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Why You Should Choose MS Office Over OO.org
sander writes "As noted on linxfr.org, Microsoft has published a competitive guide on OpenOffice.org 1.1 vs Microsoft Office. Some of the weirder things they claim in it is that by choosing MS Office over OpenOffice.org one is protected from the threat of viruses. But the giant seems to be sweating -- and with a good reason."
also, here is a translation of the link to linuxfr.org. Slashdot should have posted another link to the english version- i don't think the majority of
is it just me, or is microsoft the one who we usually hear about leaving bugs unresolved for months?
Well, that's a great argument. No, it isn't. The opening line was, "Open Office is good enough. I only need basic functionality." And Microsoft's response is, "No, you don't! You need more than that!" Well, thanks. I'm glad you know what we need more than we do.
Another argument they make is "User support such as training (OpenOffice UI, although similar in many ways to Office, is not the same and users may require 'retraining')."
Well, that's also swell! I'm glad Microsoft has assumed that we'd need retraining, because obviously everyone was originally trained using MS Office. I'm glad they assume that. That makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. So what about everyone who hasn't had training in either?
I'll leave the rest of the fallacies to more experienced users than myself.
Oo is vulnerable? lol
I chose MS Office because I like throwing away my money. I am also a moron. That is why I have a chandelier hanging in my car.
I also reply below your current threshold.
Some of the weirder things they claim in it is that by choosing MS Office over OpenOffice.org one is protected from the threat of viruses
yes because i get all sort of virus alerts about new security threats for open office.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
The path is:
/partner/salesmarketing/opensource/discguides
Disc stands for "disinformation campaign"
One of the things I find most interesting about this guide is how much it focuses not on how MS-Office is better but on the many inconveniences you will suffer by switching away from it. They focus on the pains of data migration, macros, and training. And to the question "What if OpenOffice has all the features I need" they don't attempt to refute the claim, they point to all the pain you will feel when MS-Office users start sending their "full-featured" documents to people who only have OpenOffice. MS-Office was feature-complete as of Office 95, everything else is not simply window dressing, it's down-right irritating
Microsoft Office is cheaper!
Obviously when you pay more for a product you get more in return.
jk
With the moo and the cow and the fish. Minesweeper Record: 7 sec
Inch by lonely inch, the Open Source Movement/Linux/whateveryouwannacallit matures and grows more powerful.
And M$ says they won't release a new version for (what was it?) three years? Five?
Meanwhile the opensource coders and fans continue whittling away in the trenches, refining their dreams and ever more gradually making MS look pretty damned bad and ugly.
I think of where Linux distros are today compared to 5 years ago -- and I think about where they will be 5 years ahead!!
It's a beautiful thing!
--
om Shanti
"by choosing MS Office over OpenOffice.org one is protected from the threat of viruses."
That is why any one uses Microsoft products, duh!
"Microsoft Office vs OpenOffice" document, published by Microsoft in ... PDF format.
Amusing...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Hmmm. If Microsoft considers OpenOffice a sufficiently mature product that it warrants a comparison, then I guess it is time for me to compare.
Many of the same people who could possibly be swayed by this probably haven't heard of OpenOffice.org anyway. This is free publicity.
I can't imagine anyone seriously basing their purchasing decisions off of such a document, although I'm sure someone here has an acquaintance who can disappoint my small amount of faith in humanity.
Sharpies don't just sniff themselves.
That is one of the things that stuck out to me... Given the longstanding bugs in Windows, and the lack of support to end-users when bugs do occur, I'd say this is a case of the pot calling the stainless steel pan black.
Same FUD
And yet the comparison document is in a format that can't be read by MS Office, but CAN by OpenOffice.org...not a great idea :)
Chris
Of course Microsoft would create this document using their own products, naturally, they are the big proponent of the "Eat Your Own Dog Food" methodology.
So why then when I click on Document Properties on this PDF do I see?
Creator: QuarkXpress 4.11
Producer: Acrobat Distiller 4.05 for Macintosh
Bill: while you're transferring this over to Microsoft Publisher perhaps you'd like to fix the typo on page 1: "rteam".
John.
"B-but, Open Office doesn't have Clippy, the helpful paper clip. Or a wizard. Or a little Microsoft logo that tells you when you're writing a letter (because obviously, you don't know). We even have a helpful little puppy! You like puppies, don't you? Everybody likes puppies! Fine, go ahead and use Open Office, puppy killer!"
...so OpenOffice doesn't have a dedicated support rteam? :-)
Paragraph 3.
OpenOffice does not have a dedicated development or
support rteam.
What is a rteam?
I'm forced to use Office XP here at work. XYZ pharmaceutical company I work for is certainly not going to be moving to a desktop other than Windows, so I'm stuck with Office XP. That being said, I'm glad to see MS reacting to the threat of OO. If it means they have to put an extra group of developers/debuggers to make the damn thing work better, I'm all for it.
As much as I'd like to see OO make huge inroads into the multinational corporations, I know that's at least half-a-dozen years down the road. So in the meantime, if I can have a product that does not completely suck....well....make the workday go by faster.
Chris Knight is my hero.
then, they laugh at you
then, they fight you <-- you are here
then you win
Will step 4 happen? Stay tuned.
"All the cool kids are using Microsoft Office, why aren't you?"
Is that really the best they can do?
Can someone give a +5 (thousand) to the MS guy who wrote the part about viruses!? Rolling on the floor from hysterical laughter!
I like the fact that this document is a PDF which stangely enough I can generate quite easily from OO. To do the same thing in Word however I have to be running Acrobat... ($$$$)
Good to see Microsoft 'debating' these things though - means that OO is popping up on their radar.
1. Never mention the name of your competitor.
Once a company names their competitors in marketing literature, you know the company is losing ground. Or so the marketers say. I'm not sure if I believe it though
Here's a reason, because MS Office is integrated well with Windows. Open Office isn't. If you are using Ximian products then Open Office would be the correct choice. Perhaps they should say if you use Windows use MS Office, if you use Linux use Open Office. OOo should focus on the Linux desktop integration and forget about Windows compatibility. Migrating everyone to a Linux desktop is part of the Linux Jihad isn't it?
You notice that their document is PDF, OOo makes PDF creation easy for the crowds (Export as PDF button) whereas MSWord makes it a pain in the ass ("printer driver" / Acrobat Distiller combination...)
If it's good enough for microsoft, why not just us acrobat :)
"Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it" Richard Feynman
...but that was really a pitiful attempt. You'll find that you'll have more success if you don't say things like "penguin shit". Also, saying "but until there's that legal murkiness" just doesn't make any sense.
Back to the drawing board, my young Jed^H^H^H^HTroll.
And find Open Office to be decent, but a far cry from being useful. It was clunky for anything beyond basic usage, which I expect is what the /. crowd thinks is most important. It was a pain in the ass just to take notes with, though and was soon ditched with little care. Bullets were a hassle, advanced formats were a nightmare, even saving files was annoying. Pass this crud on by, it is just not worth the acclaim everyone is giving it. Still tripe when in actual use.
Created on a Mac.
Nice.
First Reply.
--- What
Paper Clip Guy
Congrats to OO.org!
When you put something together that is good enough the bloated Micro$oft blimps bother to put out a publication libeling your product you KNOW you have to be doing something right!
Kudos!
Why don't you embrace your slashbotness instead of living in a dreamworld?
Now, why can't OO.org open those documents? It's not because OO.org doesn't want to, or isn't up to date; the reason is because Microsoft keeps the method of opening those documents secret! They drive out the competition by not letting them know how to open the files. This justifies the EU's recent actions even more.
Hmm...funny, when I check that box, Microsoft loses every time!
I can say with a mere skim that this guide just smells like BS from the get-go. The only advantag e that MS Office has over OO.org is loading time. Nothing more. And I think it's more than a bit jammy of Microsoft to publish a "competitive" guide. The hypocrisy of them is fucking unbelievable. I'll be glad when they're gone; they haven't made any useful software since Encarta.
After reading this, it looks like they are marketing OO!! I mean, sure it doesn't have Clippy and all (more features) and it doesn't have an email client (umm, do we really need another anyways?), but personally, I _hate_ Clippy.
Why didn't they put the "System Requirements" of Office? I mean, if it's a comparison shouldn't you put some sort of "comparison" information somewhere? That alone would show that OO is multi-platform, a HUGE benefit for most business..
The open-source community should be using this paper to hype OO, IMHO it does a great job!
Mod +5 Drunk
This quote made me stop:
I only need basic features. OpenOffice is good enough."
In today's networked, highly collaborative world, businesses do not operate in a vacuum; basic feature functionality that enables content authoring is only one small aspect of what a small business needs.
It reminded me of an incident that happened several years ago. I was working at a company with close ties to Microsoft when the "I Love You" virus struck. Both Microsoft and our company were hit hard by it. A couple days after the messy cleanup, I sent a Word doc to a Microsoft employee. It was a form we used often and it had a macro that allowed the recipient to fill in some check boxes.
I got a nasty reply from the microsoft employee about how it was irresponsible to send word docs with macros in this time of virus vulnerability. Since then, I have used as few of the gimmicky features that MS Office supplies. They don't add much to your documents, and they set you up for virus and incompatibility problems. Only using basic features isn't something you should settle for, it is a good rule to follow to avoid lots of nasty problems.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
M$ is right about one thing- migration is the most painful and expensive part. Unlike using M$ products, though, the pain stops afterwards.
---
SCO is weenies
Gator is Spyware
Microsoft is thugs
I was amused by the claim that OO was inferior because "if bugs [in OO] go unresolved, users have the option to resolve problems by...".
:-)
This apparently contrasts with MS Office, where if bugs go unresolved, users do not have any options.
Ok. I knew that, but I'm surprised that MS raised it as a point.
It's true!
Nine out of ten British housewives cannot tell MS Office from a dead crab!
Seriously, though, it does seem like the very fact that MS is paying attention to the open source stuff means a lot.
But you can't convince a British housewife of that.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
We've already discussed most of what's in this document. For example:
3. "OpenOffice 1.1 is an open source alternative." OpenOffice does not have a dedicated development or support team. Consequently, if bugs go unresolved, users have the option to resolve problems by scouring through numerous community sites and chat rooms.
MS has been saying things like this about OSS for years. Of course they don't mention what your options are if a bug in MS Office goes unresolved.
Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?
Too expensive, no useful additions in years.
I'm still using Office 97 on my Windows computer. It cost me about $70 when I got it, and it's functionally identical to the Office 2000 and Office XP that my university and workplace use. The additions in the last several iterations of Office have been of only niche usefullness, and you can usually get something to do that with 97 anyway.
At least with OO, I'm not asked to pay another $150 every year or two just to get a new font, or a new text overlay effect that I could do with the old one anyway.
Creator: QuarkXPress(tm) 4.11
Producer: Acrobat Distiller 4.05 for Macintosh
Hilarious.
Microsoft became the juggernaut that they are by selling a shitload of software that's just "good enough," and now they say that people shouldn't be satisfied with the "good enough" OO.org.
~Philly
Fortunatly, anyone can download OpenOffice and make their own judgement about it. I myself, prefer GNU Emacs :)
The spell checker must not work on that doc (or they didn't use it or they have some strange settings)
"support rteam."
Maybe others, but that one was glaring @ me (it is right beneath the 3. OpenOffice 1.1 is an Open Source alternative)
Also what is this OpenOffice they refer to? I know of an OpenOffice.Org and they mention that "OpenOffice" is a trademark owned by someone else.
I guess they've never tried to resolve an MS issue as a lowly home user, slogging through the MS "knowledge base". I usually end up Googling for answers to my MS Office questions.
I could kill you, sure, but I could only make you cry with these words
The best part has to be "with an R&D budget of over $4.8 billion, Office is a core Microsoft business."
$4.8 billion, and it's not up to par, IMO, with OpenOffice
Setec Astronomy
This is amazingly petty of me, but I can't stomach using OpenOffice since they changed the name of the software to "OpenOffice.org". What, was "OpenOffice" not getting the point across?
Sigh. I suppose I should at least be thankful that they didn't call the individual components calc.openoffice.org, writer.openoffice.org, and so on.
However, pettiness aside, to the uneducated, the ".org" at the end is thoroughly confusing. Ever tried recommending it to someone? "Hey, you should switch from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org!" "Oh, you mean I can create my spreadsheets on the web?"
Perhaps if they spent more time making it less resource-intensive than Microsoft Office, it might actually be a contender. For now, I'll stick with Microsoft Office on my Mac when I have to use it, and LaTeX otherwise. PDFs for everybody!
Pining for the days when The Glorious MEEPT!!! graced SlapDash with his wisdom.
WHY open office can't format Office Documents correctly.
my other sig is a commando
...whoever has the best marketing.
YOU'RE THE MAN NOW DOG!
Wouldn't they want to distribute this comparison in .doc format instead of a pdf?
I was so confused but now I see the light, thanx Microsoft. I didn't realize that I needed to spend $500 bucks just to do basic word processing at home. But you showed me otherwise.
I just bought a new computer and chose to skip getting MS Office on it, so I have been experimenting with OO.
My results so far: in general, I prefer MS Office. Perhaps it's just because I'm more familiar with its eccentricities, but I find many things about OO annoying.
I can't map functions to ALT keys, and the relatively simply "switch to style X" involves setting up a macro before I can bind it to a key.
It took me a long time to get section numbering right. Eventually it did work, but the vast array of options confused me and tweaking them introduced subtle problems of their own.
OO doesn't have book-style figure layout. (Neither does MSO.) Drawing is not easy, and not well integrated.
This is not an evaluation; this is just the list of things I wanted to do on day one that pissed me off. MS Office has its own problems, and many of those persist for version after version. But the devil I know is better than the devil I don't when all I want to do is get some work done.
I assume OO.o will get better, and I'm going to keep using OO.o to see what happens as I get more familiar with it. I sure can't beat the price.
At least OpenOffice doesn't come with that F'ing paperclip!
I believe this is just MS's marketing at work, we have probably seen those advertisements about XXX potatoe chips are 97% fat free, and 3% healthier than other competitors, but how many consumers really go to find out if it's true? and if it is, how things are compared? since number/percentage can easily be tweaked to your advantage.
However, my real question is, does OO.org already have a similar Competitive Guide Why people should use OO.org?
Open Source users 'in the know' probably can understand the benefits in the sleep, but how many average MS-only users? Bashing MS isn't always as effective as praising the alternative.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
"Consequently, if bugs go unresolved, users have the option to resolve problems by scouring through numerous community sites and chat rooms."
A current MS user might ask:
"You mean if instead of waiting months for a bug to be resolved, I can just logon and probably get a answer?! Shoot, otherwise, I might have to wait a few days"
Now that is definitely something a user would *not* want!!
Am I the only one to notic:
looks like someone is using Mac to produce good document to publish
Creator: QuarkXPress(tm) 4.11
Producer: Acrobat Distiller 4.05 for Macintosh
Step 5 - Profit!
-- Alastair
The shared document workspaces and the self-published websites are the only new thing useful in the office suite. This doc actually makes me WANT to check out open office.
Definetly.
From a developer's perspective, over the last year they have pushing Office 2003 down our (mainly MS based shop) throats. I can't rememeber how many free courses I have both declined and been to - all evangelising using a component of Office as part of the front end. (Not mention to all the free cd's of Office for us.)
Not a bad strategy - get the developers to build their apps requiring a cool little widget in Office 2003 so the customer HAS to upgrade to the latest version to use the app.
Thanks, but no thanks our customers are not keen when Office 97, Star or Open Office is fine for their needs.
Why all the support for bloated word processors? Plain text with Vi or your favorite text editor seems to be the better choice. And if you want fancy graphics and formatting, just write it in HTML.
The golden rule...he who has the gold rules.
.xls, .mdb), you have to be able to provide them. They don't want to hear "well .rtf blah blah conversion blah". They use Office and they're giving you money, so they call the shots. An internal debate between open-source principals and cash is a short one.
If someone is giving you money (employer or client) and they demand that you give them Office files (.doc,
-B
After rtfa (or rtfpdf) the basics alone made me laugh. Some examples: No sales force, Cross platform, No cost to download. A quote: Additionally, OpenOffice does not have an e-mail client, so customers may incur a licensing cost associated with buyin and e-mail application. Oh lord...as if any distro doesn't come with a billion email clients already. Thanks, MS, I needed that laugh today after dubugging your wacky VB.
I also reply below your current threshold.
OpenOffice does not have a dedicated development or support rteam. Consequently, if bugs go unresolved, users have the option to resolve problems by[...]
Let's hope the dedicated support team are a bit better than the dedicated proof-reading guys, eh? Come on! It's only a 2 page document for gods sake.
If you Must have MS Office, but don't want to use Windows just for that, you can use Microsoft office under linux. Either by wine or crossover office. It also works for other popular apps such as dreamweaver, quicken, photoshop and the like!
I don't care if you use MS office or not, just don't run it in windoze!
you insensitive... no wait.
Back in 1995, Microsoft Word had a problem with auto-page numbering in the footer of documents that affected the page numbers as well as the font used if changed from the default 12pt Times Roman. 9 years later, this exact same bug remains.
Actually, besides the already helpful OO.org developers, Novell has recently announced at brainshare that they will be giving full support for OO. From developers, to sales and user support. Not just for the linux part, but full OO support. Not a bad thing to have for those just getting into open source, or companies that need the assurances.
Why isn't this released from microsoft in one of their superior formats like Word or Powerpoint.
;-)
You'd think considering how superior they believe their products to be, they'd atlast use them.
Ah well, back to writing raw LaTex
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
One of my new clients had to go out and purchase yet another copy of MSOffice XP Small Business at $500.00 +/-. This is a stripped down Office version, no less. I have just set him up with OpenOffice to test and evaluate. I predict he just bought his last copy of MSOffice.
sig mind freed
"There are no such things as mutual fantasies. Yours bore us and ours offend you."
- Bill Maher
What did you expect them to say?
"Their product almost as good as ours, so don't bother giving us money."
Sales/marketing will say anything to promote their own stuff.
Remember...there was a marketing team for the Edsel and the Yugo.
Microsoft twisting the facts to their own advantage to try to scupper something better.
Gee...what are the odds!?
I'm amazing. You aren't. SUCK IT
I work in a US spinoff of a Japanese chemical company. As such, there are times when users here have to deal with documents from Japan, complete with Japanese fonts.
A rather nice lady reported a problem with an Excel document that contained Japanese fonts. The characters in the spreadsheet were appearing as squares rather than the proper Japanese characters. Naturally, this appeared to be a fonts problem, so my first attempt at a fix was to install the Japanese language set. Unfortunately, this didn't work, as the document STILL had nothing but squares where the Japanese characters should have been.
It looked as though it was a versioning issue. It looked like a document created with Japanese character with Excel 95 (the document seemed to have been created with that) could NOT display the characters properly in Excel 2000. I couldn't find any method of getting the document to show up properly in Excel 2000, and the solution seemed to be to install Excel 95, because that was the only application that would show the characters properly.
Then I remembered OpenOffice.
I didn't know if it would work, but I downloaded and installed OO 1.1. I opened the Japanese document, and to my surprise, I was greeted with the spreadsheet just as it should have appeared, complete with the Japanese characters. Not content to leave it at just that, I re-saved the document from within OpenOffice, then I opened it with Excel 2000. Lo and behold, the document appeared correctly! The only way that I could get a document created in Excel 95 to show up properly in Excel 2000 was with Open Office.
Needless to say, I related the solution to the network admin who had assigned me the task, recommending that OpenOffice be considered as an alternative or replacement to MS Office.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
I think the point that Microsoft is trying to make with office is that it's not just a word processor (like Notepad or MS Word).
Its an office, as the name stats, it has your contacts, your email client, a filing cabinet, abilities to track your information, memos Marcos way too much crap then most people will need.
Office is good in an office environment, where the tools available are put to use; small companies don't necessarily need all of these, in which case OO would be great.
TruePunk | Games
fencepost
just a little off
Microsoft Office has no threat of viral infection. That's because viral infection is very real. Hell, they ought to remove all doubt and just ship Microsoft Office pre-infected.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
By removing the trailing part in the link, including your search terms, like this
you get the cache without the search terms highlighted.
If you want to read the rest of the document under that opensource/ folder on Microsoft's site just try this Google search:
m icrosoft.com
http://www.google.com/search?q=opensource+site%3A
John.
DISCLAIMER: I've never used OpenOffice - my job is completely win32 based - so i don't know if you can open MSOffice docs with it. I have spent a little bit of time with StarOffice and KWord (sp?).
I'd say that OO will never be a serious threat to MSO until it can open, edit and save an MSO file. Otherwise theres just too many users of MSO out there for anyone to bother changing. Why would you cripple yourself like that?
I'm sure that the folks at MS are smart enough to know this as well, so will be protecting the file format as much as possible.
I have a customer with about two hundred Windows desktops. Most are win2k which are relatively trouble free, but they're so thrilled with XP (Wintendo) that they've blocked any more entering the enterprise after the first five. We're working on a Knoppix installation and the Mocha TN5250 client might be the final piece of that puzzle
Some users intially whined about receiving a non M$ office package, but they whined much less when the IS department started a charge back scheme. A few of the finance folks are heavily invested in Office and they will rightly stay there, the rest are very likely to get moved to OO the next time the M$ tax appears, and they'll have no choice if we get Knoppix to do everything that is needed
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
But the giant seems to be sweating -- and with a good reason.
Could it be because MS software is disgustingly bloated and unfit for the enterprise?
Microsoft: redefining the phrase "up to date" :)
Damn right. Socialist control of Europe is why their unemployment rates are so high. No economy can prosper if there isn't a right-to-work law. Say no to union shops!
...although only by inference. The one thing that keeps us from moving to OO tomorrow is the lack of a user-friendly, quick-learning-curve, brain-dead-reporting database application. And tools to get all the *&^$%% mission-critical .mdb's running around this office converted.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
I'm sorry, X11 is a pain in the ass. For now anyway a real office app for Mac means Microsoft (even as old-timers still pine for the days of Word 5.1 and its elegant simplicity).
sulli
RTFJ.
First: My primary office suite is currently OOo 1.0.3, which is what I'm running on top of Apple's X11 on Mac OS X.
/.?
That said, the only full featured native office suite for my platform seems to be MS Office, but (my anti-MS ideological questions aside) I've been reluctant to purchase a license, as it does not have Finnish language tools (spell check and hyphenation), even though using native apps - even MS ones - is a pleasure comparing to any X11 equivalents. But suddenly, MS has announced that the upcoming Office 2004 for Mac will fix that problem, which has made me consider purchasing a license. (OOo for Mac/X11 does not have Finnish support either, but at least I don't have to pay for the lack of it.)
And yes, I do need proper MS Office file formats support. Textedit.app's doc support is far from adequate, but that of OOo's is good. And I really need that Excel support too. PPT, OTOH, does not matter.
Any non-MS solution suggestions for me,
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
My emphasis, there. And I couldn't agree more. Handling issues of inaccessable Access databases is incredibly important, and is notorious for chewing up helpdesk hours.
Especially when Office 2000 broke Access compatibility with 98 databases, and forced everyone to upgrade (or to not touch the database with Access2000 so that those who had not yet upgraded could still get to their data).
OfficeXP did the same thing to 2000 databases - all it took was one XP user to touch the database, and all the 2000 users would suddenly be out of the loop. I fully expect Access2k3 to be the same way.
So yes, consider those Access databases as a major component of the cost of data migration. When one version of Access touches the database, be ready to install and deploy that same version to all your other clients, because with Access, you migrate your data whether you're ready to or not. And you pay every year for the privilige! Hooray!
'Cause then you would be a girlie-man.
we're Hans und Franz and we're here to pump you up!
I particularly like the part about support, "support when needed" Microsoft providing the resources where needed. I still get my MS support same place I get my Open Office support "google". My IT budget isn't big enough to pay a Microsoft employee to search tech net. Then tell me it will be fixed with the next service release.
Does anyone know how good are the database tools?
I really don't use either office suite for anything at all, except that I'll be needing to create a simple database for a local seminar and I don't konw if I should go with access or should give oo.o a try.
