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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.
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 submitter meant that the generally good compatibility of other office suites with Microsoft Office was a good reason to switch away from Microsoft.
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.
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.
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.
Yes. OpenOffice is pure evil and will bring about the rise of communism, followed by the fall of civilization. The skies will burn and the rivers will turn red with blood. The Great Old Ones will return to bring unimagined terror to mankind and it truly will be hell on earth.
Oh, wait, my mistake.. that's just the text of a Microsoft internal memo.
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).
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.
New version of what? The Microsoft or the OpenOffice?
New version of Microsoft Office. They're coming up with new incompatible file formats. Real bad for interoperability everywhere.
If OpenOffice, is there something wrong with it? Please, tell me, why shouldn't I upgrade?!
OpenOffice is just fine, and each new revision brings better MS Office compatibility.
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...
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
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
Yeah, I keep hearing rumors about a Spice Girls reunion too.
==========
Error in module creativity.dll : Unable to create witty comment.
Abort / Retry / Ignore ?
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.
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.
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?"
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. ;)
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
"Standardized consistent spellings coincided with the rise of dictionaries"
Correct.
"which are the authority on spelling and usage of words."
Incorrect. So incorrect, in fact, that it betokens a complete lack of understanding of the English language and how she is spoke; and spelled.
C has an authority. Java has an authority. French and Icelandic have authorities.
English does not. Nobody died and made Noah Webster king. Dictionaries are snapshots of the language as it exists in the majority opinion of a panel of experts ( who often disagree) and many ( if not most) dictionaries disagree with each other on certain particulars.
English is open source and we make it up as we go along.
KFG
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.
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.
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: