
... Not upgrading isn't an option for a lot of people. They simply get a computer either preconfigured through their IS department, or preconfigured by Dell or Gateway.
As soon as 'the boss' is unable to open your budget report written in OpenOffice, guess what he'll demand from you..
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
The problem is when someone important (a customer, a government) expects you to read a file in the locked-in format and you don't have MS Office. It's troublesome to convince your customers to save the files into HTML/CSV/TXT/whatever before sending them to you or publishing on the Web. So practically you have to pay for the MS Office licence to be compatible with everyone else. Hopefully this will change.
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..
"Though Microsoft may soon be blocking Office suite compatability with open source productivity tools"
Microsoft may soon be blocking office compatibility with ANY productivity tools. They don't care whether the source is open or closed, just that it is not a Microsoft product.
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 $0
It's the PHB's which cause lock in, not the technically adept admins. Your PHB gets shiny new laptop with shiny new MS Office all pre-installed they write some inane bullshit about something irrelevant and mail it to everyone under the sun utterly oblivious to the fact that there is such a thing as a file format.
Because PHB is their boss the rest of corporate minions now have to upgrade to the shiny new locked up tighter than a virgin's snatch version of Office in order to read the irrelevant inane bullshit.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
This more or less confirms my experiences I've had with MS Office -> OpenOffice interoperability in everyday use. While using Windows at work, I use Linux at home, and so far I've only had minor issues moving between the two worlds. So what's the deal about the story?
-- Power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
You really should care if you can log in via LDAP in a Windows AD; or if you can share a file betweens different OSs, or be able to map a network drive.. but file formats ?
If you want to send anything to outside your organization, send if in PDF format. Its portable and "write-protected".
And inside your organization, for sure someone already has ditacted a office package as "the standart". If it is Windows Office, KOffice or StarOffice, it doesn't matter, because everybody will use the same product.
If you get some of this files from outside, just use one of the many converters available around.
The problem with the Linux Office packages is simply one:
Everybody that already worked 2 days with a computer knows how to work with MS word, MS powerpoint and MS excel. Switching to another office package is seen as a dificult task, because the interface is always diferent.
My 2euros (cents dont buy you anything these days)
Micro$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
an academic report backing real-world experience!
Although it must be said that this study is *quite basic*. The authors, to be fair, do point out however that "This particular experiment should be considered a pilot study that could be extended to a larger one.
Our experience in the 'real' world is exactly the same - compatiblity, for the most part, is *good enough*.
We have been rolling out small pilots with a number of clients using exactly this line of reasoning. For many IT departments who have lived through the *gratuitous incompatibilities* between succesive generations of Microsoft Office, this is all that is required to evaluate alternatives.
Yes, we should strive for 'perfect' interoperability. No, it is not necessary to begin migrating real businesses to an Open Source desktop.
Just my 0.02!
What Microsoft is about to do, is to introduce an enourmously complex, ill-documented format. Just wait'n'see.
Don't forget incompatibility between formats used in some of their different MS Office versions.
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
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.
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.
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.
Word and Excel are fine in Office 97, but Outlook is not. Outlook 97 sucks, and Microsoft had to release Outlook 98 upgrade free for Outlook 97 users. There is still room for improvement even for Outlook XP, you will see some cool stuff in Outlook 2003.
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.
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.
Apart from the arguments already made above, there is another argument: If you save a file to csv, html, or whatever, you *lose* information.
My information is mine, Microsoft prevents me from exporting my data from its closed formats, that's vendor lock-in.
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
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!
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).
Consider: You're in Mega Corporation and you're running Office 97. One day, the guys running XP with the latest Office pre-installed start sending you Word and Excel files. It doesn't matter that these documents use none of the new Office features, and may even use the same file format: your Office 97 doesn't recognize them, and you can't do your work any more. So, you shell out for the newest Office. And then, of course, everyone you send your documents to has to upgrade as well.
God, what a racket! Why anyone in his right mind does business with MS is beyond me: you wind up so screwed.
[this
What I really would like to see was, if they'd tested Microsoft Office as well. By that I mean, they should try opening the same documents in, say, Office 97 and test it the exact same way as the others.
The article does mention that, but I reckon most readers will just look at the table and say "I need 100% - I'll take MS office"
What was tested here was how well different office suites could READ documents that were (most likely) produced with MS Office (since MS Office has a 9x% market share, and it's unlikely that you generate .doc for web dissemination if you're using Open Office).
Unfortunately, this tells us very little about interoperability, as needed in an office/colaboration environment, where people need to read my files and my revisions to their files.
Just to read other people's files, I prefer a format like PDF anyways.
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.
This story, published on SlashDot less than 24 hours ago, notes that interoperating with the next version of the Word format may soon be a DMCA violation due to design decisions being made by MS (i.e. using DRM "features" in the format itself).
.DOC format everyone else will be using. (And if you think everyone won't upgrade eventually, you're wrong. When Win95 came out, people said that adoption would be slow... and then when Win98 came out... and so on. How many people are running Win95 today?)
What good is OpenOffice if it's illegal? It'd get railroaded right off of the "legitimate" Internet just like DeCSS, and if someone finds out that you used it, you could very well go to jail. Not my cuppa.
I wish that we in the SlashDot community would have a longer memory, and that we would organize some sort of community against the DMCA (for it is the law which permits this sort of egregious BS). We should be rallying in the streets, but we're not. Pretty soon we may all be FORCED to buy a PeeCee with Windows and MS Office, or we will be completely unable to interoperate with the DRM-"protected"
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
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
The problem is when someone important (a customer, a government) expects you to read a file in the locked-in format and you don't have MS Office. It's troublesome to convince your customers to save the files into HTML/CSV/TXT/whatever before sending them to you or publishing on the Web. So practically you have to pay for the MS Office licence to be compatible with everyone else. Hopefully this will change.
That isn't lock-in, that is someone sending you a file in a format you don't like. I've had people send me files in PDF when I needed a Word file, but that isn't lock-in either. If you are hired by a person or company to do a job, you need to make sure you accommodate them, and that includes using whatever they want for file (within reason). If they send you something in Word, you use Word because that is what the customer wants, not because MS has somehow now mysteriously "locked you into" Word. It's not MS's fault that someone you deal with uses Word and you don't want to. That's not lock-in, that's you now liking how businesses operate.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
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]
What would have made the article truly compelling would have been to also have compared things like Wordperfect and even MS Office itself. I haven't seen quite the same comparison of word processors or office suites in years, like 6 or 7. If Star Office and Open Office meet or exceed the compatibility of the commercial alternatives, that's a huge step.
Many businesses are petrified to move from MS Office and Windows but won't look for themselves at alternatives. They believe what they see in print and a comparison like that includes other commercial suites as well as MS Office would be very compelling. Most of you have heard things like "well, PC Magazine says if I snort onions through my none, Windows won't crash as much" and they just believe it and might even do it because they read it somewhere.
I don't think MS Office would achieve a 100 in any category either. Just from the font issues that crop up, formating issues, use by one person of a feature that another doesn't have installed, etc., would keep it down to 97-99 range also most likely. But it needs to be seen in print.
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
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 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.
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?
You also have the problem of evolving file formats. Take the .doc format for example. This file format has continued to change and the only time us poor old users find out is when we can't read a document or it "seems wrong". The whole thing is undocumented and the world is forced to upgrade as newer versions of .doc files are propogated.
Personally, I was happy with Word 6.0. From my perspective, Word 95 added long file names, Word 97 added incompatibilites, Word 2000 attempted to fix them and Word XP does away with MDI. I don't need anything newer than Word 95, but have to use Word 2000 because of incompatible .doc files.
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
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.
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.
I've had this one out several times with my kids on their school reports. Their first instinct is to make things look pretty on the page - using spaces and the enter key. I've told them to just type in the content, and THEN we'll go after formatting.
Some of the time they even listen. Most of the time now they pretty much do this stuff on their own, so I don't know how they're doing it. When they ask for help, I get my opinion noted.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
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...
It would then be desirable to be able to use this as part of my Perl, PHP, C, Java, and Python programs which I have to run a lot at work. That way I can, for instance, write custom forms to input timesheets, generate the timesheets on the fly as *.xls, store them to disk, send them via email, and generally decrease the amount of time it takes to get common clerical tasks completed for the employees, and (hopefully) they'd better spend the 5-10 minutes a week we saved by... I dunno... working.