Office XP Standard = $349.99
OpenOffice = FREE.
That's it. That's the only reason. I don't care if MS Office is better or has more features or is protected from viruses...
[Two minutes of laughter later...]
I'm always going to go with the free option first. If it does what I need to do, I'm not going to pay for something else. Openoffice is perfectly sufficient for my occasionaly letter writing and the simple spreadsheets I use to manage my montly budget. And it costs me absolutely nothing. Until Microsoft offers a free version of Office XP, I'll use OOo regardless of how "inferior" it may be.
"1."OpenOffice is free."License cost makes up only a small portion of the total cost of ownership.More significant costs include: ... Data migration and testing (especially if customer uses Access database)
So they're saying that since you're already using their crappy product, switching off it might be expensive.
Document conversion and rewriting macros (OpenOffice does not support Office macros)
Is that supposed to be a bad thing? Office Macros are part of their "anti-virus API," right? ;) For shame...it doesn't support such a wonderful security flaw that has been the home of maliscious code for eons.
Additionally,OpenOffice does not have an e-mail client, so customers may incur a licensing cost associated with buying an e-mail application.
Yeah, outlook is "free" with MSOffice. That's why there are liscense costs with Exchange. Wait, you don't want exchange mail? Just regular smtp? Then use one of the billions of free email clients.
I love this world.
Hmmmm. I guess the fact that OpenOffice successfully opens .doc files from old versions of MSOffice that recent MSOffice revs can't read isn't interesting... or it's a fluke... Nah, must have been user error. Maybe I need to be retrained. Me glazzies! I can't shut me glazzies!
post on a debian forum?
FOAD redneck Freak.
Three points:
1) we realize you don't use 90% of the functions inside Office, but we know you just want to keep up. and with only M$ Office will you get all the features you don't need.
2) if we decide to change the proprietary document format, OOo will take time to catch up to us! just like older Office is incompatible with the newest Office, OOo will become incompatible every time we change the format!
3) you don't want "Open" Office! that's cubicles. you want your own "closed" office with a door and a view from the Window (TM)!
Another note: Do a side by side comparison of applications.
...
If MS Office has Access, you're looking at the professional version -- $700 (CDN) retail price for v2003. Also, if you need to include MS Visio to compete with OO Draw, add in another $300 (for Visio Standard, or $750 for Visio professional -- Standard is the more relevant comparison, OO Draw is very basic).
Total:
* MS solution: > $1,000
vs
* OO solution: bandwidth
Hmm. That $1,000 difference could buy a hell of a lot of "retraining"
Yes, thats almost 15% of the market. It may not sound like much, but that is potential billion$ not being made
Article here!
Plus if you haven't downloaded Openoffice.org, download it here
See, now, whereas some may call this a bug, isn't it far more positive to characterize it as a commitment to tradition? /. such a negative reputation...
It's you humorless types that give
How can I recover a corrupt document or template - and why did it become corrupt?
Some Tips and "Gotchas" for those who are new to Word
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
> "You can't have everything. Where would you put it?" -Steven Wright
:)
Everywhere.
I've been hearing about how Microsoft is starting to sweat for over a decade now. About how this or that proves that Microsoft will go down thanks to at least one of (Linux, Mac, Sony PlayStation, monopolistic practices, Apache, Open Office, WordPerfect, the list goes on and on). And yet, life goes on, and Microsoft and it's products are still here.
Certainly, one could see how all these harbingers of Microsoft's demise not panning out would make me skeptical.
Ignoring for a moment the snide tone of the post, and the flamebait headline, let's look at this realistically.
The company I work for evaluated OOo. I have managed to get them to use several other free software packages (notably perl rather than asp) but there's no way I could sell them on OOo. It's ugly, it's counterintuitive, and it inherits all the interface mistakes Office has -- and you can't get professional support for it. And so my office shelled out to get everyone copies of Office 2k3.
It's getting better, but it's not really a threat to Office. Yet. In the meanwhile, MS is probably responding to OOo out of precaution. If they didn't react at all to competing packages, they wouldn't be much of a company.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
Keep your Clippy, and your little dog too! I use the dynamic-duo of Open Office and Bonzi Buddy!
I used openoffice exclusively for about a year. It worked very well for most tasks, but I noticed some major stability issues once i integrated graphics into a large economics paper I was working on. In plain text, I had no complaints. With dozens of charts, graphs and other images, the file size ballooned to over 50mb, and open office wet the bed shortly thereafter. I ended up removing the images, moving all of the files over to MSOffice then reassembling the project. In my opinion, open office is great for everyday use, but isn't yet reliable enough for corporate use.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!
...I reverse red the title. I did read that it said: "Why You Should Choose OO.org Over MS Office". And now the title of my post (parent) really sucks.
Note to self: Never post when drunk...
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
I'd rather be a redneck and being rich in the US than being a miserable communist in the EUrinal. Americans laugh at 3rd worlders in the EUrinal
Some of the weirder things they claim in it is that by choosing MS Office over OpenOffice.org one is protected from the threat of viruses
Bill, give Darl his crack pipe back...
This is an excellent example of the damage MS has done to the computing world. MS Office, from the biggest, richest software company in the world, should be so advanced by now, that no one else could compare. If a group of people got together on the internet and designed a car that could be built from parts available from Home Depot, would Ford or GM have to explain to us why their cars are better?
FYI, If you want to hire someone etc. demand OOo or no job
Help fight continental drift.
Wow, it must be "internet day" in the trailer park.
.357 slugs on your trailers porch. That would give us all something to look forward too.
Does it hurt that the Euro is worth more than the greenback? Does it sting that the whole planet is against your "Shrub"? Does it offend you that any inhabitant of the EUrinal can afford medical care, and you can't? Does it burn your ass that you are living in the earliest stages of a dictatorship? Are you freaked out that all of your precious rights are going down the drain?
You are a perfect example of what the rest of the planet thinks of, when they think of americans, loud, outspoken, misinformed, and unimportant. Please, tell me that you are a zealot, and that if Bush doesn't win, you will have a light lunch of
Well, after all that hard reading, why not go back to nailing your sister.
I use openoffice as much as I can but one of the pains i often run into is accessing a spreadsheet with more than 32000 lines. Excel handles this no problem but openoffice still needs work
I love the retraining issue... shows how ignorant MS is of its own products. Ever try upgrading an organization from one major release of MS Office to another release? Where's the ______ menu now? How do I mail merge? The only thing they keep consistent between releases is that damn dancing singing talking paperclip.
That bug was so difficult to deal with most of the time that a lot of my papers wound up being numbered by hand either on the computer or with a pen once I printed it.
Y'know, you blow up one sun and suddenly everyone expects you to walk on water.
Author is encouraged to RTFA he's submitting. The blurb from MS says that there is an AV API available to MS-Office, not that it's immune to viruses.
That is the sound of me closing the door on Office and moving to OO. Reasons for this change:
1. MS does not make a good argument to not change, in fact they promoted their competitor IMHO.
2. If MS doesn't use Office to create press releases, why should I?
3. The pot has called the kettle black one two many times. Outlook, Office Macros, have been the cause of most of my virus problems, now they have let me know of a better option where I can do something to fix it.
4. Help menus that are more work than they are worth. I need a help menu for working with their help menus. Hmm, see #5.
5. F**king Clippy. 'nough said.
Disclaimer: I love openoffice (actually, Staroffice) and I use it every day.
The one aspect of OpenOffice that I have problems with is their macro language. Recording macros and writing my own functions for Excel is easier than the same task in OpenOffice. Is there a reason the OO team decided to reinvent the wheel and go with a different macro language?
The interesting thing about all this -- and about MS's responses to the user "questions" in the document -- is that MS has convinced itself that MS Office is more than just a tool to facilitate writing. All this colloboration shit just makes me woozy.
I mean, MS goes off about OO's lack of database connectivity, lack of formatting, lack of Office compatibility -- but they (MS) don't acknowledge that for some of us, all we need is a tool that enables us to *write*.
I mean, there are writers writing out there who are not part of an "enterprise" and who do, in fact, operate in a vacuum (much as MS would like to pretend that this isn't -- or can't be -- the case.)
When I sit and write, I sit down in a quiet room for a long, long period of time. My computer runs, and I type. It's fucking simple. I don't need to spend $500 every other year to get software that does, essentially, the same thing.
You're a week off!
How many times has your boss/manager purchased a product that has made no sense? Even when a cheaper better version exists?
This "report" is not targeted at us; it is for the gullible managers to consume. They will eat this up.
www.thejulingtoncreekplantaion.com
By choosing they mean stealing it and putting it on every windows machine I can find, right?
I wonder what Office's penetration would be like if 97 and 2000 had XP-like activation. The fact that MS, Adobe, et al turn a blind-eye to piracy on the residential and small business front to 'push' their products really hurts competitors who are trying to actually sell a product.
If Photoshop is all I know then that's going to be on my resume, its going to be taught at school, and my employer will have to buy another $500+ Photoshop license when she hires me.
If Office is all I know - same situation.
OO would be *everywhere* if the alternative wasn't borrowing a friend's Office CD, but actually paying for Office.
This is why I sometimes smile when I hear about the BSA (yes they are evil incarnate) cracking down on some shop without licenses. Instead of buying something cheaper or going OSS they chose to steal. At a certain point all that MS software suddenly isn't free. Funny how that works.
OpenOffice does not have a dedicated development or support rteam
Then they might have been able to use the MS Word Spell check feature.
Looks like they were in a rush to get that one out!
I would switch to OpenOffice.org today if it had docking toolbars (such as for the styles and formatting dialog). I saw a status item on one of their TODO lists related to this. Does anybody know which version this is supposed to be included in?
I'm sure most users running into dead ends like me simply uninstall the software without giving any comments about the software, so I thought I'd tell you the reasons to why I couldn't use OpenOffice for my intentions, mostly due to (to me) some rather fatal design mistakes or simply bugs.
I was using OO 1.1 on a Windows XP box.
These problems all apply to Calc.
1. Saving as character delimited files with fixed length is a lossy procedure and mangles the files. You will no longer be able to reconstruct table data. There is no warning saying that OO might corrupt files saved like this. It seems like it simply cuts the column width to some predefined maximum length, instead of setting the maximum length at a column-by-column basis. For example, this spreadsheet:
Saved as:
Or something with a similar devastating effect. This is, of course, insane. The solution would be to not crop the columns and instead keep the entire column lengths. With this behavior -- too bad if your application rely on the column names to parse the file, or you just wish to have the column names preserved, which is hardly uncommon.
.csv back and forth). After much more playing around than I should need to, I found a solution which isn't obvious. You need to pick File -> Open, then "Comma-separated file", and -- this is crucial -- type the file name in the text box by hand. Then click OK. Because OO only displays .CSV and .TXT files, and this is only when it offers you to import a char delimited file. Not .2DA files like I needed to edit in my case. Something else that works is selecting the file with "All files (*.*)" before switching filter, that makes OO hide the files. I also tried the "Import External Data" menu option, but the OK button was always grayed out even after I had picked my file with the file dialog. No dialog box or message in the dialog told me why.
2. Opening a file from Calc (for example) doesn't necessarily open it in Calc, illogical as it may sound. Actually, it never opens in Calc unless the file extension is a special "open-in-Calc" file extension which doesn't seem to be user configurable. You can't even tell Calc to open all files in Calc if you open them in Calc. The major problem to me is: A file is never of the "open-in-Calc" type in the case of unknown file extensions. It doesn't give the user the to me expected choice of importing these in Calc, but instead opens it in Writer. The workaround can be tedious (constantly renaming the files to
All this could have been fixed by simply offering the user to import a spreadsheet with the "Import Delimited Text As Spreadsheet" dialog if you had picked a file with the "All files (*.*)" open dialog filter (like in Excel). But then they opened in Writer. Even if I opened them in Calc. I have no idea why it even does this, although it seems to be intended behavior since I had this problem in OO 1.0 too. But it beats me what Writer has anything to do with this, and why the application is forcing me to work like this.
3. The "Replace All" feature can't replace everything in a selection. I used a filter, selected some resulting rows, clicked Replace All while having "Only in selection" checked with some text to replace the selected cells with. When I deactivated the filter, a whole lot more than I had selected had been replaced. This seems illogical to me (I recall most other programs taking "selection only" options into account when "replacing all"). It also made it very hard for me to easily replace everything in a selection. Or maybe it was problem #4 below showing up, so even if I had selected row 32, 98, and 132 in sequence in t
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Then again, it's got a way to go. For instance, they tell us that the (~$500) license cost of MSOffice isn't important, then they turn around to point out that OO.o doesn't have an e-mail client so that the customer would have to spend money to acquire one.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
A white paper on IE vs Mozilla FireFox?
Mmmkay. Do you know one which is more... active?
Gee Bill, you're right, if there's no sales force, how can it be any good?
..
Hang on let me conference in my kernel.org sales rep, and we'll get to the bottom of this
an PDF pushing Microsoft Office made on a Mac using Quark
From the article:
License cost makes up only a small portion of the total cost of ownership
We all remember Microsoft's skewed Windows .NET Server/Linux comparison and how they creatively invented numbers to show how expensive Linux was in TCO. Funny that they never factored in the billions of dollars companies lose due to security flaws that enable breakins and data theft, macro viruses and exploits of other features they think you can't live without, and lost time/effort/work from programs/OSes that crash. That will raise your TCO, won't it?
So Microsoft, QUIT IT with the TCO argument. None of us are buying it, and subsequently, none of us are buying your stuff.
If it's not one thing it's your mother.
OpenOffice does not have a dedicated development or support rteam.
That was supposed to be a quote. Maybe *I* should learn to hit "preview" first!
writing bug-free software is manageable: not only it is notmanageable, it's impossible.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
The reverse is also true: I absolutely love the eqn editor in OO.o, but the equations I make with it aren't read by MS Word properly.
Note how the non-MS software bears burden of translation in both directions.
took the time to mod me down but not answer, stupid prick
Does that upgrade stuff actually work more or less cleanly? If I learned something in the IT world, it is "an upgrade from a several years old system to a new one will never work. better do a clean install from scratch."
It seems Microsoft is learning from the administration of GW Bush in this regard. When dealing with an opponent, claim that the opponent has your flaws, whether or not this is true. This strategy is tailored to a news media unaccustomed and unprepared to investigate or otherwise do any more than quote sources. It becomes Microsoft's word (excuse the pun) against the diffuse band of evil virus-writing hackers who also happen to write open source software.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
The parent to the prior message is a troll! Sun has a lot of code in it because they released it from closed source to open source. They did this after stripping out proprietary code (read 3rd party) that could not be released as OSS from StarOffice. They may add code in the future under the OSS Licence that OO is under.
There is not the potential here of another TSG fiasco as Sun has aknowledge the OSS release.
If Microsoft Office is really as good as Microsoft claims, why is this document a .pdf file?
Keep your eyes to the sky.
"If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?"
Seymour Cray
And history has placed this quote firmly into the company of other "forward thinking" quotes such as the one about the world only needing 5 computers, or 640K being all the RAM you need.
MPP computers are doing rather well, actually.
Not to mention it could be written out to PDF format by OO.o, and not Word. That is a nice feature. I wonder if.... nahhhh.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
She introduced them to AbiWord, Gnumeric and OpenOffice. WIthin two weeks, they had completely switched to OO. The IT department loved her after that, and I thought a couple of them were going to kiss me when I met them. They have far less problems with OpenOffice than they had with MSOffice. User training hasn't been an issue!
They interchange documents with people all over the world. Occasionally they have to ask someone to regenerate something with an older format, but overall they are as happy as the proverbial clams.
My favorite bits in the MSO/OO "comparison" document were:
The german computer magazine c't reviewed word processors in it's last issue. They especially looked into large documents by inserting hundrets of images and footnotes into a document. MS Word's layout falled apart after 52 images (rendering the document in an unreparable state) while OpenOffice.org didn't show any problems at all.
This isn't a new problem BTW. I remeber having lost a document in Office 97 a few years ago...
Some of the weirder things they claim in it is that by choosing MS Office over OpenOffice.org one is protected from the threat of viruses.
Can anyone name a virus that has preyed on an OO.org vulnerability? No? I didn't think so. So, the above statement is obviously false, but more importantly is the question of what prevents them from making false statements about the competition? What's keeping Microsoft from saying that none of the *NIX/*BDSs implement a standard version of TCP/IP? Whether it's ludicrous or not, Microsoft has a very large soapbox to speak from and there is obviously nothing preventing them from using it to spread lies. So, what's to prevent Microsoft from using their soapbox to spread lies and get John Doe to always and forever support Microsoft products and think of all competition as unstable and virus prone?
I'm not really making any point here, call me ignorant if you want to, but I really want to know.
I'd almost bet that the work to create the document was contracted out, explaining the product used.
Ahh, A nice legally binding electronic signature...
Try downloading CD1 of the official "woody" set off a CD mirror. Boot that one and when you're ready, tell the installer to change the location of the install media to the sid CDs. That might work?
I started the program and noticed, hey, there are some very ugly blue toolbars on by default. I wanted to turn these off, so I went to the Help and discovered that (as far as I can tell) you no longer have help on the hard drive, you have it on some website somewhere. The 'help' search box searches a website. This is much slower and doesn't get me that nice index I'm used to. It's very unhappy. So about 2 minutes into the MS help I gave up and went to Google.
I spent 5 minutes Googling and I can't figure out how to change their theme back to the normal Windows theme that is present in every other app. So I decided to ignore it and go on.
Okay, so I'm working on an outline document. I had created my original outline in Notepad (with two spaces, four spaces, etc, before each line to do the hierarchy) -- I wanted to use Word for the font sizes so I could actually read it during my presentation. So I pasted the Notepad in and got each line as a heading 1 in the outline. While I didn't relish the thought of setting the level of each one separately, I didn't really expect that it would 'just work'.
The bug I quickly discovered was that, for whatever reason, you had to actually press enter on a new line before the thing would indent properly. That is, clicking on a line and hitting the "demote" button didn't DO anything. I had to delete the newline at the beginning of the line, for each line, and replace it manually. THEN you could indent it properly.
So I guessed the hotkeys for Promote and Demote (shift-tab and tab). But I couldn't guess it for Demote to Body Text, which I also needed a lot. Mousing over the icon got me the name. Right-clicking got me the 'customize your toolbars' menu(a list of toolbars with checkboxes, and a Customize item at the bottom). Okay, Customize (although this is not really what I wanted to do). I flipped the tabs and didn't find it, so I left the menu. Tried the help again, searched for 'hotkeys' and didn't get anything. I looked in Customize again, dug a little deeper. Indeed, there IS a Keyboard button; it's not on the tabs, but it doesn't deserve a tab by itself (or something). I have no clue.
I assumed the list of menus here corresponded with the toolbars I could select (this is not actually true, but I didn't know this). I looked around and didn't see an Outline one. So I clicked on 'All Commands' and scrolled down to the DemoteToBodyText item. Clicked on it. No hotkey is listed. Okay, I'll assign one... how about shift-tab? Click in the assign shortcut area, hit shift-tab, and the focus leaves and goes to the previous text field on the form. I remember that shift-tab is already assigned anyway, so I try ctrl-shift-tab. The focus does not move but it does not capture my shortcut!
I click on the item above DemoteToBodyText, which is DemoteList. Its description is 'demotes the selection one level,' so I assume it is the demote command I used with Tab. BUT NO SHORTCUT IS LISTED!
I give up and finish working on my document. The last thing I notice is that you can't demote something to body text at a certain level -- at any point, the body text has to be below the level of the last header item. You can't do this:It instead comes out as this:There is no way to coerce it to put the second body text one level up.
This experience with Office Word 2003 led me to great sadness, much like the military. I haven't used OOO's outline features, but I'm just going to assume they do it better, because that was AWFUL.
As former employee of a Microsoft "Gold" Partner, I can tell you Microsoft produces tons of this kind of horseshit spin documentation. Bottom-line: They will have their Cheerios eaten by OSS in every single market segment given enough time and consumer education.
Reason? OSS development is essentially a quality (think egoboo) driven process. PSS development(or piss, if you prefer) is a bloated, bureaucratic, revenue-driven process which has very little to do with the automation of information-intensive processes. PSS has a lot more to do with lowering (or "managing" as managers love to say) customer expectations until you are able to get away with getting them to pay you, and thank you, for the piece of shit software you have come up with.
The aforementioned company has and keeps receiving many lucrative contracts with the Government of Puerto Rico for Software that simply does not work (spanish).
Sure you can. One of those is mine, in fact: OO.o doesn't have an overbar (opposite of underline) font attribute for text. Really a problem for doing technical documentation, but to date nobody has wanted to bother with it. Including me, as it happens; if it were important enough to $EMPLOYER we'd have added it already.
Of course, MSOffice doesn't have overbar either. Wonder what it would take for $EMPLOYER to enhance MSWord?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
what i miss is visio (which wasnt part of M$ office until just a few years ago when they bought the company, so again... "inovation" bleh)... dia and kivio doesnt have a "rotate" option in rotate objects inserted from the stencils.... if i insert gates and resistors in my diagram, i would like to be able to rotate these things....
the commercial version kivio has this function, and there's also xfig, which I havent had the opportunity to try out...
my blog
...one of their other big points is that OO doesn't have it's own email/PIM client.
Of course it doesn't... between mozilla/evolution/insert your favorite email client here/ they don't -need- to include one.
It's primarily only MS that keeps insisting that different functionality needs to all get sucked into a single monolithic 'suite' (which then gets sucked into the OS)...
Phew... are the Debian guys really that backwards compatible?
I just had a moronic user come in here and ask for a higher quota (they get 10 megs which is more than enough for their work). He's working with some idiot saleman who wants to send him a 15 meg Powerpoint presentation. Can you IMAGINE??!!! Why on earth would anyone send a 15 meg attachment? How retarded do you have to be to think this is a good idea? If you have something that big to send, then post it on the web. DOn't clog up the e-mail server with that shit. That's one of the biggest problems with Microsoft Office. The idea that mail should be used like a file server. It's not a FUCKING file server!!!! If it was, it would be called a FILE SERVER. It's my job to make sure mail runs smoothly through our Sun based messagin server and one way I do that is by limiting the amount of shit the people slog through the MTA. No attachments larger than 8 megs. And that came with a fight. I originally had it set to 4 megs. Stupid fucking idiots who send things over 8 megs in size via e-mail are just like the people who hog up bandwidth on their cable modems with P2P clients. These fuckers need to die. And so does that goddamned salesman!!!
Almost every point they point make in their document applies equally well between generations of MS Office. The most important point in the document in MS Access compatibility. There are a whole lot of small business applications built on this, and these would need to be rewritten.
It also seems that this document is about the best argument against upgrading to a new version of MS Office.
What they don't say is that most of these "costs" would apply when choosing to switch the M$ Office as well. In other words, the documents assumes that Office is the business' native enviroment. Look at the quote again and imagine switching from say Corel's office suite to M$. Same difference.
Or not.. you actually have to pay for the software to switch to M$. Bummer.
And the formatting of said news report into PDF instead of DOC, is of course, a courtesy detail...
Check out my sysadmin blog!
why won't the oo-people write a similar document, but about why people should choose oo instead of microsoft office?
I suspect that in a lot of organizations, even when Linux isn't taking over the desktop, a few people will be using Linux in an otherwise Windows dominated environment. And after the Linux guy spends enough time using OOo around the Windows people, it will start to make sense to them to standardize on one office suite that will cover all the platforms in use at the company.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
The Air Force lab where I contracted for a while was on the verge of going with Linux + OpenOffice. The majority of people in the lab were scientists comfortable with unix. They only needed MS for Office and Outlook, both of which have linux-based alternatives now.
Their main reason for the itch to switch: they were sick of patching Outlook, IE, and Win2K. We had to install patches ourselves, sometimes 3 times a week. For the past couple of years, the Air Force has been very strict about keeping computers virus-free in the past couple of years.
The document is so pretty and nicely formatted, not to mention it is published by such a reputable company, i MUST listen to them and buy MS office--they know what is best for me!
