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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.
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
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..
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
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.
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.
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.
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 I don't understand by this is that under the US anti-trust settlement, Microsoft were made to release the specifications of their communication protocols to competitors.
That's true, in spirit. In actuality, if I remember correctly, the conditions under which MS is required to open the protocols for the office products contain at least two rather difficult obstacles:
1 - Licensing fees
2 - J. No provision of this Final Judgment shall:
MjM
Oops, they did it again...
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
Yeah, I keep hearing rumors about a Spice Girls reunion too.
==========
Error in module creativity.dll : Unable to create witty comment.
Abort / Retry / Ignore ?
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.
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
Great,
so I buy an entire Office Suit for an email client?
Something must be amiss here.
It is starting to get funny sort off, as I unwrangled myself at home from Windows now for a couple of years and see just how far OpenOffice has come. Even at work most of the stuff I work on I create in OpenOffice and then save it into Windows format so that others can use it.
I was starting to think last night and realized the only reason I do HAVE to use windows at work is so that I can use Exchange (calendar) and get virus scanned 3 times a day from the Helldesk.
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
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...