If there's any tools out there that do this already, and I've just missed the boat (or several), I'd love to know. But if there's nothing out there, I'd love to do it myself. It's the doing that gives me pause. ;)
If you include Wine in the mix, then the answer is a resounding...sometimes.
The competition should have scored major bonus points for not using clippy! That annoying little Fscker!
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
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
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.
For small and mid-size businesses,the key is the brain-dead quick-learning-curve personal database with good reporting capabilites. Once OOO has an Access killer, it will be unstoppable. People will work around the file format issues.
The OOO data design tools that allow you to work with MySQL and PostgresSQL via unixODBC are a start, but still too difficult for the average Joe.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
This story, published on SlashDot less than 24 hours ago, notes that interoperating with the next version of the Word format may soon be a DMCA violation due to design decisions being made by MS (i.e. using DRM "features" in the format itself).
.DOC format everyone else will be using. (And if you think everyone won't upgrade eventually, you're wrong. When Win95 came out, people said that adoption would be slow... and then when Win98 came out... and so on. How many people are running Win95 today?)
Take off your tinfoil hat. The DRM feature is not a part of the file format itself. It's a feature in Office that you can turn on when you save a document, so that you can secure it for other people in your company only to read it! It's not even on by default.
What good is OpenOffice if it's illegal? It'd get railroaded right off of the "legitimate" Internet just like DeCSS, and if someone finds out that you used it, you could very well go to jail. Not my cuppa.
Well, your wild-eyed conspiracy isn't going to happen, so relax.
I wish that we in the SlashDot community would have a longer memory, and that we would organize some sort of community against the DMCA (for it is the law which permits this sort of egregious BS). We should be rallying in the streets, but we're not. Pretty soon we may all be FORCED to buy a PeeCee with Windows and MS Office, or we will be completely unable to interoperate with the DRM-"protected"
Next time, actually RTFA that you're linking to.
"Sufferin' succotash."
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.
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
That is, until the next version of MS Office, which has patented technology in its file formats. Even attempting to read/write that new version will be a patent violation! So much for limitless interoperability...
Guess what? This is a major opportunity for OpenOffice.Org. The reason why Mickeysoft hasn't made major changes to its file formats in SIX YEARS is because of user resistance. Every time a file format change has been suggested, there is a loud chorus of Fortune 1000 companies that scream "No! Don't do it! We don't want to convert all our documents!" And in the past, when the Fortune 1000 corporations scream, MS listens. However, they aren't listening now, perhaps to their peril.
We need to start pushing OpenOffice.Org as a viable alternative to having to change file formats. And what's more...it's FREE! And it runs beautifully on Windows! It even runs usably on a 233MHz G3 PowerBook with only 192MB RAM running Yellow Dog Linux! It might not be able to deal with the fancy stuff, but then again, older versions of MS Office can't either! It IGNORES Word/Excel macro viruses! There is such a compelling business case for a big switch to OO.O it's not even funny.
We might not be able to get the Fortune 1000 to switch to Linux on the desktop. But we certainly can get the Fortune 1000 to switch to OpenOffice.Org on their Windows desktops.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
We all know MS is going to release Yet Another Office Upgrade. And we know it's going to break compatibility with OpenOffice and other alternative suites. And we can probably count on MS using DRM/DCMA to prevent anyone from reverse-engineering the format.
It is important to begin telling everyone you regularly communicate with that you will NOT accept MS Office file formats that are not backwards compatible with Office 97.
Let them know well ahead of time, so that the meme gets well-implanted long before MS starts filling their heads with advertising.
Let your contacts know that it is their responsibility to ensure their documents can be used by others.
In this way, you will help encourage people to look to alternative office suites, think twice about upgrading to MS Office, and will encourage greater use of compatible file formats.
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
It's not supposed to be a freaking troll. Why does the truth always get downplayed as a troll on SlashDot?
.DOC compatibility in their programs). If you disagree with my interpretation, so be it... but my track record is quite good. When Bush was elected and everyone downplayed the dangers, I said "A, we're going to get into a war. Or more thant one. And B, Microsoft is going to get let off the hook." And lo and behold, I was right on both counts.
I simply provided a link to a previous SlashDot story, along with the message that I took away from it (i.e. that it may soon be illegal for any non-MS entity to offer
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
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 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:
Where do you want to go today?
How do I look at my old data?