(on a serious side, it almost looks like an advertisement for OO, it says its free, provides a link to their page, AND notes quite a few of its capabilities--all at the very beginning of the document!)
I love it. They touted Office's lip service to XML as an advantage, forgetting that OO's internal file format is pure XML with an open published DTD. A decent programmer can make software to read and repurpose an OO document with 100% accuracy.
Anyone with knowledge of both can blow away most of these arguments. However, some do have merit in certain circumstances.
"they claim in it is that by choosing MS Office over OpenOffice.org one is protected from the threat of viruses"
Does anyone know of a single virus affecting OpenOffice?
just curious
In OO do a simple "save as" and save it in word format, similar steps for excel and powerpoint.
By the way I haven't seen anyone mention Sun Microsystems here, we owe a lot of our Open Office success to their team. Cheers.
In 1997, I bought a computer bundled with MS Works that was, in fact, preinfected with a template virus.
Way to go, Microsoft.
MSFT claims that an additional cost of using OO is that it doesn't come with an email client, unlike Office (Outlook), so 'customers may incur a licensing cost associated with buying an email application'. I think it is noteworthy to point out that there are many free email clients, notably Evolution and KMail on Linux, and Mozilla Mail, Scribe, Mahogany, and YAMM for Windows/cross platform.
You do know that OO.org can open and save documents in MS Office formats right?
I found the document to be quite reasonably balanced. Someone has really been studying stuff. There is a lot of marketing fluff, sure, but it does tell you that OOo is free-as-in-beer, runs on more platforms, what it can and can't do, what to watch out for if you switch, etc. etc. I would consider giving OOo a spin after reading this, but I already have and didn't like it. It's just too heavy for me.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
That is an advantage of OO.org. I use it at work. I am able to supply and receive documents in just about any format. I routinely have clients say,
"I can only send it in format X, and most businesses say they can't use that."
And I say, "No problem, send what you've got, I'll let you know if there's a problem."
And you know what? 99.9% of the time I can open and use the document and respond with the same format.
That's a service MS Office can't supply, or doesn't now anyway.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
IT'S FREE. no contracts, licensing to tie you down. no support extentions and bullying. no evil empire.
I thought Microsoft would have learned by now.
FUD is not effective. Didn't they even mention this in their own documents.
Today there are a lot of CEOs that not yet have heard of OpenOffice.org or StarOffice. After reading this they will start asking themselves can I reduce my costs using OpenOffice.org intead of accepting the Microsoft Office suit as the only way to provide office functionality.
Microsoft may, or may not. be right that MS-Office is better. But what managers will ask is: Is OOo good enough?
Just like managers found IE good enough when compared to the costly but better Netscape.
So I suppose we have to thank Microsoft for their unintended free marketing of free software.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
I've found the "Save as PDF" feature in OO.org to be invaluable.
If you work in an environment that does not require press-quality PDFs, but does use PDFs for office document exchanges, OO.org saves you the $300+ cost of buying Adobe Acrobat.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
I'm just waiting/hoping for the day when Microsoft creates a PDF on a Mac that does a MS Office vs. ViM comparison.
Then those stupid emacs lovers will finally have to shove it. Of course, ViM doesn't have a version of Tetris for ViM (like emacs) or a fucking flight sim nested in it (Like Excel).
Come to think of it, Open Office doesn't have a flight sim nested in it either. Shouldn't this be in the PDF? This some serious ROI here...
It's a feature. And oo.org's writer is not compatible with word in this feature.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
It's fun to see a Microsoft document published in Acrobat format originally created from a Quark XPress file.
who is "Gravity" and why did he write this document with QuarkXPress 4.11 / Adobe Distiller 4.05 on a Macintosh???
I saw an ad awhile ago that linked to a "independent" analysis of the TCO (total cost of {operation?} that linked to these studies Also found this... BTW, would appreciate info on which Linux variant is best for 1st time users.
There should be a law requiring/prohibiting that (Please circle one)
System Requirements:
* Windows (98, NT, 2000, XP) - Pentium-compatible PC, 64 MB RAM, 130 MB HD; or
* Linux (x86, PowerPC) - 64 MB RAM and 170 MB HD
* Solaris (x66, SPARC) - 64 MB RAM and 240 MB HD; or
* MacOSX (beta); or
* FreeBSD
And this:
Pricing:
* No cost to download. http://www.openoffice.org
I didn't see where they mentioned MS Office's system requirements or $$cost. ;-)
But if they fix it then a lot of Word users would have to be retrained and M$ says retraining is expensive.
> There are over 300 million users of Office
> worldwide who can seamlessly exchange documents
> without concerns for loss of data or formatting
> errors.Third-party studies show that competitive
> office suites retain only 75% accuracy (data and
> formatting)when receiving documents from Office
> users.
Might that be because M$ doesn't make their format public? Doesn't the current antitrust suit exactly concern this matter?
And don't even get me started about their 'rights management' crap... Which is in fact a marketing strategy to lock in users. Kill Bill
Browse Slashdot at Funny+5, everything else -5. The only way to sustain it.
Shouldn't be too difficult for OO to respond to these, point by point. Half the work has already been done, right here. Dollars to donuts, if they do and try to include a link or copy of M$'s document, they'll get threatened. M$ is scared. It wouldn't take much to make them act real st00pid.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
OpenOffice does not have a dedicated development or support team. --- That kills me. OO team isn't dedicated. Yeah right.
This whole thing is filled with half-truths and owtward lies that are apparent to the involved computer user, but the part I hate the most is this:
"Additionally, Open Office does not have an email client, so customers may incur a licensing cost associated with an email application."
They fail to mention that there are a magnitude of cross-platform email clients to use. Why do people want a mail client integrated with an office program?
Je ne parle pas francais.
If you forget about the future, the future will forget about you.
It's taken a bit of time, but I've managed to get our office to take open source tools seriously.
Open Office is finding it's way on to more desktops, as are other applications.
Tools like Audacity are great when you have a level designer who wants to tweak a short audio clip, but you can't justify spending the money you did on Sourceforge for the audio guy.
The next step is getting companies interested in donating to the projects that they find useful, be it in code time or a few bucks for project hosting costs.
It's possible to make an application that opens Word documents. Apple's done it, after all. TextEdit 1.3, the graphical editor that comes with Panther, opens .docs like a charm. And if a piddly editor like TextEdit can do it, why can't a big office suite like OO.o?
"User support such as training (OpenOffice UI, although similar in many ways to Office, is not the same and users may require "retraining")"
if a user requires "retraining" when migrating from winword to oowriter i strongly believe that he/she/it should be fired. or worst, outsource his/her/its position.
note: i am aware that oowriter is not the sole OO component, so please dont reply with your silly comments. i just used it to get a small point across.
You need people like me so you can point your fuckin fingers and say, "That's the bad guy." So what that make you? Good?
Impress, for presentations, isn't bad either. It lacks the graphics and templates that come with Microsoft's overpriced PowerPoint, though. (Another example of the "open source programmers don't have artist girlfriends" problem.)
...and support them. Nuff said, Microsoft wins hands down. And trust me we looked at the cost. If you go with a Pressed Cd solution (Star Office, etc.) it ends up still being much cheaper in the long run for Microsoft.
Dang it Bill!! Stop making robust products with over a decade of maturity! ;)
- Save as
.RTF from your favorite libre word processor - Rename the file from
.RTF to .DOC
Microsoft Word will see that theTired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Did anyone else read the PDF and notice how it says M$ Office has great support? When was the last time you tried to call them with a problem (not having a service contract) and got a free answer in less than 5 months?
Somehow I don't think they care about the 5 companies that actually use Corel office switching. They are concerned with current Office users thinking about switching to OO.
Yes, but I think everyone will get the point that OO makes PDF files, and Word doesn't. PDF files are MUCH less likely to cause problems, because they can contain the fonts they use. I don't think that is available in Word. In most cases, you don't want the person to whom you send the file to be able to change it, and maybe later forget and think it is his.
I would LOVE to see someone make a similar two-page brochure, formatted exactly the same way, that would provide all the arguments for using OO. Here's one: Word is quirky; it often does things that you don't expect, like put footers at the head of the next page.
"If someone is giving you money (employer or client) and they demand that you give them Office files (.doc, .xls, .mdb), you have to be able to provide them."
As long as they are giving you more than $200, which is around the cost of MS Office. Otherwise you are losing money on the deal.
For years, clients have been sending me .doc documents. I email them back saying "I don't have Word, can you send that in a standard format like HTML?" They usually say "Oh, sorry, I didn't know" and send it as HTML or plain text.
.doc isn't a standard.
Of course, they may think I'm out of touch, but as the years have gone on I've been looking more and more like a visionary for running Linux. What's amazing is the number of people that don't understand that it's possible to create a perfectly beautiful document without Word, and that
A little pushback is all it takes. If in your world cash trumps principles every time, maybe you want to reconsider whether you want to stay there.
From the Document Properties for OpenOffice.pdf:
I use MS Office a fair amount at work (some PowerPoint animation, some Excel VB, nothing too complicated in Word - but I like the Outline mode).
I would prefer to switch to OpenOffice eventually (though I doubt I will have any luck convincing my company), but I don't want to until the speed of opening and saving files is improved (the current development versions of 2.0 are nowhere near fast enough yet, but maybe later).
I have never had a problem with quick save in MS Office, and when I work with files that a bigger than a few megs, it sure is nice to be able to open and close them in just a few seconds.
The speed issue and some way to partially convert VB code to OO Basic (or python or whatever works with OO.o) is all I need.
Dara
I did some work (for free) a while back for a non-profit out here, and I'm not joking when I say every single fucking document had some kind of macro virus (I don't use Office so I'm clueless) embedded in it... not to mention 2 years worth of floppies and 7 or 8 home machines I had people bring in, which were in similar states...
I'm sure macro support is really nice for people who do a lot of shit in Office, but for the market OpenOffice seems to be targeting (basic & poor users) it lacking MSOffice macro support is a fucking godsend to IT people everywhere.
No e-mail client is included in OpenOffice: Use Thunderbird , Mozilla mail, Netscape mail, Outlook even. I neither knew nor cared that MS Office had email, and I certianly won't start using it. (I use webmail anyway).
PIM... Well, as far as I know there are plenty of these avilible.
Integration. I suppose that MS Office does have better integration, espesilly when you consider that more software is bundled with it. But really, integrated software suites (I think that would make an interesting acronym - ISS) are not nearly as importent as some people seem to think. anyway, integrating a few other programs would probably require a little python, perl, or C programing, nothing that a competrent sysadmin can't handle if needed.
I think Microsoft is scared. They speak of TCO agian, which dosent make much sense to me. Retraining people to use OpenOffice? Write them a few tutorials. Installing it? try VNC or SSH. And the benifits of the multi-platform nature of the project...
Much more of Microsoft bragging about the benefits of their software and I am going to start think they have finally realised that they cannot compete with Open Source. Though I suppose they will stay ahead in the PC OS market, since most Open Source projects can't afford the Ad campagians that this multi-billion dollar corperation can.
I don't have time to comment my code, the program is late already.
I would have expected them to say MSOffice has lower TCO or higher ROI than OOo...
Stack trace:
...
0x08 MSOffice
0x09 TCO
0x0A ROI
0x0B OOo ***warning: overflow***
Please try again with fewer than 4 unexpanded expressions.
Of course there's 'Sun Code' in OO; just where do you think OO CAME FROM?
OO came from StarOffice, which came from a company that Sun bought years ago.
Sun pulled out any OTHER VENDOR's proprietary code (such as the 'database' software available in the StarOffice variant), and opensourced the rest - the OO.org was set up to oversee this 'opened' code.
Since all this was originally done with Sun's blessing, I don't see the likelyhood of a "SCO event" happening anytime soon...
If Microsoft's response to OO is a bunch of handwaving and fear mongering, then this is a very good sign. Two reasons:
1) They realistically see OO as a competitor to their product
2) They lack more substantial reasons to stick with Office
It means that enough Microsoft sales folks have been losing sales to OO that they are worried and needed to a PR blitz. You'll recall from similar actions against Linux that these campaigns are perhaps minimally successful, but a waste in the long run.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Build a table in Word 2000 and look at it in Word 97.
.doc format resume.
It works some of the time. Other times the formatting will look ridiculous. I found out the hard way when I got fancy with my
They managed to go right into the wastebin because in 97 it looked like a drunken idiot designed it.
Informative.
Kudos, Quila.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Back in 1995, Microsoft Word had a problem with auto-page numbering in the footer of documents that affected the page numbers as well as the font used if changed from the default 12pt Times Roman. 9 years later, this exact same bug remains
Funny... I rarely use Times Roman, and page numbering works fine for me - I've never had a problem in the last 10 years with it.
Do you have any specific examples or repro-cases of how to get it to screw up?
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Can you supply me with more detail? You are unable to change the font? It worked for me in Office 2003.
I would just like to mention that one of the worst headaches I've ever seen with viruses in the workplace was the outbreak of MS-Word macro viruses shortly after Office '95 came out.
Sure, it was a while ago, but I spent a lot of hours cleaning that crap off of people's machines in the couple of weeks before we had a real fix.
Look here
Help fight continental drift.
I certainly hope OO 1.1 is significantly better than OO 1.0.2 (which I think is the version that comes with RH 9).
As much as I hate doing it, I sit down at Word and Excel in campus computer labs every time I have to write lab reports. OO.O could almost do the job, but not quite. The two biggest missing features (in my opinion) are the user-definable error bars and the clunky formula editor.
The error bars, in particular, have been a common gripe for 3 years. I find it absolutely amazing that no one has fixed it. OO.O is USELESS to science people without them.
Isn't there some sort of truth in advertising that could be claimed here? I mean really, MS claiming to be safe from virii?
This is what they are saying: "OpenOffice is enough for you", with that paper they are confirming that. Seriously, I don't understand your complaints this is really good for OpenOffice.
Most of the time, I can use OO.o to work with Word documents with no trouble. However, you are correct that sometimes it will break documents with complex tables.
However, I find these breakages to be about the same as what happens if I open the document in Word, then switch my default printer.
OO.o has never changed a documents layout on me just because I switched printers.
plus-good, double-plus-good
... Acrobat Distiller on a Mac.
It's not a tangent! It's important. Chen and Chan and Lu and Li (not their real Chinese names) have been completely unable to answer an important question about Windows XP. The reason? They're in China, and if they don't know the answer, they have to lie, since they have no way to contact anyone at MS who will listen.
Whenever I ask for MS technical support, I am calling about a difficult question. If it weren't difficult, I would answer it myself. Those are exactly the kind of questions MS technical support can't answer.
The Psychic Friends Network is sometimes equally as good as Microsoft technical support at understanding bugs in Microsoft software.
- Glow is an OpenOffice.org project to develop a full-featured groupware client application using Java, eventually covering group calendaring, mail, instant messaging, folders & web whiteboard and P2P content exchange (see Feature Plan below). Glow will function as a network client as well as provide full offline support, including synchronization.
It's still in the planning stage, but it'll be interesting to see what happens when they add groupware. Both KDE and Gnome offer groupware clients, but there's always room for one more - especially since OpenOffice.org is a cross-platform solution.Just imagine: running OpenOffice.org on the ReactOS (a free Windows NT clone), with Mono (a free .NET implementation). A completely free replacement for Windows.
Whilst I appreciate the humour, there's a good argument in favour of MS Office straight away: there's no Mac-native version of OpenOffice.
Now I realise that it's possible to run OpenOffice on a Mac. In fact, I do run OpenOffice v1.1 on a Mac - I can't justify the price of Office X for the limited amounts of time I do that kind of document creation work. However, even though I've made that choice I have to no note that the X11 port of OOo is ugly, has poor font handling and doesn't conform to any of the Mac's environment. Even cut and paste still uses control and not command.
Nope - saying that this leaflet was created on a Mac doesn't help the OpenOffice cause, it reinforces the Microsoft one. It will be 2006 before a Mac-native OOo appears, and even then I wonder if it will conform to Mac UI guidelines or whether it will just have Cocoa components overlaying the same Windows'ish layouts, menu names and key choices.
Mind you, being created on a Mac also shoots down another of their points. There's no Access for the Mac either, though these is Filemaker Pro.
Cheers,
Ian
Both MS Word and OO do suck big time. Both terminates unexpected and kill my data. Both contains 100.000 features I never need and eat my RAM and CPU.
I will never use such sh*t again - LaTex is my friend!
Hmm, I seem to have said everything I want to say in the subject.
I somewhat RTFA. Did anybody else notice the "Anti-virus API" part (second page, no. 7 Security)? Whatever it means I wish they'd implement it in Outlook. :-)
An anti-virus API. Oh boy, this document certainly is for sales people!
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
What is wrong with you people? I thought this was supposed to be a community of GNU/Linux users. Don't tell me that everyone here is using graphical word processors. Are emacs and latex now restricted just to academic use?
A fanatical support team, editable macros, and a psychologist. Emacs has it all. Don't tell me that either OO or M$O have kill-rectangle, either.
The only thing going against emacs is that it's difficult to learn. But hey, you've already installed Linux on your machine and even configured your multimedia player. Come out of the cave and see the beauty of the ideal.
If the first page of this PDF read like a good advertisement for OpenOffice and reason enough to leave MS Word behind, then you're among friends...
I almost feel like writting a letter to MS saying "Thanks" for advertising Open Office and getting the name out, mentioning that based on this PDF I've just switched from MS Word to Open Office.
Hold on. One of the reasons is to "protect" people from getting viruses? Um, that's sorta a given fact if they use ANY Microsoft product. Rare, but there. With Open-Office though, you will be a hell of a lot safe. Besides, which is more popular? MS Office of course and that's another reason why it's more of a target.
And of course Microsoft will be saying that their product is better. They DO try to say that Windows is better than Linux after all...
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
err what?
.doc .xls (etc) formats haven't changed significantly since 1997? I had all of my work in as MS formats, since that what the business side of our operation still runs. The technical side abandoned MS Office long ago, in part pushed by the switch to Linux for workstations. If I handed my boss a .sxw he would have no idea of what to do with it.
Have you ever used an office product other than MS office? Did you realize that the
RMS vs. cash. Hmm.
ESR vs. cash. No, hmm.
Perens vs. cash. Umm.
Yes, I guess you're right. In a debate over OSS principals and cash, cash wins out!
Maybe if they were cuter.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
This is exactly what OOo needed. Free advertising.
Every single one of these items is quickly checked from a few seconds of getting into OOo. They planted the seed in Managers minds with this doc.
Is OOo right for EVERYBODY? no. Is it right for most? _DEFINATELY yes_. All it takes is using OOo for a little bit to realize it just works.
I have used OOo exclusively at work with the IT guys blessing. Do I need to "Fall Back" to MS Office. No. OOo works for every single document my company has ever got or created. Nobody has ever realized that I don't use MS Office.
Imagine that.
This is great. Thanks again Microsoft.
Scott Carr
I used to love to check the document statistics including readability, number of words, characters, sentances, and indicated grade level of the piece. When you wrote for technical people the higher the grade level was, the better off you were. When you wrote for most end users then you aimed for much lower. In addition let us not forget the grammer checker for those who were writing for the grammer nazi types :)
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
You don't happen to be using the same version of Word from 1995 do you? I just tried this (currently using Office 2000) and had no problems. I think you're talking out of your ass and hoping no one calls you on it.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
It doesn't contain that paper clip guy that we've all come to adore!
OO.o really needs clippy if it needs to be feature complete!
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
Have these people ever called Microsoft for customer support? I don't consider when I need them being hours on hold, and I don't consider how I need them setting me back a couple hundred bucks.
"We need a fourth law of Robotics: Stop Fingering My Wife"
Apparently the "Open office" trademark is owned by the "E-mail incorporated corporation of California", and has been classed as 'dead' since 1993.
Interestingly enough, the Openoffice.org trademark is also dead since last year, being considered "Abandoned: Applicant failed to respond to an Office action.".
Sun owns this trademark.. what are they up to?
This particular piece of literature is for ISV's and VAR's...it isn't a direct marketing flyer for the end user. It's a "battle card" so to speak, and salesmen have been using them for years. The reason it speaks so much about the pains of OpenOffice rather than MS Office features is b/c it's more of a rebuttal card in case the ISV's customer's ask questions about OO.o I would hope that MS marketing department is smarter than that (and they most definitely are).
what's a sig?
Ok, everyone makes things more difficult than it ought to be. I have 400+ users that regularly switch back and forth between Corel WP11 and Office2K. For the most part, they type characters onto the wordprocessor or spreadsheet screen, you highlight certain words with a mouse, and make them BOLD or ITALIC and then they adjust the FONTS using a FONT PROPERTIES INTERFACE which is darn near IDENTICAL for ALL competing products.
Giving average joe a product such as ACCESS is just asking for support trouble(to the IT guy/gals). 99.9% of my users don't use ACCESS which is installed on their PC's; which means that we are supporting the OFFICE2K PRO version for no reason. We could have bought the STANDARD version and saved a lot of money.
Since 01/06/2004 we have placed OO onto all of the desktops. Guess what? it prints, it outputs to PDF, and it is available for Win and Linux (our two platforms).
It all boils down to one basic point, its an office suite! For the most part, the extra toys in the suites are NOT even used by the end users.
They also claim that MS Office is better because it uses XML. Who writes this stuff, anyway?
1. "OpenOffice is free." License cost makes up only a small portion of the total cost of ownership..... ...and all our damn revenues.
I wonder if you looked at a verion history of this using Word you would see something like...
5. Ignore that man behind the curtain, listen to me, the great and powerful [booming voice] Microsoft [/voice]
+&x
Yay for seeing the other side of the argument at last. I didn't know that OpenOffice had no MS Office macro compatibility... that is a biggie. I'm pleased to see an informed other side of the argument at last! I'm a little sick of hearing people say that OpenOffice is all good without backing it up.
Years ago I learned word processing on Wordperfect 5.1 for Dos and spreadsheets were Lotus 123 version 2.3 for Dos. I switched to Win 3.0(big mistake), then to 3.1(improvement, on to 3.11(not bad). Along the way (2years) I got Lotus Smartsuite R4 and had everything I needed at 1/3 the price and disk space of office. I have used Lotus R9 and now OO 1.1. Last fall I put together a business plan on OO 1.0 and had no trouble at all, that was in RH9. I still use Win xp for games but serious work is Linux and OO.
Who needs a bloated virus trap with lots of fluff, but no useful, different features?
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Holy shit. I knew that was a bug. I spent weeks trying to convince one of my professors that its the software thats screwed up.
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
I like both MS Office and Open Office.
I got MSO pretty much for free with the copy of WinXP I bought as a package from my university when I was building my computer, so I put it on there. My mom was taking online classes and so I decided the copy prevention technology wouldn't complain if I installed it on her machine, too, and was right. Why not Open Office for Mom? Because she isn't computer literate, and if she asks her online classmates for help, they'll be using MSO because that's what U of Pheonix recommended to them.
When I built my brother and sister computers, they got Open Office. This was because it was free, and because they are literate enough to figure things out on their own if they run into trouble. They understand how to save in different formats for compatibility with MSO and don't do advanced things that require complete interoperability. Mom wouldn't be able to put up with that sort of thing.
As expensive as MS Office is at full price, though, I recommend OO to anyone that can't get MSO for a heavy discount. It just isn't worth the cost for home users.
Yet try to get an XML document to render nicely in OOo and you're back to square one. How exactly is OOo's XML format lock-in any different to MS's?
Saving 'As XML' is the same in both. Saving to a third-party schema is possible in Word 2003, yet not in OOo so who exactly is paying lip-service to XML?
OOo may compete with Office 97 and maybe even 2000 and XP, but Office 2003 it is not.
AC
(From the misses)
No comparable clipart library. (Different colored toruses??)
No comparable powerpoint type themes.
No document wizards, for Drawing app like in Publisher.
Sometimes difficulty figuring out the options menu. It's not layed out very well.
Seriously these are why she won't use it. She can go into publisher, click new X document, choose a picture, etc and print out the page. She couldn't care less about open source, she just wants to get something printed in 5 minutes or so while the kids are busy.
