Slashdot Mirror
Israeli Ministry of Commerce Picks OO.org Over MS
CaptainT writes "According to this article in The Register Microsoft office was replaced by Open Office in the Israeli employment agency.
MS scorns the defection...
This follows current Israeli antitrust legislation and the recent release by IBM and Sun of Hebrew support in OpenOffice.org. Is the Israeli Defence Force going to follow?"
Well, one thing that completely stopped OO adaptation in our lab was that the math symbols always came out garbled when importing or exporting Word files.
The owls are not what they seem
The specific office moving to OO do not maintain their own computers. They are on contract from IBM, and IBM preferred OO to Word.
The contract is global, and the ministry does not pay more (or less) because of it. MS received quite some scorn over that, as their initial press release was claiming this is going to cost 50$/station. When the correction came in that OO was used rather than star office, their corrected response was seeked. They declined to comment.
Another twist is that the Mac angle was not raised, not even once. I believe The Register put it in because they were the first to flag that.
I must say it warms my heart - but I'm a bit pessimistic, you see ... Israel has got some of the best politicians money can buy; And, judging from the enthusiastic appearance of two of our ministers in Microsoft's latest "microsoft in the government expo" in Italy, I think Microsoft Israel is well aware of the commodity status of Israeli politicians.
Do others think that MS Office has added many new core features since then (and I'm not talking about getting clipart from the web)? My mother has been using MS Word exclusively for 8 hours a day since version 3.0. She knows and uses all of the shortcuts (she does not even use a mouse), and all of the features. I recently upgraded her from 97 to 2002. She has read the manuals, and can't find anything new that she would use.
OpenOffice.org is not slow - takes time to start but later on works OK. It's not bloatware either. Insert image of tens of KB in size into oowriter and save the result in MS Word format. Check the document size - it'll be around the size of the image itself. Now do the same using MS Office 2000. How many MB is that .doc big now?
European Union: 380+ million
India: 1.05 billion
China: 1.27 billion (American billion = 10^9)
Huh?
Insert->Field->Page Number
This is hard?
At least OpenOffice doesn't sometimes forget how to count when deciding what page numbers to use.
I've seen word randomly skip a number before.
Follow me
I have been looking at OO to replace Office 2000 at my workplace and I just gotta wonder what the hell you have been smoking...
1. Speed: There's no point in being 100% compatible with MS Office, if it's 200% slower
In my tests, there were in most cases no speed penalty. It seems to take longer to load ONLY when MS's utility to load most of the components for Office at boot (located in the Startup folder)is loaded. We have to disable this because it causes other applications we use to crash and uses far too many resources (which may be part of the reason for crashes). When this is disabled, load times are virtually identical.
When up and running, I see no speed difference on the 733/128M test machine I have been using.
2. Bloated: Same as MS Office.
Huh? the download file for OO 1.1 is 73Mbytes. The service pack SR1a for Office 2000 is 50 Mbytes.
3. No option to install a dumbed-down version.
The only reason I install limited versions of Office 2000 is because of the insane disk requirements for the entire package and the fact that we don't use Outlook for security reasons or Clippy for sanity reasons. As mentioned above, when the entire download is only 73 Mbytes, I don't feel so limited with OO. I can download and install OO in less time than Office takes to install from CD.
Now, all that being said, we still have some issues with OO. Our existing product manuals are all written in Word. They don't all translate cleanly; mostly formatting issues in the headers and footers. However, I gotta mention that these were similar to the issues we had when we moved from Office 97 to Office 2000.
Have you actually installed and run Office and OO on the same machine and compared them head-to-head? The first 3 items in your list would seem to indicate that you have not.
Section "Page Styles and Page Numbers" in the OpenOffice 1.0 help-file.
I had the same problem you had, and I hacked my way through -- putting a white rectangle graphic over the page number in the first page. It was only later that I read the help files. =)