#debian on irc.debian.org Join the channel, then do /msg apt help. Also check the topic for any news. *don't* just start asking questions without first trying to find the answer yourself.
We tried to start using OO on a couple of our machines here, trying to avoid the Microsoft tax, and it was a terrible disaster.
.xls and .doc formats.
OO is great if you deal only with OO format, or RTF documents, but until the Word and Excel compatibility improves, it'll be impossible for us to switch. I'm sure the problem is with Microsoft's format, but our users don't care about that. They just want things to work right. OO has serious issues when it comes to
I'd switch over every desktop tomorrow if the compatibility improved.
640YB ought to be enough for anybody.
Looks like they're scared now. It won't be long...
We've been using OpenOffice since before it was born - StarOffice 5.2. God that was painful!
OOo has come a LONG way since then. It's MUCH faster, and compatibility issues are almost completely resolved. I've been using a developer build ( one leading up to the OOo-2.0 release ) and our incredibly-complex analysis spreadsheets now look EXACTLY the same under OOo. And I hear an MS Office ==> OOo macro converter is in the works.
Management here are very happy with OOo. We certainly won't be switching back to MS Office, and with the release of version 2, we will be migrating most of the rest of the office ( those not dependant of VB macros ).
I love it when M$ is running scared. They come up with such crap. More secure. Yeah right. I'm always fixing problems with people's computers because of OpenOffice macro viruses. Sure...
For hating MS so much, you guys sure give it a lot of press here...
Actually, Sun bought Open Office (then Star Office) from StarDivision. Star Office was a pretty good product already.
Office 2000 has a bug in numbering pages using a cross-reference to the last page number. The numbering would appear as 1 of 1, 2 of 2, 3 of 3, 4 of 4, .... It was fixed in an office service pack, which many people still have not installed. But it looked so funny seeing these very official looking documents looking so broken.
It's gotten successively better with each version of Word, but only through more and more aggressive repagination events being fired by Word, esp. when accessing Word in code. Seems to kick off when documents get larger than about seven pages. It seems like their solution to the bug was basically to force a repaginate for each mouse or keyboard click or something.
Code that operated on Field Codes in Word got MUCH slower in Word 2002 compared to 2000 or 97. Haven't benchmarked 2003 lately.
As happened with Linux, you know you're ready for prime time as soon as Microsoft breaks out the FUD machine for your product.
It's that OpenOffice is ugly. Plain and simple. It looks like a crappy piece of software compared to other windows programs, so people assume that it is and won't use it. Putting skin functionality in it (or themes if you want to call them that) would dramatically improve acceptance of OpenOffice. The theming in Thunderbird makes a huge difference when trying to convince people to use it instead of Outlook Express.
Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be a high priority for the developers. I can't complain because it's a free product, but if they want to do some simple to improve end-user adoption they could start with just prettying it up a bit.
. --- If you're looking for free e-mail you won't find it here! http://www.noemailhere.com
Putting cost aside, and loyalty to the OSS model aside, MS rules the desktop because of Office. Now, I run OO. I never encounter any problems. When I build a new machine, more often than not, I install OO on it. But good god if you could hear my wife cuss! At work, they use MS Office for everything but email. OO is basolutely NOT able to deal with most of the documents that she gets from work. No matter the version of office, there is *always* some problem. Whether it's a weird formatting thing, or a completely unreadable document, there is always something that isn't right.
But if she makes something in OO, it rarely has a problem going the other way. She opens it at work with no issues.
But I would like to throw some points out there:
1. There *is* a learning curve. OO does thing just differently enough to confuse a long term Office user.
2. There *are* bugs - and we aren't talking about the obscure ones that MS Office tends to have. An example is superscripting and subscripting. My wife was swearing like a sailer over a math document she was preparing because of these issues - admittedly, I have no idea if 1.1 fixed the issue, snce she hasn't had to do a math document for awhile.
3. While with OO, you can search Google or the bugtracker for some answers... The MS Support sight is very good for Office. Office is MS's bread and butter. It isn't perfect - no complex software is, but its pretty damn good.
4. Groan if you want, but what email client do you have with OO? None. All versions of Office come with not just an email software, but one that happens to be a damn good one with an integrated PIM system, and direct server support on the backend. Outlook, altho the largest target for attack, is really nice and full featured. With proper setup, viruses can be very difficult to get - even in Outlook, and with proper user training, it can be almost impossible.
But on the flip, OO has a huge point on its side - it's free. The second biggest thng OO has going for it is that it is constantly evolving and getting better. OO gets exponentially better at every point release. Unlike MSOffice which has gotten more bloated than anything over the years.
Of course a competitive comparison done by one of the competitors is always biased. To me most of the stuff seemed somehow fair. They are not *really* bashing OO.
a lot of times, newcomers to a field discuss how their product stacks up against more enrenched stallwarts. E.g., on the Weider Crossbow page, they discuss how it stacks up to Bowflex.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Maybe some missed it, but it bullet "3." they misspelled a word. Obviously we should buy Microsoft Office.
[NOT RTFA, just .rtf, eh]
.wpd files that are only meeting minutes, and I'm on a mac that afternoon (Corel killed WP for the mac), and Word can't deal. So I move over to the Win2K box, which means converting to rtf anyway. Plus, Word can't read older formats: 100's of MB of bloatware, and get clippy but I can't read my v5.1a documents?!
99.9967% of the documents I receive need only be Rich Text Format in order to maintain formatting and readability. Some of the stuff I get that tries to use multiple columns or fields are simply window-painting, not even windowdressing.
What's even worse is that MS claims of compatibility are laughable. I receive documents with nasty font variations, with weird text-box anomalies, and useless graphics that the text won't flow around properly. Then people send me
RTF or TXT, or if it must be pretty, PDF please.
Damn those pesky terrorists
"I don't know what weapons WW3 will be fought with, but I can say that WW4 will be fought with clubs and rocks."
Albert Einstein
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Counter to what the competitive points claim, Sun provides fee based support for the top-tier platforms (Linux-x86, Solaris, Win32) for OpenOffice.org, not just for StarOffice. It's right in the "Commercial Support and Training" portion of the OOo support homepage next to the Sun logo. There are also some other firms and independent consultants listed. Gee, not only can you get paid support from Sun, but price around your support needs as well! You'd think that if MS is trying to sell Office with support as a major bullet point they could at least have given the webpage a look!
:)
While I can't speak for other places, on trinity where I host and answer OOo OS X support forums there's usually a Mac OOo expert answering questions within one day of asking. There are non-programmers who volunteer their time to help new people with installation, deployment, how-tos, etc. It seems unfair to belittle one-on-one expert help just because it's done for free
ed
There are over 300 million users of Office worldwide who can seamlessly exchange documents without concerns for loss of data or formatting errors.
As anyone who has tried to open an Office 2000 document in Office 97, this is blatantly untrue.
License cost makes up only a small portion of the total cost of ownership.
Indeed. For MS products, the cost of constant forced upgrades, security problems, antivirus tools, e-mail scanners, etc. represent a serious additional cost.
OpenOffice UI, although similar in many ways to Office, is not the same and users may require "retraining"
Indeed, this is true. But at least they had the decency to put "retraining" in quotes. The vast majority of commonly used functions will be at a user's fingertips within minutes of loading OpenOffice. The rest are no more different than from one version of Office to the next. My wife is not at all technical, was trained on MS Office, and hardly noticed the difference when switching to Open Office.
OpenOffice does not have a dedicated development or support rteam. Consequently, if bugs go unresolved, users have the option to resolve problems by scouring through numerous community sites and chat rooms.
Note the "if" in that sentence. Note also the number of defects open in MS Office. Note also the excellent reputation of MS support.
businesses do not operate in a vacuum; basic feature functionality that enables content authoring is only one small aspect of what a small business needs.
Businesses indeed do not operate in a vacuum. I presume that this is why the document is in PDF format - so everyone can read it. Compare and contrast the ease of creating PDF documents in MS Word and in Open Office.
I could go on, but my righteous indignation circuits are all burned out. EUR500M? Should have been the full EUR5G.
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
"OpenOffice does not have a dedicated development or
support rteam."
But it _does_ have a working spell checker!
http://stats.openoffice.org/wusage/index.html Week of 3/9/2003 to 3/15/2003: Top 100 of 30,280 Documents Sorted by Access Count Rank Document Accesses 7 /welcome/registration.html [Referrers] 34,069
10 /about-downloads.html [Referrers] 29,734
25 /download/mirrors.html [Referrers] 11,670
40 /about.html [Referrers] 7,408
Week of 8/31/2003 to 9/6/2003: Top 100 of 36,358 Documents
Sorted by Access Count
Rank Document Accesses
6 /about.html [Referrers] 57,858
7 /about-downloads.html [Referrers] 45,531
9 /welcome/registration.html [Referrers] 38,913
11 /project/www/dev_docs/source/download.html [Referrers] 31,967
21 /download/mirrors.html [Referrers] 12,800
Week of 2/29/2004 to 3/6/2004: Top 100 of 27,708 Documents
Sorted by Access Count
Rank Document Accesses
7 /welcome/registration.html [Referrers] 41,316
8 /about.html [Referrers] 36,818
10 /contributing.html [Referrers] 27,339
14 /download/mirrors.html [Referrers] 17,821
17 /about-downloads.html [Referrers] 16,667
25 /servlets/ProjectDocumentDownload [Referrers] 14,643
Don't make your problems my problems!
Ximian Evolution (Features)
Ximian Connector
Is this bashing not a bit late?
There are a couple things I'd like in oofice though. One would be a way to manipulate docbook documents easily - especially import and export to doc format. The other would be a speech to text facily to enable dictation input.
No realy how? :{
Mod parent as funny because Windows doesn't support PDF out of the box, whereas virtually all distros do :)
you mean clippy isn't enough of a reason?
this is just a placeholder till i send back my real sig from the future.
save as rtf, rename to
if they whine about file formats then they are certianly not smart enough to detect the difference.
I have used Open Office here in the office for 3 years now. and nobody in the PHB clan knows. but it is spreading through the office like wildfire.. most of IT runs OO.o and some of marketing does.. funny how us in IT giving out free OO.o cd's to everyone for use at home makes them want it here.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I think a great many people end up asking technically literate people they know (friends, relatives) to help them solve MS software issues. So what we are basically doing is giving up our time to provide free support to help prop up crappy products. Don't do it! Just say no. Tell them, "Microsoft sold you the stuff, you paid them a lot for it, let them help you out".
First, Microsoft ignored the DOJ.
Then, Microsoft laughed at the DOJ.
Then, Microsoft fought the DOJ.
Then, Microsoft won.
That quote is so fucking overused. It is also too general, and can be twisted into almost any situation for either side.
Hell, you could even do this:
First, Linux kiddies ignored SCO.
Then, Linux kiddies laughed at SCO.
Then, Linux kiddies fought SCO.
Then, SCO won.
So, wtf is the point of recycling this quote over and over again? To make yourself feel good?
A friend of mine worked for a rather large company and his users were having problems with excel corrupting files in a wierd, almost viral, way.
His Microsoft account rep kept on telling him that the problem must be with something that he was doing, because nobody else seemed to be having that problem.
Then my friend found out that someone at another company was having the same problem, and my friend had the following conversation with his MS account rep:
One thing that you rarely get in the Open Source world is people lying about the existence of a bug.Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
http://stats.openoffice.org/wusage/index.html Week of 3/9/2003 to 3/15/2003: Top 100 of 30,280 Documents Sorted by Access Count Rank Document Accesses 7 /welcome/registration.html 34,069
10 /about-downloads.html 29,734
25 /download/mirrors.html [Referrers] 11,670
40 /about.html [Referrers] 7,408
Week of 8/31/2003 to 9/6/2003: Top 100 of 36,358 Documents Sorted by Access Count
Rank Document Accesses
6 /about.html 57,858
7 /about-downloads.html 45,531
9 /welcome/registration.html 38,913
11 pr../dev_docs/source/download.html 31,967
21 /download/mirrors.html 12,800
Week of 2/29/2004 to 3/6/2004: Top 100 of 27,708 Documents Sorted by Access Count
Rank Document Accesses
7 /welcome/registration.html 41,316
8 /about.html 36,818
10 /contributing.html 27,339
14 /download/mirrors.html 17,821
17 /about-downloads.html 16,667
25 /servlets/ProjectDocumentDownload 14,643
Don't make your problems my problems!
What a nice piece of FUD this is! Sadly, OOo is not a drop-in replacement. The article makes reference to Open Office as such, and attempts to dissect it on that principle. Instead we should look at it for what it really is: Brand New Software, that happens to read and write MS Office documents pretty well. Once upon a time, the height of document editing lay firmly inside the Corel/WordPerfect camp. People dropped it in favor of MS Office due to a richer feature set and ease-of-use (I'm sure there are other reasons too). To level this example of the mid-90's switch to MS Office against the arguments put forth in the article, underscores the hyprocracy in the argument. People wouldn't have switched to Microsoft's product if cost of training, deployment and imperfect document conversion were realistic barriers for a switch. So far the major benefit for OOo is it brings down TCO over the long-run. And for companies that are tired of riding MS's merry-go-round of upgrades, that may be enough to switch.
Could somebody please explain to me what Ma & Pa Kettle do with Access?
Now I have seen a lot of stuff done in Excel that I would rather do in an RDBMS, but I never quite figured out what people use Access for.
Apart from making pretty little forms with and then trying hard to click the nessecary forms together. But I must admit, I have shuned MS Office since the mit 90's, so maybe I missed some new development there.
But If Ma & Pa Kettle think they need Access, those that write FOSS applications for the desktop should look at that. And maybe a better forms generator for OO that will talk to ODBC or JDBC will absolutely sufficient to have end users believe that there is a Database in OO (And not done in a technical brain dead way that Access does it)
Good, then we may have budgeted for that. :)
I see you've noticed the "Question" bit in Microsoft's agenda.
1. Question the "free" argument.
Not "show that your product is a better value", just make sure that the QUESTION about "free" is raised. This is too much like the "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" FUD.
2. Question the "good enough" argument.
Again, this isn't about responding to the "good enough" argument. This is about QUESTIONING it in an attempt to instill some Fear, Uncertainty and/or Doubt.
My favorite item is "Seamless Information Exchange". Third-party studies show that only 75% of data and formating is transferable when using Microsoft's proprietary, undocumented format.
You'd do better just sticking to Notepad or WordPad and ASCII text.
We have a document at work which is created in Gill Sans, and unfortunately I cannot install this font on my system for reasons I will not go into. If I open the document on my machine, which has its default set to Arial, the page numbering comes out as "Page 5 of 3", as the differences in the fonts screw up the page layout, BUT DOESNT ALTER THE NUMBERING!!!
According to pdfinfo, the document was created on that day of all days in the year:
So, what was used to produce that document?
Creator: QuarkXPress(tm) 4.11
Producer: Acrobat Distiller 4.05 for Macintosh
So, once again it looks like MS don't like their own dogfood.
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
Wow. Had you RTFM (wow, that's fun to say!), you would have learned that you were updating the document stylesheet, which affects the whole document. All ya yad to do was uncheck "Update Automatically" from the Footer Styles.
No kidding that's weird.
The impression I have is that Outlook is one of the most efficient email virus vectors in existence.
Does anybody know of statistics showing what percentage of all email viruses are transmitted due to Outlook's insecurities (e.g. its macro language)?
http://stats.openoffice.org/wusage/index.htmle k of 3/9/2003 to 3/15/2003: Top 100 of 30,280 Documents Sorted by Access Count
/welcome/registration.html 34,069 /about-downloads.html 29,734 /download/mirrors.html [Referrers] 11,670 /about.html [Referrers] 7,408
/about.html 57,858 /about-downloads.html 45,531 /welcome/registration.html 38,913 /download/mirrors.html 12,800
/welcome/registration.html 41,316 /about.html 36,818 /contributing.html 27,339 /download/mirrors.html 17,821 /about-downloads.html 16,667 /servlets/ProjectDocumentDownload 14,643
We
Rank Document Accesses
7
10
25
40
Week of 8/31/2003 to 9/6/2003: Top 100 of 36,358 Documents Sorted by Access Count
Rank Document Accesses
6
7
9
11 pr../dev_docs/source/download.html 31,967
21
Week of 2/29/2004 to 3/6/2004: Top 100 of 27,708 Documents Sorted by Access Count
Rank Document Accesses
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(Post as Code)
Don't make your problems my problems!
I did the exact same thing with my HTML resume the last time I looked for a job. When asked for a Word formated resume, I just sent them the same file but with a different extension. Worked like a charm.
If the presentation of your documents is important, send your customer PDFs, not doc files. Oh, forgot, MSO doesn't produce PDFs with one click like OOorg does.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
In the course of a recent Microsoft Access programming project, we had three difficult technical problems where we decided to call a support hotline for advice. This article compares the two support numbers we tried:
t ml
Microsoft Technical Support and the Psychic Friends Network. As a result of this research, we have come to the following conclusions:
1. that Microsoft Technical Support and the Psychic Friends Network are about equal in their ability to provide technical assistance for Microsoft products over the phone;
2. that the Psychic Friends Network has a distinct edge over Microsoft in the areas of courtesy, response time, and cost of support; but
3. that Microsoft has a generally better refund policy if they fail to solve your problem.
More detail here:
http://karmak.org/archive/2002/03/MSvsPF.h
The incredible thing about this document for me is that MS haven't set out to say MS Office is better than OpenOffice because it has X, Y or Z.
Instead, they say you better stick with MS Office because it will just cost too much to change. No where do they try to claim that it is the better product (except perhaps with the fact that it includes Access.)
Microsoft lies by omission the same way Bill Gates did when he recently visited the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign--don't mention software freedom, anytime someone mentions "free software" only talk about price (where proprietary software often fails to compete). I certainly appreciate the opportunity to inspect, share, and modify software to suit my needs. Whether I take advantage of it is up to me. I don't have that option with proprietary software. When you focus on software freedom, you focus on something software proprietors cannot, by definition, compete with.
The Free Software Society at UIUC is currently working to arrange a response talk where issues of software freedom can be addressed. I host "Digital Citizen" on WEFT 90.1 FM every other Wednesday; two weeks ago I had Brad Kuhn, executive director of the FSF, and Chris Foster, founder of the Free Software Society, on my show to respond to Bill Gates' speech in which he took a question from someone asking about the Linux kernal. When I arrange for some web hosting, I'll post a copy of the show and other episodes of the show under a Creative Commons license.
Even on technical features, Microsoft fails to point out that their programs run on all the operating systems (which makes their "networked, highly collaborative world" claim hard to swallow unless you have committed yourself to always using Microsoft Windows for all things). I'm well aware that over 90% of the world's PCs run Microsoft Windows, but as more people hear about Microsoft's illegalities and lenient treatment by the world's governments, as well as all the viruses and trojan horses that spread so quickly via Microsoft programs, I think this will change.
Digital Citizen
OSS will assimilate Microsoft.
...that this is a pdf? Surely they should have released it as a Word file :-)
Hey, it's not a bug. It is a feature, everybody should know that by now.
Quantum hacker.
There is a bug where your section breaks get turned from "next page" or "next odd page" breaks to "continuous" breaks. Been there since Word for Windows 1.0.
(If it hits you, the best workaround for modern versions of Word is to go to the section after the offending break, open the Page Setup dialog and select the correct section break from the Section Break list on the Layout tab.)
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
it sucks!!! It is sooo freaking slow. So, as far as Mac users go, M$ Office is far better.
... to OpenOffice.org, only Open Office.
MICRO$~1 apparently either doesn't care about trademarks (ha!) or they can't make a cogent argument against OO.o
MSIE: The world's most standards-complaint web browser.
Sounds similar to the unions here in NYC ..
:)
In NYC the union uses a giant inflatable rat outside businesses that won't play with the unions and their corruption. I've always find it a nice marketing display for me to know the businesses to do business with
There are many good reasons to choose OO, eg.
- it is free
- it uses open file formats
- it is cross-platform
BUT it is not "better" than MSOffice in the way that most users would understand that word. And when an average user tries OO with expectations that it be better than MSO, they become sorely dissapointed, and this affects their attitude towards FLOSS software in general. So please be realistic when you try to sell people on OO.
I am hopeful that OO will become quite good, but that won't be for a while. The next 1.x release is going to attempt to imitate the look of native GUI's. People more more experience than me in these issues have assured me that this is a terrible solution, so I won't start recommending OO to end-users until they have implemented a true native GUI (probably version 2.0).
It took me a long time to get section numbering right
Well, the main reason I now use OO exclusivly is section numbering.
I worked on a class project where three people shared a word document.
Everytime we pasted something from one document into the master document, Word rearranged the section and list numbering "for us", causing us major problems. It took ~20 minutes to fix the dam numbering and with the next paste it was all void again. Word also changed header formats and other stuff "for us". Finally we just ignored the numbering until the document was done and rearranged it at the end.
Since then, I use OO exclusivly. It never did anything similar to me.
OO does what you tell him to do.
Word does what it guesses that you want, even if this means reformatting the whole document after a simple paste. As Word's "guessing" is more often than not wrong, it's REALLY annoying.
And yes, I know that somewhere in Word is a hidden cryptic option panel "Autoformatting" where you can turn most of this stuff off, but the default is still annoying. Besides, "autoformatting" is one of the "great" features that MS claims make Word better.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof for my post which this sig is too small to contain.
RTF goes into cvs/perforce/etc. as a text file. DOC goes in as a binary.
So, you can use $Version$, $Author$, whatever in an RTF and they'll get updated by the server when checked in.
You can also text diff RTFs. To get diffs in a DOC, you need to turn MSWord's versioning on and the doc gets bigger and bigger.
Share and Enjoy!
I still find using OO annoying as hell. It just doesn't work as well as Office, printing is a pain and so is general word processing. Not that Office is the best product either, but OO isn't even close to the maturity of Office. Maybe in a few years.
This page was generated by a Barrel of Circus Midgets, and that is the way I like it!!!
had half a brain, they would use a list like the following and point out real flaws:
1. Formatting of MSWord Docs can get hosed easily.
2. OO does not use the full printing capabilities which means in order to colate print a packet I want to give out I have to export to PDF open in acrobat then print and get full printer support.
3. Excel doesn't have exactly the same featureset
4. No access like DB engine.
5. Long load times.
Yeah yeah, there's tons of stuff GOOD about OO or I wouldn't use it instead of MSoffice. But the above are the only real valid points MS should be making. Currently they're attempting to make the correlation between FLOSS and the ever popular media whores the virus writing hackers. As Open software makes its way more and more into educational establishments and MS continues to lose it's stranglehold on it's Office suite expect to see more of these underhanded tactics.
*cough* SCO *cough*
RTF (which is, by the way, an older standard than Word), it would have looked fine in either word processor.
Have you ever actually LOOKED at a RTF file? It never, ever looks fine.
Also, from the doxygen manual.:
"Note that the RTF output probably only looks nice with Microsoft's Word 97. If you have success with other programs, please let me know."
RTF is clearly not completely standard, and in my experience most often looks like hell (our co-op office used to make us submit resumes in it).
1. The costs of converting from Microsoft Office to other platforms is not an advantage for Microsoft Office over the long term. If you use Microsoft Office you will be faced with that conversion cost over and over again, every time you have need to use an alternative. If you use a tool based on open standards your data will remain accessible from other applications as time goes on. It's like the guy at the garage says when you put off repairs, "Pay now or pay later"...
Of course Microsoft's response would be that you will never have to migrate from Microsoft Office. Permit me to express a little skepticism: every few years we go through another forced upgrade and conversion as a new version of Microsoft Office comes on the scene. Not only is this a cost of Office, it's a regularly recurring one.
1 1/2. Open office doesn't have a mail client. This is an advantage: the mail client Microsoft provides is inherently insecure. By merging Internet Explorer with Windows Explorer they imposed on every application in the system the responsibility of parsing and evaluating the names associated with objects to try and guess whether they're trusted (and can be allowed to do things like read and write files) or not. Any application that uses the MSHTML control and related APIs, anyway. Like outlook...
2. There's actually a cost to features: the more features in your software, the more complex it is, and the more dependent the data you produce with that software is on the particular version. See point 1.
2 1/2. If you're not running Outlook, you've done more to prevent yourself from getting infected with a virus than anything you can do with Microsoft's help. Then you can go on and turn off the RPC service, the personal web publishing services, and with each step leave viruses further behind...
3. When we were installing our first Windows NT domain, I was unsure some of the setup. I called Microsoft three times before I got someone who was willing to provide an answer to one question, and it turned out to be the wrong one. Our network was basically down, and when i called Microsoft for help they told me I had used up our free support calls and could I provide a credit card number so I could pat them to fix the problem they'd caused. I went ballistic, my boss went ballistic, and a week later we got an apologetic call from someone at microsoft and some kind of free support contract... but in the meantime "numerous community sites and chat rooms" had fixed things for me.
4. Microsoft offers limited compatibility with Open Office is what I think they meant to say. As for macros and dynamic links and the like, well, see point 1 and point 2 1/2, remember when macro viruses were the worst problem out there? They haven't gone away, they've just been overshadowed by the flood of "cross zone exploits".
Just look at what format M$ used in their presentation. They know their formats suck. :D
German magazine c't of 2004-03-22 prints the results of testing Word 2003, WordPerfect 11, WordPro 9.6, StarOffice 7 (OpenOffice 1.1), Ragtime 5.6.5, Textmaker 2002 and Papyrus X. On one test, they took a 140 page text into which 120 graphics, and 240 footnotes had to be added. The first three all failed, they simply could not do the job. Office managed about 50, WP 90 and Pro about 50 before crashing or becoming unusable. The other 4 had no problems with this. Office was also worse than StarOffice on layout test and serial letters, the only test it did better was HTML export (which still was lousy). Anyone doing large complicated text (e.g university students, technical authors) was recommended NOT to use the first three !
The fact is OO is a serious alternative to Office. As soon as you decide you're tired of MSBS (sounds like a certification) you have somewhere to go. For small businesses OO is a very workable alternative. It's super for producing forms. Notice they didn't say anything about Sun Office, either. Interesting.
And I'm not sure where they get their training figures, but it certainly isn't reality. Figure training and license costs cancel each other out. And I'm betting you could design an in-house training program for less than 299 per person. The way to start if you're thinking about switching in a bigger office is to hand out free disks to everyone and invite them to install it at home. For that matter if you were worried about customers being able to access your documents, send them a free disk too.
Chops to the OO team. They should be proud of what they've accomplished. It's got to feel good taking a serious whack out of MS's bottom line. Yeah, ba-by!
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
and it is rampant these days: from the ...
CEOs & CFOs in our corporate boardrooms,
to our presidents and our congress. no
real surprise that MS would jump on
THIS bandwagon bound for hades
...has an email client??!? Oh, wait. I guess that's not quite buggy enough to be considered a bug, and not viral enough to be considered a virus.
Woops.
Anyway, the real killer feature of OOo is lack of concerns over license compliance (for users, I mean, not developers; but that's an interesting distinction to need to make considering that license compliance with MS Office unambiguously refers to end-users). In a reasonably sizeable corporate office software license compliance is enough of a concern to have created a burgeoning market for compliance tracking and auditing tools.
In fact, I believe you'll soon have a new executive level CxO designation: CLO -- Chief Licensing Officer. This person's job is to oversee the department in charge not of installation, acquisition, maintenance, training, selection of software but merely of adhering to license terms. The impetus will be to avoid draconian (or has it progressed to Machevellian yet?) BSA audits carried out by warrant-holding sherrifs. Think I'm kidding?
With Open Source there are many benefits. One that cannot be denied is the total elimination of license management and compliance. This is true on both sides of the software equation -- producers and users. Imagine how much better MS Office would be if MSFT didn't have its brightest minds inventing ways to stop the software from working (XP Activation being only the latest incarnation; now you know the great advantage OOo has over MS Office -- it doesn't have to delay waiting for the Activation team to finish its work.) Anyone who's had to track licenses for a large installation knows the headache on the user side.
Remember, one violation per the BSA's standard (i.e., not just the "license" but the original invoice is also required to establish that you are not a THIEVING PIRATE!) can cost you not only a year's worth of milk money (up to $150,000 or more) but also your freedom (up to 5 years in the federal pokey with Bubba, the federal poker). That's a big price to pay for making an "extra" copy of MS Office for Mr. Jones' take-home laptop, isn't it? With proprietary software it doesn't take much to ruin your day.
Don't forget to add the potential for fines and/or prison as well as the overhead needed to maintain license compliance records to avoid them into the TCO equation.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Okay, suggest something geeky nerds should love bush about! His learned curiosity? His fascination with why and how things work? His constant asking of questions and challenging of assumptions? Gimme a break. Bush is the anti-nerd!!!
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
Your samba problems may be due to the "XP firewall". Try disabling it and see if you can connect.
Cheers,
-Shane
I work professionally as a writer, and I have no problems giving individuals the required .doc or .xls files when they ask them of me. Most people hiring writers want .txt, as they wish to do most of the formatting on their own.
I couldn't do the work I do right now efficiently on MS Word even if I wanted to, really. I need the ability to read all file types and MS Office does not have that capability. My clients aren't restricted to just windows.
Just a thought.
-- RJ
worst: microsoft office better: openoffice best: pirated microsoft office
The biggest (if not only) problem with OOo I heard from a guy which works in a bigger midsize company is the fact, that you can't reuse all the macros they wrote in MS Office. That's a big minus as lot's of company data (reports, worksheets etc) are using the macro options from MS Office. Otherwise, he said his company could adopt it...
You didn't post with your name... but I'll respond anyway.
If you want to play logic hardball, so be it.
In order to assess a statement according to the rules of logic, it should be of the form: Statement A, therefore Statement B.
You have mistaken my sig for an assertion of this type. If you read my sig, however, you will not be able to find a "therefore" because my statment is of the form Statement A - and that's it. If you would like to disagree with my Statment A, by all means do. But don't accuse me of making a fallacious argument just because you read to much into it and misunderstood the logic. My sig is meant as a counter example to those who think that only the weak-minded beleive in God.
If you would like to argue this logic further, I would be more than happy to indulge you.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
This was not fixed in the latest service pack, we've seen it reappear in documents that were created in previous versions of Word. The fix is to copy-->paste special-->unformatted text. This is often worse than just numbering pages manually, so We whine.
from pdf:
...Microsoft has continued to innovate and invest in productivity
applications since the '80s, evolving Office from a content
authoring tool to a collaborative productivity enhancement
platform. With an R&D budget of over $4.8 billion....
Office provides innovative security on three levels to protect your business environment, data and intellectual property:
and one of these levels is
Data Loss: Auto recovery and application recovery tool
it's funny that OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 on my machine actually can open corrupted Word documents but M$ Office still can't.
and
hmmm... what they are researching with all that money for all these years? PowerPoint?
It is laughable. MS tries to convince its resellers how MS-Office is extremely superior to OpenOffice. Here are a few choice excerpts:
.doc file, it is open. Done. $0 cost, 0 time.
.doc file, it is open. Done. $0 cost, 0 time.
1) Question the "free" argument
License costs makes up only a small portion of the total cost of
ownership.
Really? So MS-Office gets even more expensive than the $1000+ retail? That really makes OpenOffice seem so expensive.
More significant costs include:
Installation and deployment.
Let's see, it was automatically installed and "deployed" when I installed Linux. $0 cost, no time.
Data migration and testing.
Click on
Document conversion.
Click on
Rewriting macros.
Neither I nor any of my users use macros. $0 cost, 0 time.
User support such as training.
Click on "File" "Open", click on file. Type. Click on "File" "Save". Wow- 90% the same as every other modern GUI application, including MS-Office. $0 cost, a little time.
Additionally, OpenOffice does not have an e-mail client, so customers
may incur a licensing cost associated with buying an e-mail application.
??? Talk about whacked. What does Email have to do with an office suite? Ok, I'll bite. Install Linux. 4 high-quality Email clients installed. $0 cost, 0 time.
Oh, it goes on with such drivel. Just amazing.
How exactly is OOo's XML format lock-in any different to MS's?
Uhm... it's well-documented, and tracks an emerging standard (the first of its kind). That is, it's agreed-upon by many other companies, not just Microsoft.
Also, Microsoft does not publish its XML schema.
MS-Office 2003 is a nightmare to use in an heterogenous environment. Its export to third-party schemas is hardly more than a check-box on a PR sheet somewhere; it doesn't work quite right, so the published document isn't a very good XSLT translation of the original document.
Microsoft, by obfuscating their XML schema and making it no more readable than their original binary format, is the one paying lip-service. But as long as people are willing to accept intentionally-broken garbage, they will continue to sell intentionally-broken garbage.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
It's also interesting to think about how long MS has been going at Office, didn't they release the first version in 95. This means MS has had nearly 10 years to get Office where it is today. It seems to me OpenOffice has only been going since around 2000. Not that is matters but OpenOffice is still relatively young compared to Office. Give it a couple years and see where it goes.
I wonder why they left out the system req. for Office, since that is actually a BIG factor in the "Total cost of ownership" they talk about.
I must admit to being somewhat bemused by three observations about document linked in the original article.
The first is that the document is supplied in PDF form. To have MS Office produce such a document requires the purchase of third-party software.
The second is that Microsoft's editorial staff need to learn to proofread and/or spell. Clearly they ignored Word's internal spell checking in regards to "support rteam".
The third observation is the assertion that OpenOffice does not include a email client (true) and that to remedy this would require expenditure. Surely Microsoft have forgotten their own free-to-use email client bundled with their free-to-use browser. Even avoiding the Microsoft product line, Mozilla ships with a perfectly serviceable mail client, and there are many other options. Some of the other options even interoperate with Microsoft's Exchange product if that's what floats your boat.
Sure, but StarOffice wasn't open source. Sun spent $70+ million to buy StarOffice before they open sourced it. That's a pretty damn big gift to open source.
Also Sun fixed a lot of the ickiest problems with StarOffice. Such as the MDI, the regular crashing, the font handling, the speed problems, etc.
Also Sun employs professional programmers and managers to further develop OpenOffice. Sun deserves heaps of kudos for all of this.
Of course, most people prefer to bash Sun for not open-sourcing Java, or for buying drivers from SCO *before* SCO started accusing Linux of being tainted. With friends like that, Sun doesn't need any enemies.
I've been using OO periodically for quite a while now (the pre 1.0 days I'd say, but can't really remember) and its made some fabulous progress, but as much as I'd like to, I cannot recommend it for my business or my employees just yet. The main feature that I use OO for these days is its PDF export function -- you don't get that with office unless you've got a full copy of Acrobat. However, I feel that the OO interface has something to be desired. Its just not as simple to navigate as Office 2003... I'm not one to give MS undue credit, but MSO2K3 is pretty nice. I don't expect OO to be of the same caliber as MSO2K3, and hopefully the next few releases to OO will make some inroads. At least it starts up a little faster now ;-)
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
I'm ready to switch. OpenOffice doesn't have all the wonderful nifty features that MS Office has, and I'm tired of explaining my use of this obscure piece of software to my friends and family...
So. Tell me - where do I buy MS Office for FreeBSD?
No?
Linux?
Solaris?
Oh.
Wait one second...
"R&D budget of 4.8 billion"
*blinks*
Did I see that right? Is that how much they spend annually on developing Microsoft Office or is that a cumulative figure?
Microsoft should really investigate their TCD (total cost of development) to output ratio.
Unbelievable,
--Stephen
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
This is certainly interesting news, but nothing new if you are familiar with marketing tactics. Any succesful organisation with a good sales and marketing setup will produce this sort of 'collateral' targetted to specific competitors aimed to help win across deals.
Microsoft changes features, menu positions, shortcut keys, and anything else its "engineers" can get their lousy hands on with every freekin' release. (OK, File Open hasn't changed...) Why can't my dealer get me some of whatever Microsoft was smoking?
If Microsoft really feels this way, that would be fine with me. But they certainly aren't exhibiting their feelings with their actions.
Instead of trying to fight against the global adoption of Linux in many fields where Office might be useful in the ways that they have just delineated in this pdf, why not port Office so that it works on Linux?
Maybe this will happen eventually , but the inevitable situation is that if Office is to remain strong, and if users are to be able to take advantage of these "premium features", then it's going to have to get ported to Linux. It's pretty much as simple as that.
Portability is important, because I think the world is sick of being tied to one particular OS. That might have been fine in the 80's and 90's, when computers were new, but there is no way that we can move ahead over the next 100-200 years simply having one OS because of anti-competitive practices and entrenched luck.
It may not be financially "rewarding" to port Office to Linux, given that statistically, it would account for a very small percentage of Office sales - but - in the interest of making Office a fully professional product, the port should be done, even if it costs money to do it. A port to Linux would just reaffirm Microsoft's willingness to stand behind its Office product's merits and benefits, and it would also go a long way to show that Microsoft is willing to provide a premium product, for a fee, without tying it to their own OS. Of course, the backward compatibility issues are really going to hurt them here.
We have to move forward, and the future is not a future where there is only one OS. It's just a no-brainer, if you asked me.
Just repaginate the document then. F9 or something. Not hard.
Alternatively, oddball fonts should be embedded in the document.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
On the whole, when I first read the pdf on the microsoft site, I was actually rather impressed. For the most part, it was civil. Not what we'd all like, but relatively civil.
... and it is probably the best advertising OO.o has had. With this established, there are a few key points I think I would make about this arguement.
;)
It was *almost* truthful for the most part... not entirely, but *almost*...
In the #OpenOffice.org channel on IRC, I was asked what I thought about the article, and the impact it has on OpenOffice.org as a whole. All in all, I thought its great for OOo. As long as we don't get into a petty pissing fight with MS Office, that is. Then someone was throwing around the idea that we should have a pointer article tossed back as a response to Microsofts little publication. I only replied "Why bother?" No matter what route we took with a reply, I think it would do more harm than good. The only thing I could think of as a reply would be a nice polite response to some of the false comments in the article.
There are a few ways where this advertising could hurt OpenOffice.org, but that would realistically only effect the crowds that would never switch even if their existances depended on it. I know a few people like that that live and breath the harddrive space Microsoft uses.
In cases like that, OpenOffice.org just might not be the better alternative, as they would be very stuck in their ways. I would like to think we would rather have 10 very satisifed users than 20... 10 of which would do nothing but complain about this problem or that problem, and do little if anything to help resolve the issue.
But, OO.o still has quite a ways to go. While I love it and use it for all of my writing, there are still a few things that need fixed and improved upon. But, I've decided to join the project and help make it happen when I have a little more time.. which should be in about a month when my current projects settle down. But, that is what I find so beautiful about the OO.o project. If I don't like something, I can dig on in and help fix it.
If MS Office offered that flexibility, I would have been enticed in joining the team. But, as it did not and never will, I'll be stuck in my ways and keep supporting OO.o
-- RJ
Wow, that is some serious anger you have stashed away. Out of curiosity, do you hate Americans, because they are not civilized and polite like you (as witnessed by your calm and reasoned post), or because at some point in your nation's past they got off of their "loud, outspoken, misinformed, and unimportant" asses and gave your country military and/or financial aid? America is far from perfect, but what exactly did they do to piss you off?
While reading this thread I have for the past 2 hours trying to find a middle ground between MS Word documents and the alternative (for now) OpenOffice.org.
.doc 6 & 95, html)
.doc 6/95, that was the easiest for OpenOffice.org.
- I downloaded OpenOffice.org v1.1
- Saved my Word document in different formats (.rtf,
Nothing has yet worked to fully translate the fancy cover page the people in Marketing designed for our company documents (Our company name in a vertical column and right aligned). I know that maybe my document would be too much to ask since I'm sure the person doing it spend many hours fiddling with MS Word options.
Now, my problem with Stallman's proposal of converting all our Word documents to plain text or HTML is no better. Definitely plain text will not do specially with people wanting to impress clients with fancy graphics and all; and is hard for an HTML document to contain images and font styles (hard to put everything in one attachment).
The closest I got with Word is saving my documents in
The other alternative would be PDFs, but then wouldn't Adobe start changing the spec as Micro$oft right now?
my $0.02
It's quite possible that it's actually registered in some other jurisdiction and that the US and that other jurisdiction recognize each other's trademarks, but I'm completely and utterly unversed in trademark law and this may not even be possible - if that's the case then I don't know what the scoop is.
fencepost
just a little off
What strikes me is that these drones can't even use a spell checker....
"OpenOffice does not have a dedicated development or support rteam."
Chuckle.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Bush really, really likes beer!
It's all good and well to read this but if any of you work in a company that receives technet and MSDN kits in the mail from M$ then you would know that what you are reading is pitched towards sales consultants. This sheet comes on a nice piece of carboard for a companies sales staff to read it's basically a response card. Companies here about this Open Office and speak to their IT vendor who promptly (for profit reasons)says oh but these are the reasons why you should use MS Office he rattles off what's on the card and low and behold they believe him because OO.o has done nothing for their company and they've been using MS Office for years so they don't care. If it gets the job done they will use it most SMB's can't afford to test a whole new system and will seek professional advice from their supplier who happens to have an interest in keeping them on software they can charge large ammounts for of course sales people are going to sell M$ could you imagine how shitty you'd be if someone sold you OO.o for $200AUD for the package sure it costs a fraction of the price for MS Office but when you found out you could get OO.o for free you'd ring up and abuse the vendor and cease to deal with them. Basically it comes down to a few things SMB's don't want to research IT products for themselves it's a waste of their resources. They want something that can access the files their colleagues/clients send them. Vendors want to make money but not seem like bastards. Open Office is great for those that sell services it sucks ass for those that sell products. This document is simply microsoft giving sales consultants tuition it's all being taken out of context
I usually write and edit my documents in OO.o and then edit them in Word since OO.o flags two many words that are spelt correctly (usually names of philosophers) as wrong whereas Word doesn't. Though I still perfer WordPerfect.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
So you're saying you got the job, then?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Wow. I never thought that Microsoft would ever tout the seamlessness of its data exchange.
Here's a typical scenario from my work:
In my experience, MS file formats aren't even compatible when "shared" among 1 user, let alone 300 million.
My work luuuuvs office.. like they luuuuvs their gun.
Not that they use it for much but....
I've been trying for the last few years to get
my users to switch over to OOo for many reasons.
Office (97,2000 and XP) send our machines to hell as far as stability and speed goes. I have only had one problem with stability with OOo on an exotic piece of equipment. OOo runs much faster and doesn't do an alien facehugger installation on my boxes.
Most everyone here give OOo the big thumbs down. There are a few valid reasons (neeeded features and a few incompatibilities) but they are so trained in the idea of 'if it isn't word and excel it doesn't work' that it becomes an impossible barrier to having it gain acceptance.
I will get OOo complaints of incompatibility BEFORE the problem has even been tried!
example --"Install MS office on these machines because OOo probably has a problem reading my excel file"
Geez!
I open up the file in OOo and it reads fine.
"install ms office anyway!"
2days later
"your network is slow"
Now if they do find a file or application that OOo doesn't handle well, then I get the smug cat ass in your face behavior. Like bill is going to buy them a spaceship now or something.
My users are typically not like this with most issues, but MS vs Openoffice.. whew!
What I and others need from the OOo team is this:
1. A mass batch converter to OOo for all MS Office files with some error detection
This should extend even to an email attachment converter.
The converter should allow me to convert everything to native OOo, and then anything that had problems in the transition I can work on and convert. Conversion troubleshooting info should be easily accessible for others.
2. The ability to share workbooks like you can in excel (multi user simultaneous update)
This should help get them off the crack pipe.
Firefox &
Why did they decide to use .pdf for then? If Office is so great then why not do it as a .doc file instead? After all the document is intended for Microsoft sales reps, so why not use Office...
.pdf files natively?
Or am I wrong and Microsoft Office can now read and write
Mark
> My sig is meant as a counter example to those who think that only the weak-minded beleive in God.
;P
:)
That is one way to explain your sig, but that meaning is implicit and not explicit.
There are alternative implicit meansings, the 'therefore' one bing just an example.
Another example: All those great peopel believe in god, I believe in god, you are stupid if you don't.
The AC who responded initially might be mistaken with regards to it being a statement of logic, but you are mistaken if you believe it is communicating anything clearly.
Also, it is a really weak argument. Come with reasons, not with names of other (now dead) people who we can't ask about it
Ah well, maybe its better if you don't and just go be happy with your belief
Is anyone else here tired of MS whipping out the ol' TCO everytime an open source product kicks their product's ass?
From the article:
License cost makes up only a small portion of the total cost of ownership
First rule of FUD: Doesn't matter if an argument is true. If they believe it, keep pushing it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I don't know where you go to get MS Office, but I got my version (MS Office 2003 Pro) from the MS website for $20 (American).
I take girls on dates for about that much, I can't really see how it is expensive.
But keep up the good work... OOo still does a good job that I have seen so far.
Calling atheism and agnosticism a religion is like calling bald a hair color.
...is why Microsoft don't state the genuine advantages they have over OpenOffice, such as:
rather than relying on random manager-ese waffle.
Oh, wait, hang on... I do know. It's because Office 2003 got rid of the useful indices into help and forced you to use Clippy for everything, got rid of the useful styles configuration tools and stuck irritating sidebars all over the place, and generally regressed several steps from the previous version. But if Microsoft wanted to produce an improvement on Office 2003, at least they only have to look to Office XP to do it. :-)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Open Office can open PDF files.
I'm not the original poster but he/she was right. You DO have two statements:
Statement A = "Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Dirac, Faraday, Planck, Kelvin, Maxwell and Einstein believed in God."
Statement B = "So do I."
You basically have, A therefore B.
On a different note, I don't think weak-minded believe in God. If anything, regious fundamentalists are one of the strongest people around (they cannot be easily tempted by desires such as wealth, lust/sex, fame, vanity, etc).
Rather, it's the irrational that believe in God. If you support the line of thinking we call science, it is hypocritical of you to follow a religion*.
(* I suppose one can follow God since such a "concept" is outside the realm of science. However, that person cannot follow religion since it is based on scriptures and oral traditions, and hence conflicts.)
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
>My sig is meant as a counter example to those who
>think that only the weak-minded beleive in God.
That may be your intent, but I doubt many who read it will infer it in that way. Yes, the "therefore" is not explicitly stated, but I believe it to be implied. Communication via language is often a guessing game of intentions, and even in logical proofs unstated assumptions are made.
The only point I'm trying to make here is that your sig does seem like an appeal to authority whether you want it to be or not. And no, I wasn't the AC parent, and I do not believe those who believe in God are necessarily weak-minded.
What, me worry?
I'd really like to use something other than microsoft office, but I am simply chained down because on most college campuses, everything is "powerpoint lecture" or the syllabus is a Word .doc file.
.doc files. Every time I see them doing this, I send them an email complaint. I explain that since we are using systems other than Microsoft Windows, and they are presenting information to us via the web, it makes sense to post these docs as HTML. Generally they at least start posting PDFs. Though I can't understand why one has to post a simple text file project description as a goddamn Word doc.
In my grad school classes, just about every assignment is graded on a Linux or Sun machine. And yet, the profs and TAs post assignments as
Magnatune: Quality (DRM-free) MP3/FLAC/
The only thing preventing everyone with using it, is the lack of premade templates for things like resumes and letters.
I got my version (MS Office 2003 Pro) from the MS website for $20 (American).
Where? What's the URL?
I take girls on dates for about that much...
I'd like the URLs for those girls, too!--- A man with a briefcase can steal more money, than any man with a gun. [Don Henley]
Some scientists believe in God. All scientists believe in science. Therefore, some scientists believe in both God and science. I (Doesn't Comment Code) believe in both God and science.
:-P
I had thought your sig was more a counter example to those who think that only those who don't believe in science believe in God. Also a statement that you believe in science, else why mention those men? Plenty of other strong minded folks also believe in God.
Anyway, I never saw it as a logical fallacy. I did see it as a good sign that, despite the fact that you don't comment code, you are probably both a good hearted and intelligent person.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Man that was Cutie. But there is one thing M$ over looked. It cost money to convert from any system to another be it a M$ Office to Open Office or Word Perfect to M$ Office.
2. "I only need basic features. OpenOffice is good enough."
.doc except with generic text editor
In today's networked, highly collaborative world, businesses
do not operate in a vacuum; basic feature functionality that
enables content authoring is only one small aspect of what a
small business needs. Businesses need to:
Exchange business transaction information externally with
customers and vendors.
So, probably PDF would be ok, or maybe HTML.. not everyone has MS Word, that and I won't open word attachments in e-mail as I'm not a big macro virus fan.
Ensure that their mission-critical information is adequately
protected from virus attack.
Ok, I won't open
Effectively manage customer relationships so as to
maximize sales.
I almost lost out on a big sale, but once the customer realize I ran MS Office they came around real quick.
Quickly access key information from accounting and other
business applications.
Numbers and Open Office don't work together
Create sales and marketing material that portrays the
business in a professional manner.
Like Web sites made with MS FrontPage
Do all this in a cost-effective manner because a small
business does not have the resources of a large company
for IT integration and support.
If I'm going to install an Office Suite by double-clicking an installer.exe I want it to be one that costs money right off the bat.
3. "OpenOffice 1.1 is an open source alternative."
OpenOffice does not have a dedicated development or
support rteam. Consequently, if bugs go unresolved, users
have the option to resolve problems by scouring through
numerous community sites and chat rooms.
I call MS all the time, their developers hang out on message boards that don't cost anything to participate in and are always very willing to help out with things I won't give them money for.
I recently updated my mums pc which was running windows 3.11 (!) with some old, cant remember which version, ms word.
She writes novels and such, and the only thing she wanted is internet acces to browse and mail, and ya know, win3.1 doesnt have real net support.
This is what she'd have to pay if she would upgrade ms-style:
Windows xp
MS office
new ram
new cpu
a lotta cash boy
instead:
free debian + free OOo
She likes OOo a lot, and hated all those silly automagik features she had suffered when working on a current ms word in the office.
just my little story...
That took me all of 12 seconds to find. If you don't count the time I spent writing this comment.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
> Although you shouldn't lower yourself to doing business with such people in the first place,
Glad to see the economy's been so robust wherever you are, but here in the US, it's been in the tank for the last several years. Not quite as able to refuse those kinds of requests and still keep a positive cash flow, especially for a small business.
I do consulting. And I do virus calls for my clients. More often than not, some stupid user has clicked a file or opened an attachment they shouldn't have. With Norton + Eudora or Mozilla, a stupid user can execute viral code. But Norton integrates so well with Outlook (not least, I'm told, because of Microsoft's APIs) that its virtually impossible (once Norton is installeD) to become infected.
That's my $0.02.
Statistically speaking, there's a 99.998% chance that my IQ is higher than yours. Get over it.
Because oo is simply a copy of MS thats at least 3 years out of date. Of course it's free as in beer and runs on non-MS OS's. IBM may change that for MS office though.
Same paragraphe as the bug related stuff you're speaking about :
OpenOffice does not have a dedicated development or support rteam.
Either they're too dumb to understand that product's name is also product website's address, or their too dumb to click on the word 'support' when they get there.
Because, when I get there the second most obvious stuff I see on Openoffice.org (webpage) just under the title is the tab bar, with a nice huge "Support button". Click on it, and you don't get one but several support solution, 3 of wihich are commercial, and 1 is a forum
We cannot really say that OpenOffice.org is lacking support...
Ok, maybe that's not dedicated support,
but you should agree that even with Microsoft, forums have proven to be the most useful source for help. And OpenOffice has a lot of them, even an official advertised on their website.
I don't see what they're missing
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Hmmmmm, I'll argue, just for the hell of it.
Citing the fact that many well respected scientists believe proposition A is only an effective argument if propostion A is a proposition related to science.
Otherwise you are in effect claiming; "Since X is a great scientist, then all of X's beliefs are superior to the beliefs of people who are not great scientists" though there is no logical reason that this should be the case. Einstein and Newton were both oddballs, despite (or because of) their brilliance, so their views on other subjects could easily be called into question...Newton was obsessed with Alchemy, for example.
I always kind of straddle the fence in this argument; I don't believe in god, but I don't disbelieve either. To me, the hysterical athiests are just as crazy as the hysterical theists. Neither one has any proof, and both are convinced they are utterly right.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
OK, that last one is pretty extreme, but it's not like you don't have any choices. The first one is relatively easier, and each successive one makes things easier for more and more other students, too.
Evan Prodromou | evan@prodromou.name | http://evan.prodromou.name/
I don't have anything to add to this discussion other than to say that I was impressed by the previous responses to this comment. They are good.
I find it interesting how mentioning religion seems to incite so many people. If you had said "Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Dirac, Faraday, Planck, Kelvin, Maxwell and Einstein ate beef. So do I" would there bave been any objection? It seems to me that you are just saying that you all eat beef. What is the big deal and why should we care?
P.S. I'm not the original poster.
I ask them to send the file to me, open them in OO and save them as doc, xl. Problem solved.
Ofcourse I don't forget to mention how I did it and provide a link to the OO website.
Now that is advertisment!!
What power has law where only money rules.
The cool thing about openoffice is that you CAN get support for the product (startoffice is the same animal). This is something that is +5 underrated. You can sell stuff to your boss if he can pay money to think that he's supported. He wants to spend money on that. Give him what he wants.
somewhere, on a Big Red Sign:
if(color==blue){speed--;}
There are over 300 million users of Office worldwide who can seamlessly exchange documents without concerns for loss
Yup. The the 300million Office XP can exchange without data loss
Too bad : it's not the case if they try to exchange them with the other million users using Office 97...
Or worse : Office 95.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I looked around the site but didn't see anything so I'll ask here:
Is there a way to just download the Writer portion of OO? It's really all I need...
Who doesn't like free music?
I've a dislike for VBA, because of it's VB syntax. But if your into VBA and have protected VBA-Code that won't open in Word/Excel then try Openoffice. The 'protected' code itself is not encrypted and just flagged as protected. Openoffice does not care about the protection flag. It just opens the VBA code (user forms are not accessible) in it's script editor.
No surprise that Microsoft dislikes this software that is just another example that security by obscurity is borken by design.
There once was a fellow called Knuth,
Whose manner was very uncouth:
"Every program I make
Is imposs'ble to break,
And you bloody well know that's the truth!"
With an R&D budget of over $4.8 billion, Office is a core Microsoft business.
I'm sure what next Halloween will tell us about these $4.8 billion :
- $4 billion are spended in DO NOT USE LINUX/OPENOFFICE campaigns
- And the remaining is used settling EU anti-trust cases
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
...who uses and prefers OOo for writing and editing Chinese docs. His enthusiasm is such that others in the local Chamber of Commerce for the Middle Kingdom are taking it up, too. And there are about 100 times as many Chinese in the world as there are Australians.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Wouldn't it be possible to write some MS-office macros, to export perfect OpenOffice.org data files (.sxw, .sxc) ? The macro language has an object model which allows access to every feature of an Office document, and the OO file format is fully documented. That'd solve the data export problems once and for all, surely .....
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Not true. Microsoft gives you plenty of options. For instance, if you don't like using their buggy, worm-ridden software in a work environment, you have the option to go fuck yourself.
Actually, I think that OpenOffice is really the "option" in question here. Especially since it can open some .doc files.
I really hope that OO makes some inroads because I'm sick and tired of using Micro$oft's crappy excuse for products. The thing they work best at is keeping you trapped in their upgrade cycle.
Electric Monkey Pants
Bugger that.....if *this* is the people that are running the corporate computing world, get bill to pass that pipe over here - I could use a painkiller.
If you had said "Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Dirac, Faraday, Planck, Kelvin, Maxwell and Einstein ate beef. So do I" would there bave been any objection? It seems to me that you are just saying that you all eat beef.
I bet the vegetarians might have gotten pissy over this - but to them I say For every animal you don't eat, I'm going to eat three
You should say "de facto standards" and "widely used formats".
The dotDOC written by MS Office 97 is different to MS Office 2000 and different in turn to MS Office XP - and of course the corresponding Mac versions of MS Office are all slighly different again. Then you have dotDOCs written by MS Office 2000 purportedly in an earlier dotDOC format (typically 97 or v6) which are different again. Later MS Word versions usually read the earlier dotDOCs OK, including "earler" dotDOCs written out by later MS Words, but will usually not be able to reliably write something that the genuinely earlier MS Word versions can read.
OpenOffice Writer is separately valuable for being able to take an "MS Office 97" dotDOC written by MS Office 2000, read it in without crashing, and write it out as a genuine MS Office 97 (or version 6) dotDOC that MS Office 97 (etc) can then read without crashing.
OO in HTML editor mode is also top class. Very good WYSIWYG and gotta love that "@" button.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
From : marketing offices
To : R&D team
Please see if you can reassign one of the 3,000 engineers from the Linux virus development project to assist Bill developing a better marketing....
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
the threat of viruses
I got it: MS products are more impervious to exploits than open source products. Yeah right.
Is there no way to prosecute MS for false advertising in this matter? What steps need to be taken? How does one try to kick-start the process?
radsoft.net
...to have to remake in 2-3 years.
Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately attributed to ignorance. -Napoleon
We would like to use OpenOffice.org as a cheaper replacement for MS Word 2002 but so far we've been hampered by the lack of a suitable medical dictionary. With MS Word we can use Stedman's medical spellchecker which includes all the words we need. Unfortunately when I talked to them they weren't interested in producing an OpenOffice.org version.
The only possible alternative I've found is the Medical Words open source project. But's it isn't anywhere near complete enought and isn't being actively updated much. It would cost us far more to have our own employees update the list with thousands of additional words than just to continue paying MS Word license fees.
So, can anyone suggest an alternative medical spelling checker that is known to work with OpenOffice.org?
Or you might need to enable encryption on the Samba box. XP doesn't communicate without it. That was what I found when I first added an XP box to a Samba network.
Politas
"Once you go from proof of concept to mission-critical solutions, Linux doesn't have the necessary performance," says Nelson. "Upgrading to more powerful Linux software wouldn't solve enough of our problems. Nor would it allow us to leverage our corporate infrastructure or the Microsoft expertise of our staff. The answer--to move to Windows 2000 Server and
Yep. No brains.
To understand the context - they are switching from "homegrown" Linux to this mission critical high-reliability trusted no-virii inexpensive to run Windows .NET success platform...
retraining???? I have to tell previous Office 97 users about why the rest of their "File" menu is missing. And, why that little window pops up the second time they try to copy/paste.
I first read the parent post and thought, TROLL! But then I remembered this is /., where it's cool (apparently even "insightful") to bash the current administration.
The parent post is crap. It supplies nothing of value while simultaneously inviting endless political argument.
Thank you for your contribution.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
I presume you are implying that MSOffice can format OpenOffice documents correctly. Oh wait... it can't even open them! So which product is doing its job better?
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
I've been a Unix user for over fifteen years.
I've used both MS Office and Open Office. Say,
what you will, call me what you like, but OO
just absolutely stinks compared to MS Office.
OO is plauged by numerous incompatibilities
and it just is not a polished piece of work.
Want an example? When I start OO it asks me if
I would like to register, so I select the "never"
option. Guess what, the next time I start OO it
ask me if I would like to register. Sigh...
That site, and your response, are juvenile.
Sigh.... hate to reply to off-topic posts, but...
:-)
> Not to mention scientific cosmology in Galileo's and Kepler's day wasn't even remotely advanced as it is today.
Correct. It is much more advanced. And all the latest cosmological evidence points solidly to the existence of God.
If you doubt that, please read Creator and the Cosmos. I triple dog dare you to read that book and remain an atheist. Don't think you can.
Did you ever report the bug? Obviously not. So what leg do you have to stand on?
Most people in the Microsoft world don't report the bugs like they do in open source. BFD if you don't get a confirmation email back, a handshake or a blow job. The developers still get the info and will fix it.
This was mainly under office 97.
Y'know, you blow up one sun and suddenly everyone expects you to walk on water.
I think the effect you're after is demonstrated by this one-page presentation (also in MS format). All I did was right-click the text objects (on their borders so the object itself is being referred to, not the text in the object), choose effects, and pick an effect for them. You can do this en bloc as well.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Sorry. *Is* juvenile. Whatever.
We were working on a thesis document for our undergraduate course. The seamless exchange of information is a fallacy. I lost count of the number of times I saved the document and came back to it an hour later (on the same PC) to find that when Word opened the document, it threw out all the formatting and set the style of everything on about 100 pages to "Normal". If only it wasn't a requirement to submit the document as a Word file!
That said, all the default styles in Word are derived from the Normal template style. That style is user-editable, and changes depending on the user, the printer attached to the machine, the phase of the moon and how you hold your mouth while Word opens. It can be the cause of some serious headaches when loading a document on a computer that it wasn't created on, specially when the L-user that uses the computer regularly decided to set the default font to some 24 point script font.
I have had more luck, sometimes, opening documents in OpenOffice than in the same version of Word the document was created in on a different machine.
There are similar issues in Powerpoint with fonts and colour schemes. The only saving grace of that is that it has an export presentation function that dumps nearly everything into the .ppt file so that it will run on almost any machine with a compatible version of Powerpoint.
The only program I haven't had much trouble with is Excel. It's actually somewhat of a joy to use when compared to the other programs in the Office Suite.
I was joyous when OpenOffice incorporated the print to PDF option. Saved all the jerking about with printing to a postscript file and running ps2pdf.
I drink to make other people interesting!
First, they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win.
-Gandhi
Is this the fight stage?
People shape laws. Not the other way around.
I don't use the equation stuff very much, but find it heaps easier and more powerful than MS Office's equivalent.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Ok, I'm baffled now. How is the parent post a troll? If anything it could be redundant, because other people (mostly after me) posted about the misspelling.
Whichever mod did this is wacked.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
http://www.latex-project.org/
It really does make this argument much easier once you throw out the Christian god. You should research some of the other ones on occasion, most of them are much more rational.
I live in a giant bucket.
You mean that huge slab of slate that you write on with the little white sticks? I don't see why you're so down on it - I always use it in my presentations. So do all my favorite professors. The benefits are endless.
You are free to ad-lib, and if a user asks a question that doesn't fit perfectly with the outline you had originally planned, you can answer it and change the things you say later in your lecture accordingly rather than having to choose between saying "We'll get to that during the Q&A period" (which always makes you look bad) or answering it but derailing your lecture as you realized you already talked about everything on a slide a few steps down the line and having so skip through it (which always makes you look bad).
You can continually talk about your subject material, dealing only with your audience and drawing your visual aids (as you talk, of course), rather than having to keep walking back to the computer (which makes you look bad) or giving the whole lecture with your face lit by a monitors blue glow (which makes you look bad <i>and</i> unattractive).
Visual aids can be modified at whim, giving you more freedom to use visual aids when you answer questions or notice that something needs more explaining, rather than being stuck with only the visual aids you had set up beforehand.
You can give your lecture with the lights on. People who have to take notes will love you for it. It also helps keep people from falling asleep. (Don't laugh. At least in an undergraduate setting, this is an unavoidable problem, and improving your lecture skills only mitigates it.) Also, you don't have to avoid walking from one half of the room to the other to keep from getting blasted in the eyes by the projector's light.
Best yet, you can spend the night before drinking a beer or reading a book or something rather than having to fight with getting that slideshow just perfect.
I'm not saying to never use slides - I use them all the time, but only for stuff that would be impossible time-consuming to reproduce on the blackboard, such as photographs and complicated diagrams. When they aren't needed anymore, off goes the projector.
Most people I know at the university use Microsoft Office, different versions of it. They have problems with footnotes and page numbers, but when I opened their MSOffice documents with OpenOffice.org, it was all correct. It is true that MSOffice docs don't always exactly the same when opened with OOo as when opened with MSOffice programs, one of the differences is that OOWriter does not have some of the problems Microsoft's programs have with opening documents in MS formats, even for M$-.doc documents OOo may be the better choice.
> and you can't get professional support for it.
n of fice/
Wanna bet?
http://www.sun.com/service/support/software/ope
Professional support from Sun for OpenOffice has helped me considerably in convicing organisations to migrate. Even if they dont use it (well, they wont use it, they ask me for help), it is a sign of the quality of the software. I can now recommend it without worry, because I know that I wont be alone if I do need help.
Soon I will be doing a rollout of new PC's for a local school with OpenOffice, Mozilla, and if I can get my hands on some Gimp 2.0 binaries soon, Gimp 2.0.
Another customer came to me today concerns about their use of Microsoft Office without the necessary licenses. I will be testing OpenOffice there soon too.
"It's the smell! If there is such a thing." Agent Smith - The Matrix
is that they were caught doing exactly what he showed in his sample code with DRDos, and iirc, wordperfect (check the Almost Perfect book). Microsoft tactics of checking which Dos, Microsoft or DRDos, prior to running a program, and showing a warning (and impairing functionality) is documented in court records. In fact, the Microsoft emails currently being posted by the Minnesota court clerk online contain discussions within Microsoft of sabotaging DRDos in this exact manner.
Actually, it really does stink quite a bit less. But it's often squishier.
I recently started using PDFCreator instead of Acrobat.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator
It works a a printer driver to PDF creator, allowing you to export PDF files from ANY program capable of printing.
"It's the smell! If there is such a thing." Agent Smith - The Matrix
lots of us use moodle at moodle.org - also at sourceforge - which is a totally great cms with a great development group
i have used it for almost a year and a half with no problems although i am not a wonk and can't get the gd library going - bfd - my students love it, the other people in the department love it. i get kudos every exam day for hosting it in my lab
now if i could only get the neetwork people to quit protecting me from evil hackers so the students could get to it from home. anyway, put up a copy and let a prof put a course on it.
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (Wilde)
Einstein believed in a sort of god, but it probably wasn't the same one you believe in. He definitely envisioned there being a Spinozan sort of god, but that's essentially equivalent to the fact of order in the universe; in many ways it's more like Taoism than Christianity (which I'll assume you subscribe to). Because he staunchly refused to endorse a personified god, many people actually consider Einstein to have been agnostic. So you may want to consider taking him off your list.
.sigs. Why do you?
More to the point, other people believe in a whole bunch of stuff too - strongly enough that they don't feel the need to reconvince themselves daily by putting it in their
You can believe what you like, and so can the o.p. But belief without proof is what is commonly called faith. Is it appropriate for someone who calls himself an "Agn0stic"?
Microsoft Office is not a layout tool. Hence it can never format an inportant document reliably. Period, end of statement. Just because something looks good on your screen doesn't mean it makes it out safely. Try doing a layout to a tenth of a millimeter with Office. People who print for a living just never use Office unless they are forced to do so. If a prof can't find the "Save As" dialog, it doesn't make him a genius, it makes him something else. It may make him a member of the Education Department or some other group of button pushers.
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (Wilde)
Statement A = "Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Dirac, Faraday, Planck, Kelvin, Maxwell and Einstein believed in God."
Statement B = "So do I."
You basically have, A therefore B.
That is incorrect. There is no "therefore" either explicitly or implicitly implied with the two statements. The two statements are expressing a COMPARISON between the belief in God of the listed names and the subject of the second statement, the poster.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
Wow thats the biggest bunch of BS i have ever read
Bill, what do you just use your ass to write
this or what. I havent used ms office in years and don't plan to ever go back.
The biggest laugh here is virus's. hmmmmmm i
throught ms word was alway getting those macro
virus's. Never heard of any OO virus's. but whatever you say BILL!!
And no offence Bill ummmmmmm easy of use, no offence Bill but its just an Office suite they are easy to being with.
Since yours supports SMB messaging i don't know how MS Office can be secure!!
God, where would I start to combat this ridiculous list?
Well, first and foremost the correct name for this office suite is 'OpenOffice.Org' not 'OpenOffice'. This is why you often find it acronymed as: 'OOo'.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
No kidding. Compatibility issues exist between almost every single version of Office. Then you have people creating documents on older versions of Works at home and bringing them into the office (or school). Good luck opening those also.
Then too are international issues. Ever try to open a Japanese version of a document in English Word? Again, good luck.
Most people don't run into a lot of issues with Word because most people don't use 1/4 of the features of Word. And that's exactly why Microsoft is worried. OpenOffice.org LOVES these kinds of users!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Thanks. I seem to remember that fonts in a Word document can be extracted, creating copyright issues, and the fonts in a PDF cannot. Is that true?
When you pay to get screwed.
"It is only when other significant pieces of software can be licensed at little or no cost (eg. office suite, e-mail, DBMS) that TCO reduction is at a level significant enough to merit the additional... risks... of Linux"
and
"Linux should be avoided
Think:
Linux
Open Office
Samba (page 2 SIS 1037)
PostgreSQL (page 2 SIS 1035)
Many folks have (on both sides of the argument - note the last link). Why do you presuppose that the poster you replied to will be more amenable?
If long-raging debates like the putative existence of a creator figure were so easily answered, don't you think they would have been long before this book was published? And if it really were a true revelation, would it not have convinced virtually everyone in the ten+ years since its publication? Perhaps they haven't read it, or perhaps they tried and couldn't stay awake (go ahead - I double dare you).
The exciting thing about the universe is that things that seem important and obvious to one person may not to another. Think how boring things would be if that weren't the case. Though it would certainly clean up slashdot....hmm.
Have a look at the document propeties within Acobat Reader. This thing is made with Quark Express on a Mac... ;-) You might expect they should have used Ms-Office for this document...
... we've has demonstrated we can piss money away better than the most corrupt government agencies and have virtually no progress to show for it.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
The original post was obviously a troll, but there's actually more of a parallel here than most realize. The code that SCO claims was stolen from them (specifically, the Unix ABI) was actually contributed to Linux by SCO under the GPL, which the full knowledge and blessing of SCO management. SCO now claims the code was stolen. SCO is obviously smoking a very interesting variety of crack, but it's concievable that Sun may someday get ahold of that same crack and claim infringement.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are not necessarily my own, as I've not yet had my medication today.
MS Office Anecdote #1: I've had so many problems with Word that I don't often use it. However, a while back someone on Slashdot said that his supervisor had spent most of a day writing an important document. She was in a big rush. She had been saving the file regularly, but, after several hours, saving the file just brought an error message. (A sysadmin friend of mine had the same experience, several times.)
Microsoft Word would not open its own file for the supervisor. Word also would not open the backup file. She was frantic.
The person commenting said he made a copy of the file, opened it in OO, saved it in
MS Office Anecdote #2: Someone made an Excel file of all the computer hardware at a particular site. I wanted to make the left and top headings stay stationary as I scrolled to the right and down. I knew it was possible, but didn't know how to do it. I spent several minutes doing searches in Excel help, and couldn't find what I needed.
So, I opened the Excel spreadsheet in the OO spreadsheet program. When I searched, the first entry in help was the one I wanted. I made the headings stationary, and then opened the spreadsheet in Excel. No more problems.
Conclusion: A copy of OO should be required on every Microsoft Office CD.
I'm in the "They Both Suck Rocks" camp. I find them both to be equally a PITA. I'm quite disapointed that OO.o decided to copy the MS Office interface. Best word processor that I've used is WordPerfect 5.1. The "show codes" feature was great. Just turn the WP 5.1 format into XML with a stylesheet editor and I'd be a delighted customer. Right now, I use emacs for most of my document editing because it lets me concentrate on the semantics of what I'm trying to say rather than the formating hangups that I always get stuck in when trying to use either OO.o or MS Word.
A pox on both their heads. OO.o vs. MS Office? I'm rooting for injuries.
FreeSpeech.org
There isnt similar Micro$oft access, and publisher, and outlook. I dont use them, but I think is what a big number of corporate users want in an office pack to change from Micro$oft Office.
If you want to do that, I will provide editing help. I suggest we make it as good as we can, and submit it as a Slashdot story, asking for comments and improvements. The OO people have plenty to do, I think they would like the help. If a significant number of Slashdot people put their minds together, they ought to be able to make a draft copy even more persuasive.
They have a point about unresolved bugs. I use a spreadsheet every day, most of the day, and OO.org bug 2977, one of the most-voted-for spreadsheet bugs, is barely acknowledged by the OpenOffice team. It's been unresolved for two years now, and is officially classified as an "enhancement". Until OO.org stops wiping out data that's hidden by a filter, it's unuseable for me and no doubt for thousands of others around the world.
OO.org is great for secretaries and newbies, but it won't replace a power user's MS Office until they fix some of the worst bugs.
Look carefully in the "OpenOffice 1.1 is an open source alternative" section: "...development or support rteam..." It should be "team", no "r". I've noticed that this document is typesetted in QuarkXPress. But I think they type the text content in their valuable MS Word, and they do have a commercial spell checker. Or may be they don't treat this document seriously (They should publish it later, e.g. April 1st). BTW: Why they typeset this little document in the infamous Microsoft Office Publisher?
I'm not saying I advocate Microsoft here, but to me they should really stop doing these comparitive analyses from the point of view that even when they try and tilt them with propoganda, they still only really succeed in making themselves look bad and telling the world that they're frightened of Open Source. I'm sure anyone who read the original Halloween memorandum will remember VinodV's exhaustive analysis of Linux's strengths, and the areas in which Microsoft lags behind GNU/Linux. In doing so, he gave us probably a better piece of advocacy material than we could have written ourselves, and made Microsoft look terrible in the process.
If MS were intelligent, they'd shut up about this...because every time they try and make themselves out to have a superior system to GNU/Linux or it's applications, the only two things they do are either
a) Make themselves morally look bad by resorting to FUD and intimidation, not to mention the fact that this also reinforces the idea that they know they're losing, and
b) Draw attention to the monumental technical inferiority of their products. They do this because, presumably in trying to appear objective, they exhaustively list Linux's strengths in these comparisons. The problem for them is that once they do that, anyone with half a brain who reads them can see how much of a better deal they're getting with GNU/Linux than with anything Redmond could offer them.
Then again, it is really good for us because it means that when we're trying to convert people to GNU/Linux and away from Microsoft's products, all we really need to do is point them in some cases to Microsoft's own literature...so I know I shouldn't discourage it. I was just talking from MS's POV.
Recently we got new development machines at work, but we didn't have enough MS Office licenses to go around. So I downloaded OpenOffice.org and showed my boss how it worked--since most of the developers at my company only need Office to update our Excel timesheets and read bug report screenshots emailed from users who can't figure out how to send pictures except in Word documents, OOo suits our needs just fine.
And my boss had no idea that there was an open source office suite for Windows! He was impressed enough with it that we switched most of the department to OOo.
I'm sure there are many other PHB's out there who had no idea there was an alternative. Thanks, Microsoft, for cluing them in.
Thank you for that. I've had to sit through endless crappy powerpoint presentations, at uni, while I was in the army, and at a number of other places, where it was glaringly obvious that the speaker didn't have a fucking clue about the subject, and was just reading off the slide. (To be honest, I've done it myself a few times.)
My favourite uni lecturers (mostly mathematicians and a numerical analyst) used blackboards (or whiteboards) for exactly the reasons you cite.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
You know, I agree with your premise, but your arguments are just as good as Microsoft's - that is, they aren't well formed! Your first mistake is to state counter-arguments as facts. They don't have to be true to be facts. A fact simply exists irregardless of its validity to the real world. A better label should use "Counter" instead. Here are a few better counter arguments.
It's significant compared to what? If the TCO is about $10.K +/- 20% then those prices aren't very significant by definition! Better counter arguments to Microsoft's talking points for TOC arguments (point #1 in their brochure) include:
You are correct; however, it is a good idea to keep track of OO.org installations for legal, support, and upgrade purposes. Furthermore, individual distributions from other companies may have "serial numbers" for support and tracking purposes.
According to SUN, support costs per incident - after 60 days free support - are $20 via email and $25 via phone. According to Microsoft, professional support costs per incident - after installation the first two problems, which are free - for Office Professional 2003 are $99 for email and $245 via phone. Personal support is available for $35 per incident. That is all that needs to be said.
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
"Open Office offers limited compatibility with Office".
Which product is offering the more limited compatability with the other?
OO can read and write MSO formats. I'm not sure that the reverse is true at all. Last time I checked it was not.
You're just jealous that you don't have huge balls
> On a different note, I don't think weak-minded believe in God. If anything, regious fundamentalists are one of the strongest people around (they cannot be easily tempted by desires such as wealth, lust/sex, fame, vanity, etc).
... what about Falwell and Backer (sp?) and all those other televangelists who used church money to pay for blow jobs?
Er
Otoh, I completely agree with the irrational bit.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
Wow! I'm impressed! No bugs, great support, innovative security.
And they provide me with e-mail client for free! That's incredible!
So, where I can buy MS Office packaged for my Debian/sid?
"Where? What's the URL?"
Good question... I just checked the MS website and MS Office 2003 Pro is $329 Upgrade/$499 Full...
Even NewEgg has it for only slightly cheaper @ $355 Full
MS Employees get it for around $20 though. If you live around Seattle, just find yourself an MS employee if you need any MS software.
One thing that's gotten a LOT better is Excel's handling of web queries.
In fact the main reason it'd take a lot of outside pressure for me to switch from MS Office is the amount of VBA code and queries I'd have to rewrite in my spreadsheets.
seems like anti-OO.org propoganda. And about that tech support claim... yea, the best, if by best you mean that they charge you 35 dollars to wait for 45 minutes on a held line for someone to tell you to reinstall windows. (that's my experiance, when file protection protected a system file to the point of corruption. Microsoft support sucks.
Word has some useful features that are still missing from OpenOffice. For example, I often use the Word Window -> Split command, which really has no proper equivalent in OpenOffice. This useful feature allows multiple editable views of the same document. I also like the fact that obsolete functions in Word continue to be available through macros and keystroke mapping long after Microsoft removes them from the feature list. For example, ancient Word for DOS versions let you highlight simple arithmetic equations on screen and then press the F2 key to calculate a result. This function is still available in WordBasic (selection.range.calculate), and it can still be mapped to a function key through Word's macro facility.
I've been thinking about contacting my local community education center and offer to teach Open Office as a night school course. I think there are a lot of people out there who will switch away from Microsoft Office if someone will simply hold their hand and walk them through the different features.
Is anyone else doing something like this? If so, do you have any links to cirriculum materials, quizzes, etc?
Ruby on Rails Screencast
The last one, "Transfer to another university". Aaah. Now we don't have to deal with that open-office guy anymore....
I'm sure you meant it that way...
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Microsoft Word/Office or any other Microsoft products after Bill Gates gave this interview in 1995.
And no, it's not a fake.
Still, there are many reasons not to passively accept Word format as a "de facto standard". It's a goddamn mess for one thing.
I mostly have a strong positive impression of OO, the recent versions anyway. It has what people need, and it's reasonably easy to use. If it weren't for people needing interoperability with their existing Word and Excel files, Office would be dying, instead of dominating the market. Yes, this is ironic, considering how bad Microsoft is at supporting interoperability -- but it's true all the same.
But the one part of OO I dislike is the one you love: the HTML editor. Yes, it does a lot of the basic stuff very well, including WYSIWYG editing. But it treats HTML files as a kind of Word Processor file -- and that's a major design flaw. Like most WPs, the HTML editor relies on template files to standardize style -- which means that it's pretty hard to impose a new style on a bunch of existing files.
The sane, maintainable, standards-compliant way to author web pages is to put your styles in a single CSS style sheet, which all your web pages link to. For that to work, you have to be careful about separation of content and presentation, meaning you have to avoid tags like <font> and attributes like "align". The OO editor simply doesn't know how to do these things.
Link managment could use some work as well.
I suppose the OO editor is fine if you just want to create a bunch of web pages and that won't undergo a lot of revision or redesign. But for serious web design, look elsewhere.
As a colleague noticed very quickly: "Why is MS publishing this document as a PDF, while all the other stuff on their site are .doc's"? Answer: look at the properties and you will see that this document was created on a Mac with Quark-XPress. Mmmm, that's probably because MS-Office doesn't have a native .PDF export, like StarOffice has :-).
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
The 'therefore' is implied. Otherwise what's the point of listing all those people in the first place?
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Name a religion with rational God...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
It was pretty slick.
Microsoft's Office XML sucks. It comes in two flavours, one with everything useful stripped out and one up to the eyeballs in bizarre XML attributes and binary crap.
What I do with the HTML editor on my own site is edit the doc up in OOWriter, then shove it through a filter which "tops and tails" it, leaving the essence of it to be framed by a brace of PHP scripts. The scripts add headers, footers, banners, some geek stuff (translate, linked-to, validate) and common styles. I agree that it's not DreamWeaver, not a website designer, but for actually editing up pages it's night-vs-day better than Word or any other WP I've seen.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
No, that's not what he's saying.
Einstein is an acclaimed scientist
Einstein believed in God
Therefore, it is possible to be scientific and believe in God
That's perfectly straightforward and logical. It's not saying that Einstein is always right, so God must exist, it's simply saying that science and religion are not mutually exclusive.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Do you find it rational to believe in the axioms of science, especially non-intuitive ones like the axiom of choice in set theory?
What is the difference between believing in an axiomatic system (on which most science is based) and a religion, which is very much like an axiomatic system in which there are a few axioms called dogmas?
Why do you thikn one is rational and the other irrational?
My heart is pure, but make no mistake, it's pure evil
what does rational mean to you?
My heart is pure, but make no mistake, it's pure evil
More to the point, other people believe in a whole bunch of stuff too - strongly enough that they don't feel the need to reconvince themselves daily by putting it in their .sigs. Why do you?
Hmmm, just a guess, but it could be because people get sick and tired of being told what they believe in is wrong, that science has killed God, that the Bible is full of contradictions, etc.
It seems people always want to not be in the majority. I see people everywhere constantly badmouthing Christianity, yet when other religions are raised, they become instantly accepting and tolerent. It seems that only minority views* need to be tolerated; majority* views can be freely abused.
* Minority and majority are probably not the right words here. More likely its people embracing "new" ideas and abusing "old" ones, simply because if its new, its fashionable.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Hmmmm....Christianity.
How 'bout you pick off a few Biblical points, and I'll rationalize them?
(Note, Biblical doctrine, not historical. Various churches over the years have made many mistakes and I'll admit that as quickly as anyone else. But God shouldn't be judged just because his people screw up so often.)
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
However, the same argument applies to new versions of MS Office as well. The UI is changed significantly enough that retraining is required in many cases, and this is definitely something MS wants you to do.
Establishing a monoculture environment leaving the organization vulnerable
Excessive costs by requireing MS office on desktops that never user it where something like OO may be sufficient.
Restricting the use of a emerging class of IP enabled devices (from UPS to IP telephones)
Forcing the use of Win2000/IIS/SQL server where a Unix box is more appropiate and secure and cheaper to operate. I am sure other could add to this list.... But I hear customer satificaton is high
Excerpt from article:
User support such as training (OpenOffice UI, although similar in many ways to Office, is not the same and users may require "retraining")
In reference to total cost of ownership of Open Office. I agree to an extent. Retraining does incur costs, but I don't know - I think retraining is really an overemphasized cost, and it's careless to suggest retraining may be necessary without a deeper explanation of what the difference is between the UIs, and how those differences affect the user experience. Gourmet Settings flatware, while similar in many ways to Oneida flatware is not the same, and yet I've found it unnecessary to be retrained.
Additionally, OpenOffice does not have an e-mail client, so customers may incur a licensing cost associated with buying an e-mail application. http://www.openoffice.org
There is an implication being made here that an OpenOffice user will inevitably need to buy a separate e-mail application. I see language like this all the time in "persuasive arguments" such as position papers. The brochure could have mentioned that users could acquire equally free email applications, but it doesn't because the goal is steer consumers away from the product.
"I only need basic features. OpenOffice is good enough." In today's networked, highly collaborative world, businesses do not operate in a vacuum; basic feature functionality that enables content authoring is only one small aspect of what a small business needs. Businesses need to: - Exchange business transaction information externally with customers and vendors.
How is this an advanced feature of MS Office? This is a secondary business activity that can be accomplished by using any set of compatible communication methodologies including EDI.
- Ensure that their mission-critical information is adequately protected from virus attack.
MS-Office protects businesses from virus attacks? Verdict: clever use of juxtaposition to imply a relationship between two independent things.
- Effectively manage customer relationships so as to maximize sales.
At least this point is more relevent; however, CRM implies much more than storing client emails in an addressbook or designing Word templates that tailor letters to specific clients.
- Quickly access key information from accounting and other business applications.
Finally something I can support. Excel is very flexible and there are a lot of business applications out there that make use of the interactivity between Excel and Microsoft SQL database servers
- Create sales and marketing material that portrays the business in a professional manner.
Photoshop. Illustrator. Dreamweaver... and yes, PowerPoint too... but Powerpoint is empowered by one's skills in the aforementioned applications. When you're giving a presentation, what matters is that the presentation is good, not whether it was done in PowerPoint. The new database features in Flash will help make Flash a very edgy presentation development app overtime. Especially if we start getting presentation templates for Flash.
- Do all this in a cost-effective manner because a small business does not have the resources of a large company for IT integration and support.
Perhaps the strongest argument for using OpenOffice instead of MS-Office. The bulk of document sharing is still paper-based. Therefore, if you won't be sharing your documents for editing purposes electronically, then you will be either printing the document or creating read-only versions of the documents using Acrobat.
I do like the idead of a document being perpetually current - always updated. The database features of Excel, PowerPoint, and Word bring us one-step closer; however, as I said, document sharing in business is still paper-based and will remain so. People will print out their documents to study them, archive them, and share them with others. Also, I have an inherent mistrust of documents that dialup database servers to update their contents.
Perhaps the Beta or some sort of academic site license thing, either way I highly doubt it's the full corporate version. If it is, check the license policy, it may give you the features but probably forbids you to use them in any way other than academic.
.... Sun is making inroads with StarOffice. Sun signs StarOffice deal in India
Although MS is very popular for bloated/unsecure/buggy code, Office is a exception. There are two main reasons for this:
1. MS Bought it!
2. MS didn't (and couldn't) mess with it cauz it was one of the key for his monopoly with buisness customers. If someone else had a better alternative, companys would not be stick to MS Windows!
However, I DON'T AGREE for the productivity thing!
I would if it ran UNIX...
I am not familiar with the axiom of chioce in set theory. Can you summarize it for me? Thanks.
Whether something is intuitive or not is irrelevant. A lot of science is counter-intuitive but that doesn't mean anything. A good example is gravity. Most people would claim that gravity acts more strongly on a heavy object than a light one. Most people say that a one ton car, for example, will fall more quickly to the earth than a 100kg rock. Yet that is not true. Both will hit the ground at the same time (in theory, with low air resistance). What is intuitive is completely wrong. So whether something is intuitive or not makes little difference to reality. Religious people, and non-scientific people, base their lives on intuition but it can be wrong.
Back to your point... The difference between science and religion is that one follows logic while the other follow faith. That is why religion is irrational. Most of what religion says has to be taken at face value--in faith. You cannot question the principles. The details depend on religion so it's kind of hard to argue without going into specifics. But I guess one common principle is praying. Most religions claim that you must pray to some God. You just cannot rationalize this. You must simply follow the scripture (or some verbal deeds of the priest.) What is happening is that you are following faith and not logic.
You cannot prove or show in some logical manner that praying, for example, means anything. Does God reward those that pray? Not really. You can perform scientific studies to refute this, but you can also look at the terrible lives led by many religious people, who happen to be extremely poor and struggling.
So there you have it... just to recap, science follows logic. The axioms follow one from another. Relgion, in contrast, does not. You just take what the scripture or some priest says as truth. For example, a religious person cannot question why a priest/cleric must always be male*. You must simply take it on faith that the priest is a male and if you are female, well, oh well.
(* Pretty much true for all religions that I know of.)
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
My definition of rational does not deviate from a dictionary definition. Dictionaries basically say that rational is following reason. That's what it means to me too, although I like to think of it as being logic.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
I must point out how ironic it is that you refer to a grammar checker and then use "It's" where you mean "Its" in the very next sentence!
Every time you run "emerge", a Microsoft drone dies.
I would love to uninstall MS Office from my workstation. Can anyone recommend a replacement for Outlook? We use Exchange a good bit (calender functions etc.)
What was your username again? -BOFH
It's linuxfr.org, you insensitive clod !
but good luck on most campuses. The "student interface" is often some hell desk staffed by a bitter MSCE who couldn't get a real job after studying on same campus. If you can get OO.o past that to someone with some authority, I applaud you.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
I don't know much about religions and this applies to Christianity too. Perhaps someone else can jump in and provide some solid examples. Until someone else does so, I'll just give my thoughts (which admittedly is based more on popular views on Christianity than anything.)
To start off, let me attack what you put in brackets:
Given that you admit that Churches, or more precisely priests, "screw up" what do you follow? How does one determine what is right and wrong? Is the present view of homosexuality by churches (i.e. homosexuality is bad and should not be permitted in society) correct? Or how about when the Christian churches supported Nazism? Or how about the Christian fundamentalists in USA claiming that Islam is evil and should be abolished? I mean, where do you draw the line?
Furthermore, if the majority of the followers of a particular religion accept some activity at a point in time (even though it is clearly immoral), is that reflective of religion or not? Is it wrong for an atheist to accurately say that the religion (or the following of that particular God) is wrong? If you are looking at Christianity I suppose the Crusades and the burning of "witches" come to mind. How do you know that you, as a follower of a particular religion, is not wrong just like billions before you were?
Now on to the main point...
Since I'm not a Christian, this would be tough but let me try. Does your religion not say that God created humans? I'm talking about the Adam and Eve story. Aren't humans supposed to be some "special" beings that were created by God? Given that, how do you explain that we are almost identical to other animals on earth? Our physical characteristics are similar, our behaviour is identical, and so on. How do you reconcile this? Are humans "special" as religion says, or are they just animals are science says? Science is more right here...
Another example would be Noah's Ark. Doesn't Christianity say that Noah rounded up all the animals and went to a ship? Does this make any (rational) sense at all? Can any human really round up all the animals? Right now, with more advanced technology, we still can't. In fact, we still discover new species every year. And you are telling me that Noah managed to round up every animal? Also this event supposedly happened a few thousand years ago. Do you seriously believe that everythign was wiped out a few thousand years ago? Do you seriously believe that Noah even had contact with people in (Eastern) Asia or North and South America? Are you telling me that all these people were killed?
How old is the earth? Is it a few thousand as Christianity claims? How do you explain the dinosaurs? How do you explain the fact that there are other things (namely stars) that are older than what Christianity claims is the age of the universe? Or do you think the stars are figment of our imagination?
Lastly, do you still believe the earth is at the center of universe (as Christianity believed until the 1990's*)? Given that Christianity, and all its leading scholars and theists, were wrong at that time, can you honestly believe anything now?
Why are you even a Christian? Is it just because your parents were? What if I tell you that kings and queens forced people to follow their religion? How can you be sure that you are right in anything?
(* At least that's when the Catholic Church officially said that Galileo was right.)
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
So they looked at office xp and said "um, make it blue-er"
I'm going to pull a Taoist and say if I taught you then you would not learn (well actually not taoist, but I'm deriving it from there after a few steps).
I can however feel safe that if I urge you to study Judaism (at least through some good books) with an eye for why things happened they way they did in the founding days of Judaism then again Christianity.
The bible may be full of political exaggeration, but it is also extremely historically accurate in those areas the politics left alone. It is a very good reference for making your way to a god that exists in a rational universe.
And I feel safe in saying, my god is the universe. Unfortunately the word universe is inadequate, and I have no other words to explain it unless you get there on your own.
If this was a poll my response would be, "I use LaTex, you insensitive clod." And I really do use LaTeX. I can create documents in just about any format imaginable from the same file, and it just works. No fighting with a word processor trying to convince it that I really do want certain margins, or a footer on only certain pages. If you can use it, LaTeX just works.
It's a steep learning curve though. It's easier to use a WYSIWYG word processor, as long as you don't have to battle with it to make it do what you really want.
I can't even think of how many times I've seen Powerpoint crash before/in middle of presentation. And the nasty kind, where even if you hit the X and the End Task it just doesn't quit.
Obviously "End Process" is beyond most college professors. Just 2 weeks ago... "Oh darn, I can't get this to work. I guess I'll have to let you out early. Have a nice lunch!"
To that I say THANK YOU MICROSOFT FOR MAKING CRAPPY SOFTWARE! YAY!!
Partial Credit: The Engineer's Best friend
"Well, the bridge didn't fall all the way down!"
Can't we just bring back WordStar? Life was so much better then. (sigh)
TheTiminator
In order to assess a statement according to the rules of logic, it should be of the form: Statement A, therefore Statement B.
Wow, so "'If P then Q' therefore 'Q'" is a valid argument form in your universe. Fascinating. Over here you need at least two statements before you can say "therefore".
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
Have you tried Evolution?
http://www.ximian.com/products/evolution/
Not the OO communists :-)
Just some of you go a little bit overboard with the pacifism-at-all-costs thing. Granted, the opposite doesn't work either; one just has to be open to the idea that sometimes conflicts ultimately yield better results in the end.
Alas, so is the human condition.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
"Document conversion and rewriting macros (OpenOffice does not support Office macros)"
My company just did a Windows NT -> Windows XP and Office 97 -> Office XP upgrade and hired an external company to rewrite all the macro's.
Now that's an advantage.
OT, but I thought I'd share ;) Unfortunately, people tend to be REALLY stupid.
A few years ago I had a loyalty membership that gave you a free movie for every 5 that you saw. With great fanfare the loyalty scheme announced a superbe upgrade in benefits for its members -- instead of one free movie per five that you saw, now you get one per TEN! Twice the benefit, same price.
You know what? They bought it. And I got a special phone call to explain to me how I was mistaken when I complained.
So when Joe Average reads that MS Word requires 128Mb+ of RAM, its obvious that it must be at least twice as good as OpenOffice which only required 64Mb RAM.
Sad but true.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
Not if you bring up the scare tatic of interlectual property and how it is very easy for someone to change/infect those documents. If you really want to work with the big boys sometimes the best way is to point out (in a polite way of course) that the best, safest and most reliable way of document handling is to use pdf files and that it makes good busness sense. You would be surprised how many managers (remember we are not talking to IT people here) cave in to that.
... etc, use you normally can get them to agree to what you want. If you use IT/Engineering logic (and common sense) you are going to loose.
Providing you use the same jargon managers, CEO's
We can call this diplomacy or FUD. After all certain very successful companies have been doing this for years.
The astroturfer posing as an AC is inadvertantly making a case for the use of PDFs for syllabi and other read-only course material. PDF is the only effective way to ensure that layout won't get screwed up, it is well documented (so it will be available in the future), and it is supported any common platform.
By the way, RTF is becoming less of an option. After it became common knowledge that RTF met all the usual word processing needs, the next version of MS Word started making RTFs without all the needed formatting. However, the "missing" formatting is still there in the RTF, as it can be restored when opened again by MS-Word. So it is still a good format to use in a M$ shop to avoid viruses.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Indeed. Here's the link: Sun OpenOffice.org Software Support.
I'm a student at a large public university. I spend most of my computer time in Linux, and I'm a huge fan of OSS, but, for practical reasons, I find it necessary to keep an installation of Windows and MS Office on my computer.
As an engineering student, I often have to perform statistical analysis on data I collect in the laboratory. Although I have the option of doing my calculations in OO Calc or MS Excel, I usually choose the latter for two simple reasons: speed and simplicity. To this day, I haven't come across an easy way to plot data points and a best fit line on the same graph along with the equation of the best fit line using OO Calc. In Excel, it's merely the matter of a few clicks.
I realize that I could theorectically combine OO Calc with Octave and gnuplot to produce the graphs that I need, but I shudder at the thought of having to hack together a solution when Excel makes it so easy.
Excel's not perfect, either, though. It's a pain to export Excel graphs so that I can include them in TeX reports, and there's no built-in function to print multiple plots per a page (useful for getting a quick overview of data). Nevertheless, Excel is still A LOT more friendlier for a student who needs to quickly process their data.
I'm Trappped at Berkeley.
Hang on, doesn't Microsofts own literature scream "We're a monopoly, if you don't use *our* software you won't be able to read any word processor files"?
Why am I not in the least bit surprised that a religious debate has been born in an article about choosing M$ or OSS?!?!?!?!
Reputable german geek magazine c't has an great comparison of 7 word processing programs this month.
Surprising result: The biggest commercial text processors cannot produce a diploma thesis with 120 imgages and 240 footnotes. They all died at different stages of image insertion.
Word 2003 managed to add about just over 40 images before dying a horrible death. WordPerfect didn't fare much better.
OpenOffice.org stood out in that it imported all graphics and footnotes without problems.
Maybe he is implying that he is as good as those people.
It's simply saying that science and God are not mutually exclusive.
Here are Microsoft's arguments against Open Office usage:
1. "OpenOffice is free"
Licence cost makes up only a small portion of the total cost of ownership. More significant costs include:
* Installation and deployment
Yes. Guess what? With OO, you don't need to worry about activation keys, whether you have enough licenses, going through a requisition process for a computer, or anything. You can just download the thing and install it.
* Data migration and testing (especially if customer uses Access database)
It's already been established that Access is a POS. If a customer is stuck using Access, they should be migrating to a DB that isn't liable to eat their data the next time Access feels like corrupting it.
Document conversion and rewriting macros (OpenOffice does not support Office macros)
And macros are one of the primary causes of document breakage and security problems out there already. Many people block or remove attached macros to avoid macro virus problems.
User support such as training (OpenOffice UI, although similar in many ways to Office, is not the same and users may require "retraining")
I don't get why "retraining" is quoted, but okay. There is likely some transition cost, though for the overwhelming masses of Office users, the used featureset is identical on both platforms. The same is true, though, of switching Word versions. This paper gives education users as an example -- I know one elementary school that uses an *ancient* version of Word on Windows 3.11. They have no reason to upgrade -- it works fine. Moving to a newer version is going to entail retraining costs no matter what.
Additionally, OpenOffice does not have an email client, so customers may incur a licensing cost associated with buying an e-mail application
Err...why? There are numerous excellent email clients out there that don't cost a penny. Outlook is a notoriously *bad* email client, famous for security problems.
2. "I only need basic features. OpenOffice is good enough."
In today's networked, highly collaborative world, businesses do not operate in a vacuum; basic feature functionality that enables content authoring is only one small aspect of what a small business needs.
There are no concrete problems included in this section with something that Office can handle and something that OpenOffice cannot. As others have pointed out, the "virus" issues is particularly ridiculous -- when OpenOffice *has* a reputation for being used as a virus vector as Office does, *then* it might be a concern. "Create sales and marketing material that portrays the business in a professional manner"? What? How can OpenOffice not do this?
OpenOffice 1.1 is an open source alternative.
OpenOffice does not have a dedicated development or support team. Consequently, if bugs go unresolved, users have the option to resolve problems by scouring through numerous community sites and chat rooms.
As opposed to the current Microsoft approach? This is aimed at "value" customers. Microsoft is not going to care in the least if they complain about a bug. There just isn't enough money involved for Microsoft to care about actually doing support. If it were Dell, say, they might take an interest. Open Source systems are generally *much* easier to get bugs fixed in and get issues to the developers. Let's take a look at MSIE -- it's been *how* many years of complaints from the Internet at large, and PNG support is still broken?
4. "OpenOffice is compatible with Microsoft Office."
OpenOffice offers limited compatibility with Microsoft Office. Formatting, document integration, dynamic links to data, macros, and customer applications will be lost.
Versions of Microsoft Office itself frequently break said compatibility with previous versions. I've seen instances where OpenOffice correctly imported a document from an old ver
May we never see th
MS's academic licencing does not restrict what you can do with the software any more than their regular licence does. My university's computer lab has an MSDN Academic Alliance account, and thus all computer science students and lecturers get free (yes, totally gratis), unrestricted licences for most MS end user and developer products; I have three Windows licences, licences for VS6, VS Embedded and VS.NET, licences for Office, Visio, Project, the list goes on. I even get told when new versions are out and offered those. There are no restrictions on what I can use these for (personal, academic, commercial) and the licences are perpetual (don't have to stop using them once I leave the lab) - when I graduate, all I will lose is the ability to get new versions for free.
I use very little of the MS software I have licences for, but it's handy to be able to fire up VS.NET under VMWare to check out code that someone else wrote. =)
Whenever someone posts a link to some kind of MS
FUD, it's usually too subtle to fully appreciate.
This article is awesome in that anyone with even
2^-1 a clue will see straight through this.
Have MS completely disposed of subtlety?
Or am I giving them too much credit in believing
they had any in the first place.
Why would I ever want to send a document to a client in .doc format? My tables will appear outlined, abbreviations and names will have scwiggly red lines under them, bullet points scwiggly green. If I want to send a professional looking document I might make it in Word, but I'll definitely convert it to pdf before sending. And wouldn't you know it, open office has that feature built in!
And another thing, in my experience I've had way more problems moving between different versions of word than open office. Even the SAME versions of word on different machines.
Reasons to get Open Office over MS Office 1. Expense 2. Buying from a monopoly sucks! 3. Expense 4. Who needs thge bloat? 5. Did I mention expense?
But Officer, I DID read the f**king article!
This is untrue (or maybe I'm misunderstanding you). An axiom is simply a statement which is assumed to be true; it does not ever follow from other axioms. Think about it: If statement A can be proven using axioms then it makes no sense to call it an axiom. Therefore we eliminate it from the set of axioms.
Hehehehehe. hmm... yeah.. its asking for it indeed.
Given that you admit that Churches, or more precisely priests, "screw up" what do you follow? How does one determine what is right and wrong?
Ok, well, I'm going to categorize Christian churches according to their views on the Bible. Catholic and Orthodox churches take the view that the priests' interpretation of the Bible is the word of God. Evanglical Churches believe that the Bible itself is the word of God, inspired, correct, and sufficient. Charismatic and pentecostal churches often (these churches are usually fairly independant, and what is said of one doesn't always apply to all) take the view that the individual's interpretation of the Bible is correct.
I'm evangelical. I believe that the Bible is the word of God, and that anything said in the Bible can be interpreted in the context of the Bible. Therefore, I believe in moral absolutes. I don't believe that Christian morality is defined by the behaviour of priests. What is right is what the Bible says is right.
Is the present view of homosexuality by churches (i.e. homosexuality is bad and should not be permitted in society) correct?
I'd say that homosexuality is a sin - Leviticus 18:22 "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination." From a Biblical perspective, I'd say that's pretty clear. However, I'd disagree with the "should not be permitted in society" bit. In the Bible, all these laws are applied to Gods' people (the Jews, in the Old Testament). As Gods' people, these rules are for Christians as well. But nowhere in the Bible does it say "go out and force non-believers to act the same way you do". Forcing people "not to sin" won't save them; that requires a change of heart. All it will do is foster resentment, and it won't change a darn thing. Christians are told to evangelise, not tyranise.
Or how about when the Christian churches supported Nazism?
I can't find anywhere in the Bible where it advocates racism; the problem the Bible has with foreigners is not their race, it's their religion. Also, considering more than half the Bible is Semitic texts, considering Bible-based Christianity to be anti-Semitic is pretty absurd.
Or how about the Christian fundamentalists in USA claiming that Islam is evil and should be abolished?
I would say that Islam is wrong ("Jesus said...'No man comes to the Father but through me' John 14:6), but not that it should be abolished, mainly for the same reasons as with homosexuality. I think Christians shoud definately have a ministry to Muslims (which is difficult in extreme Muslim countries), but not that Islam (or any religion) should be forbidden.
Does your religion not say that God created humans? I'm talking about the Adam and Eve story. Aren't humans supposed to be some "special" beings that were created by God? Given that, how do you explain that we are almost identical to other animals on earth? Our physical characteristics are similar, our behaviour is identical, and so on.
The difference between man and the animals, according to the Bible, is that man was created "in the image of God" (Genesis 1:27). That is generally taken to mean that man, alone among creation, makes a choice between good and evil. Man is the only moral animal. The Bible says that God created man to be the caretaker over creation. The original plan was:
God rules Man rules Nature.
But when Man rejected God's authority, then Man's moral authority over Nature was also broken. (Genesis 3:17 "cursed is the ground because of you").
Doesn't Christianity say that Noah rounded up all the animals and went to a ship? Does this make any (rational) sense at all? Can any human really round up all the animals? Right now, with more advanced technology, we still can't. In fact, we still discover new species every year.
Firstly, the distinction of "species" is fairly new, and arbitrary. I doubt Noah rounded up every species. But I'm pretty sure Noah packed on dogs, and cats, a
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
endnote would launch it to the top of the list for many, if not most academics. they are debatebly more experimental than the world at large.
I am not familiar with the axiom of chioce in set theory. Can you summarize it for me? Thanks.
This is the Mathworld definition:
given any set of mutually exclusive nonempty sets, there exists at least one set that contains exactly one element in common with each of the nonempty sets.
An alternative formulation is known as the well ordering principle:
Every set can be well-ordered.
A well-order (or well-ordering) on a set S is a total order on S with the property that every non-empty subset of S has a least element in this ordering.
A consequence of this is that you can take an sphere, cut it into a small finite number of pieces (like five), which can be reassembled to produce two spheres of the same size as the original one.
Many mathematicians believe this axiom is true. Others believe is not. Hell, there have been important mathematicians who believe that irrational numbers (e.g. PI) don't exist.
You can consider belief in these axioms as faith.
Religions (at least some of them) use logic. You have a number of dogmas and apply logic and reasoning to derive more complex results.
The science in religion who studies this is theology.
Belief in mathematics and religion is very similar. You have to take some things as true (axioms or dogmas). There is nothing ilogical in believing in a dogma like "God exists" or the axiom of choice.
Natural sciences are similar. They have a few principles (taken from observation, experimentation or other methods) and they apply logic and mathematics to find new results. What happens in natural sciences is that from time to time some principles are proved to be wrong and the science must reinvent itself.
So according to your logic it would be more irrational to believe in science than in religion because nobody has proved dogmas like "god exists" are wrong, while many natural science principles have been proved wrong and have been substituted by more "acurate" principles that might be proved wrong in the future too. This has happened in mathematics too.
You may have faith or not, but you definetely can't call all religions irrational. There may be some irrational religions because there dogmas are fallacious or many the the "laws" they state contadict their dogmas in some way that can be logically demonstrated.
The reasoning of the person who said Newton, Einstein and others believed in God, so did he, is what is called reasoning by authority.
It is no different (or less irrational) of what you do when you believe in mathematical on natural science principles. You believe in mathematics and science because all your teachers you have had and things you have read (that is, authorities) and studied have taught you to believe they are true. You simply have faith in those principles. In your case your faith is so blind on those principles, that you do not even realize it is faith.
But don't worry. There is nothing irrational in faith.
My heart is pure, but make no mistake, it's pure evil
I've reviewed OO some months ago. It had a good spreadsheet, with an excellent random number generator, but still lacked a decent solver. No quantitative analyst can go without one...
More info can be found on my homepage (in dutch).
fortune is my favourite linux command
Yes, Blackboard (web-based package for student-teacher interaction, used by a number of universities) is a web-based POS. I have no idea how they managed to sell so many copies of it. However, use of Blackboard does not imply use of proprietary formats, either.
May we never see th
I know this is really late reply, but hopefully you'll notice it .... that was a fantastic response. Very well done and I completely agree with your points.
I haven't encountered one that it doesn't open yet. It is quite good. It also allows you to "Save as"
There is only one user you can truly control, and he is sick of using Office. Why does he keep doing it?
Take the plunge. You don't have to uninstall Office to install OO.o. Give it a try. I did, and I've never looked back.
-Peter
3. "OpenOffice 1.1 is an open-source alternative."
OpenOffice does not have a dedicated development or support rteam.
Apparently MS does not have dedicated editing staff for their sales & marketing publications.
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." - E.W. Dijkstra
I was compiling a doc from various sources in Word 2002 including text and pictures - it died around page 30 and lost my additions.
I then opened the corpse in OO. I added all the stuff and ended up with a 101 page document. No crash.
I saved the document in Word format just under 1 MB.
I'd never saved a document in native OO format before so out of curiosity I tried it. 130 KB.
I know OO has some shortcomings (why is Paste at the bottom of the right-click menu? Anyone know how to customise this?), but it's 90% or more comparable with say Office Small Business-type edition for functionality. Email? Thunderbird or Evolution. Access? Haven't tried MySQL but I was very impressed when I could open Access databases in OO. And the free PDF distiller and Flash converter for presentations are a tasty garnish.
Microsoft's marketing guide should come on a roll with perforations.
The 'therefore' is implied. Otherwise what's the point of listing all those people in the first place?
The 'therefore' is not implied unless you read that into it. And the reason, as I stated earlier, is a counter example.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
Well, if you start with "Statement A, therefore, Statement B" that is equal to if A then B, A therefore B. The previous is just a more succinct way to put it. You can disprove a rule, like "if A then B" or you can disprove the assumption, like the truth of A.
Wow, so "'If P then Q' therefore 'Q'" is a valid argument form in your universe.
If you would like to look into fallacies and poor argument strategies, then your post has an excellent example in which you put words into someones mouth and then shoot down that idea.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
The difference between science and religion is that one follows logic while the other follow faith.
In general, scientists take it on faith that God is the wrong answer to every question. As its generally practiced, science starts from a foundation of natural materialism.
Whether scientific or religous, logic always requires some assumptions as a starting point. This does not distinguish science from religion. The nature of the starting point for discussion is what distinguishes science from religion.
You cannot prove or show in some logical manner that praying, for example, means anything. Does God reward those that pray? Not really.
This assumes the reason to pray is that you are a selfish, greedy, self centered individual who sees prayer as a way to get stuff you want. A more enlightened view might be that prayer is a way to learn more about and draw closer to God.
For example, a religious person cannot question why a priest/cleric must always be male*
Which explains why there is no controversy or differences of opinion about this issue among religous people. Furthermore, you need to seriously expand your exposure to the range of religous thought in the world.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
XML Tools for Mac OS X
As a quick answer to all of your questions, the distinguishing characteristic of a Christian is that he or she professes to be a follower of Christ. Close after that is the belief that the primary revelation about Christ is the Gospels.
From there, you branch out to the rest of the Biblical texts, as Christ clearly presented his teachings in their context.
However, mindlessly following any religious "leader" is not advocated or condoned by any of this. The biggest counter example is Christ himself. His harshest words and fiercest anger were directed toward the religous "leaders" of his day.
So, in short, rejecting false religion, false teaching, and corrupt leaders is very much an integral part of Christian belief.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
XML Tools for Mac OS X
I just want to congratulate you on the amount of thought and discussion you have been able to generate with your sig. You've gotten people to stop and think, always an achievement in this day and age :).
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
XML Tools for Mac OS X
I disagree; I think he is trying to add validity to his own assertion by naming people who also believed that assertion, despite the fact that those people may or may not have had decent reasons for that assertion and thus can lend it little extra credibility.
...
.sig says...though you may be right about what he means.
Logically I think he's stating a fallacy.
Einstein believed in God.
Einstein was a great scientist.
Therefore belief in God is scientific.
A--->B
A--->C
B--->C
Its the old "Appeal to Irrelevant Authority."
Though I agree with YOUR logic, I don't think that his what his
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Well, if you start with "Statement A, therefore, Statement B" that is equal to if A then B, A therefore B. The previous is just a more succinct way to put it.
No it isn't. Nothing about "Statement A, therefore Statement B" implies an if/then relationship -- it could just as easily be "A and B", "A", therefore "B". You can't just say "A therefore B" until you've defined a relationship between the two.
You can disprove a rule, like "if A then B" or you can disprove the assumption, like the truth of A.
Wrong. Disproving A doesn't tell you anything about the truth-value of B. I mean, just think about it for a minute -- if A = "lightning hits the transformer"; and B = "the power will go out"; that doesn't mean that if the power goes out, lightning hit the transformer -- a fallen tree could've knocked down a powerline, or the nuclear plant could be having a meltdown, or you could've just blown a fuse, etc., etc.
What you're saying would be true of an "if and only if" statement, but with plain old if/then, the falsity of A or the truth of B doesn't tell you anything about the other.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
i looked at the m$ article expecting to see a features list, and found another marketing pamphlet; boooo.
p er with linux/openOffice/mozilla/mono. just a simple list. either yes or no to a given 'feature', like 'cut', or 'paste'.
i wish i had the time to compare the following:
windows/m$office/explorer/.net-develo
I think you understand just enough logic to be dangerous, but I entirely disagree with your post.
You can't just say "A therefore B" until you've defined a relationship between the two.
"A therefore B" does define the relationship between the two. It is a short way of saying, "there is a direct causal relationship between A and B. Furthermore, A is true, meaning B is true."
Wrong. Disproving A doesn't tell you anything about the truth-value of B.
You are correct in your argument, but you are arguing the wrong point. I didn't say anything about the truth value of B. To use your example:
A = "lightning hits the transformer"
B = "the power will go out"
To develop a complete logical argument that the power will go out, I need to establish two things. First I have to establish a A -> B relationship. Then I have to establish the truth of A.
To refute, I need only disprove one of those two things. The refutation (and this is where you were confused) does not mean B is false. The refutation means B has not been proven to be true.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
I am an idiot. Didn't get the post. Fool. Wish you could delete posts. Now I do see the irony.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
Full of arrogance: "I would say that Islam is wrong".
Lack reason to conveniently promote their beliefs: "The apostles, the people that followed Jesus around for years, were the ones in the best position to know if Jesus was a fraud". You mean they were biased because of their being so close to him?
Base their faith on hearsay: "I believe what the Bible says".
No wonder you quietly hate so many people: "The fundamental premise of Christianity is that everybody's evil, and everybody's going to hell". How can you be happy when your creator has created something so evil?
The only place where you make sense is here: "Proving Christians wrong isn't too hard".
The meme police, They live inside of my head
"A therefore B" does define the relationship between the two. It is a short way of saying, "there is a direct causal relationship between A and B. Furthermore, A is true, meaning B is true."
No, an if/then statement indicates a "direct causal relationship"; "therefore" denotes a conclusion that follows from the premises. As I noted previously (but you snipped), "A therefore B" could come after "if A then B" or "A and B" -- but in the latter case there's no causation implied between the two, only that if one's true the other is too. If you don't present a premise that defines a relationship between A and B, then "A therefore B" doesn't make any logical sense
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
only when none are necessary, wil OOo be ready. till then it's a playtoy to all those who use MS Office seriously every day.
stop whining and code!
I for one welcome this thoughtful and informative expose of the open source charlatans!
On the heels of several Microsoft-sponsored studies evaluating the total cost of ownership (TCO) of Windows vs. Linux, The Yankee Group has performed its own independent research on the same topic. And the findings are somewhat similar: Linux provides smaller companies with customized vertical applications or who have no legacy networks with better TCO than Windows But for the vast majority of customers -- and especially those that are already Windows shops -- Windows still offers better TCO value, according to the Yankee/Sunbelt Software study, which is due to be published this week http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,155 3624,00.asp
is on you to prove me that the whole python interpreter (that's what it seems) is without bugs and that this exact phrase 'Hello, world' won't trigger any hidden bug.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Full of arrogance: "I would say that Islam is wrong".
Calling an assertion "arrogant" just because you believe it is wrong is stupid. Were all the people who believed that life was spontaneously generated in rotten meat arrogant? What about the people that believed alchemy could turn lead into gold? Were they arrogant for disagreeing with the people who told them it was a load of bull?
Disagreeing with someone or something is not necessarily "arrogance", even if your beliefs are wrong. (And for the record, I believe Christianity is not wrong)
You mean they were biased because of their being so close to him?
Like, say, every biographer is biased because they know the subject? Or like every historian who actually lived through an event is biased because they were there? What you label bias is labelled in history as a primary source.
Base their faith on hearsay: "I believe what the Bible says"
I believe what the Bible says because I believe the Bible is true. If you want a detailed apologesis of the Bible, I have no trouble discussing it with you, but it's really out of the scope of this discussion. I'd recommend an excellent book on the subject, Lee Strobel's "Case For Christ". Strobel is a professional journalist, and was a non-Christian when he first set out to write a book systematically disproving the Bible.
No wonder you quietly hate so many people: "The fundamental premise of Christianity is that everybody's evil, and everybody's going to hell". How can you be happy when your creator has created something so evil?
How can you comment on who or what I hate? If your talking arrogance, then I would say projecting your prejudices on me because I claim a particular faith would rank pretty well. Besides, when I say everyone is evil, I mean everyone. As in, me too. Besides, I can't believe people can take a look around the world, at any time in history, and say people are naturally inclined to goodness.
Christians don't believe God created something evil; he created something very good, gave that something (man) free choice, and man screwed it all up. If you want to get into a free will/predestination debate over this point, feel free, but again I think a full discussion is outside the scope of this argument.
Please, if you are going to attack me for what I believe, take the trouble to find what I believe before making those attacks. If you are going to claim Christianity is irrational, please present your arguments logically rather than accusing Christians of "arrogance" and "hatred"; words which are used for their emotive content, not their rationality.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
That was dotGAY.
Pegasus Mail is the email client I would recommend (and have recommended) as a freeware alternative to Outlook. Beside the fact that you have to try really, really hard to get Pegasus to allow yourself to be infected with a virus, the conversion learning curve from Outlook is relatively flat and can be traversed quickly.
Granted, it is missing the full PIM for those who allow Outlook to manage their lives. But then again, with the pervasive spread of Outlook-based viruses, the net value of letting Outlook manage your life is dubious at best.
Simply register anbd login. It really pays - their system is well designed (email notification about bug status changes, etc.). And they are actually responding and fixing reported buges! (OK, not immediately, but usually action gets scheduled and finally it happens).
"Rather, it's the irrational that believe in God."
This is not a fact. It is a statement of religious faith. You are doing nothing other than insulting those who do not share your religion.
Of course, your own religion is rational, and everyone else is idiots. Pat Robertson and Khomeini say the same thing: they think like you.
...and it doesn't claim to be an XHTML editor. But in general, I too would find that annoying.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I am in the position of being able to name a local (Perth, West Oz) law firm who had to re-key more than 20% of their templates when they switched from MS Office 97 to MS Office 2000, and then had to edit about another (overlapping) 20% when their main printer died for the last time and had to be replaced. And edit maybe 35% of their existing docs when they called them up to re-print them.
Did they even think of suing Microsoft over it? Hah! Double hah!
That's just one law firm. I saved a friend's bacon by back-porting an MS Word 2000 dotDOC so it could be read by an important client who refused to upgrade past MS Word 97. Nothing (not even RTF) that MS Word 2000 wrote the document out in could be read by MS Word 97 without crashing it and usually also the OS (we tested on '98SE and '2000) it ran on. I used OpenOffice 1.0 to fix that.
And so on.
However, I agree that it wasn't so much the file format (which is basically an unfiltered OLE dump, so blaming it would be reasonable) as MS Word's worse-than-naive crossing-the-freeway-blindfolded expectation that it would arrive 100% happy.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Beautiful, you provided your own counter-argument: Given that the python interpreter is without bugs, the code is bug free. The problem is: (1) the python interpreter is not bug-free; (2) even if that was possible (the python interpreter being bug-free), it would be impossible to prove it bug-free.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
.DOC files are not standard. There are nearly many different versions of word files as there are version of Microsoft Word.
:(
GIF, for all its problems, is a well-specified file format. Ditto JPG and PNG. There are different types (animated GIFs, GIF87 vs GIF89, animated PNGs, interlace vs. notinterlaced)... but at least you can find how the files are meant to be constructed.
DOC files, you can't. And Microsoft now plans to deliberately obfuscate their output and patent the obfuscation so no-one else can read word files.
The document referenced in the original post seems to have been removed from Microsoft's site.