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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?
Interesting? It's far more likely that it is short for 'Discussion Guides'.
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!
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.
fencepost
just a little off
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!
actually no... Openoffice exports to PDF but is not a PDF reader itself. Still one would then have to wonder if the pdf was originally written in openoffice...
"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.
I seem to recall that there was a namespace collision (read, "trademark problem") with some other pre-existing Open Office. Hence the tacked on ".org".
Yeah, I think it looks silly myself, and I don't know that anyone bothers pronouncing it.
-- Alastair
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
I must be missing something. I just created a doc with a table in OO.o and saved it three times (XP doc/win95 doc/rtf). I then opened it up in word 2000 and it was correctly formatted in all three cases. Of course, I haven't bought a copy of office since office 2k premium, so this may relate to office xp and later revs... DAve
Hmm, is Mozilla still free ?
Yup.
Now, let me know when Mozilla will do calendar, appointment book, task list, and email integration.
And before you flame me as a troll - I use Firefox at home and work and Thunderbird at home. Work requires I use Outlook, and it's because of those features that it has value. I don't find its email capabilities particularly wonderful by themselves, not to mention the slew of virus vulnerabilities (but that's ok, because we paid for, at a considerable expense, a mail server virus scanner). Despite the drawbacks there is very little that is actually competitive with Outlook/Exchange. And most of the alternatives (Notes, for example) suck even more. Yes, there are some OSS solutions out there as well, but they're not up to the same level in functionality as Outlook/Exchange. And that's a pretty sad statement.
I don't have that problem, what version of Open Office do you have and what version of MS Office are you using. Mine are 1.1 & 2000 respectively.
You didn't like the drawing package? I think that's one of OO's strong points. It's incredibly flexible and full-featured IMHO. Perhaps it has too many widgets?
This is true; what Microsoft has done is legitimized OpenOffice.org as a replacement for Microsoft Office. The number of posts here along the lines of "I hadn't thought much of it before, but I might check it out now" indicate as much.
I spent a very long time trying to figure out how to get the 3D cylinder drawing to give me a fairly simple cylinder, to attach to a flow chart. No dice. Eventually, I found an extension (which was not easy to install) that provided some of the flowcharting symbols I need. (No, I'm not doing flow charts. I'm doing architecture diagrams and the flowchart cylinder to represent a database was exactly what I needed.) Office provides such things by default.
I did, however, finally figure out how to get Snap To Object working (it was hidden under a bunch of other menus) and that may tip the balance. That's a really nice feature.
You may need to check your work here. I created (yesterday) and 7 page Word doc that included mutiple tables created in in Calc that behaved flawlessly. There are some problems in document conversion, but I have been using OO for more than 2 years and I have had only 2 issues that I had to find work arounds for, one of them being the font translation issue that messes up some bullet points. Btw I produce an average of 6 docs per week, since a large part of my work is technical writing. Also, its worthy of note that most of the people I send these to have never heard of an Office alternative, that idea hasn't even entered their universe, but I have not had one report of a problem.
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,
Actually the Open Office people inherited it from the original Star Office produced by a german company Star Division. Neither Sun nor the Open Office developers have really dug that deep into it. The first version of Open/Star Office was not that much different than the original Star Office 5.2. That version could be made to look like Star Office 6 just by changing some configuration files inside. They originally removed more than they put in. It used to have a really decent email client and a not so decent web browser.
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.
Yeah, but does it have an annoying lightbulb that pops up whenever you don't need it? You can't beat a lightbulb. Therefore, OO.o > MS Office.
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.
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.
What's wrong with OpenOffice? It reads and saves MS Office docs extremely well. (Make sure you have the latest version!) And if you want to show people up and protest MS Office, you can export your documents to PDFs! My wife uses it to exchange letters in Russian with her father. Despite the fact that he's using Word, she can read and save the files without trouble. Works quite well. Oh, and OpenPresenter is almost exactly like PowerPoint.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Or how about this one: "OpenOffice provides no database client support". Really? Then how did I setup a fairly slick front-end to a MySQL database using OOo and ODBC? It's called OpenOffice Forms and even many die-hard OOo fans don't know about it because it's so buried. But it's there.
Oh, and if you don't want a separate back-end database, you can create a dbase database straight from OOo. Check out Tools/Data Sources in your friendly neighborhood OpenOffice install.
the no
Okay, in that case, let's compare:
r eq s.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/office/previous/xp/sys
Windows XP Professional, or Windows XP Home Edition
128 MB of RAM plus an additional 8 MB of RAM for each Office program (such as Word) running simultaneously
Office XP Standard
210 MB of available hard disk space
Office XP Professional and Professional Special Edition
245 MB of available hard disk space
Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows Millennium Edition (Windows Me), Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 6 (SP6) or later, Windows 2000, or Windows XP or later.
Computer with Pentium 133 megahertz (MHz) or higher processor; Pentium III recommended
Okay, so break it down:
A computer (d'uh), 210-245 Megs of RAM PLUS 8 megs for each product run (so Word, Excel, Access, Outlook = 32 Megs) so 242-277 megs. OS: Windows.
Now from the article:
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
Hmmm, so OO uses less RAM, less system resources, any runs on a variety of platforms.
Now here's the clincher:
basic feature functionality that
enables content authoring is only one small aspect of what a
small business needs.
So they are promoting bloating. Neat!
Mod +5 Drunk
Heck, MS-Word isn't compatible with anything else, not even newer and older versions of MS-Word.
From NeoOffice
Don't belive the modest site, its very good full OO on the MacYou 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
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?
Have you tried Ximian Evolution? It's got e-mail, a calendar, task list and address book. It also has the ability to grab rss feeds and display them for you. I think it's a lot better than outlook.
Ximian evolution with Open Office and PostgreSQL or mySQL and you are set... Who needs Office/Outlook?
I tried to use OpenOffice for an online Technical Writing class last term (just ended last week). It worked fairly well. I was always able to get the information out of the documents. Only formatting was ever broken.
Unfortunately that's not always good enough. After too many times correcting "mistakes" that weren't actually mistakes (e.g. suggesting that a classmate put bullets in his list, even though there already WERE bullets, OpenOffice just wasn't showing them) I ended up switching back to Word.
OpenOffice is good at reading Word documents, but it's definitely not good enough for everyone's needs.
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
Quite a bit of study material comes as a powerpoint or word doc here too.
I've never had any trouble opening them with openoffice, true, there may be some slight formatting errors or other trivial graphics mishaps, but then again most of the time I'm trying to read the information in them, not goggle the prettyness of graphics (besides, they're usually frickin' ugly anyway, even in word or pp).
Now, the accursed html exported from powerpoint, which is used way too much as well is another story... there's just no way to get that sucker to open on anything else than IE.
According to pdfinfo, the document was created on that day of all days in the year:
More to the point, StarOffice used to have a mail client, but Sun wisely removed it. YAMC (Yet Another Mail Client) was definitely bloat.
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).
That's not totally openoffice's fault. If your friend would have sent you the file in an open format, then you wouldn't have had a problem.
Uh, I made no mention of faults. Show me the part of my post where I claimed that it was OpenOffice's fault (whatever that means). Believe me, I would've much rather used OpenOffice than installing VMWare, Windows, and Word.
But it doesn't really matter whose fault it was. I was responding to a guy who claimed that you could use OpenOffice in a school environment without any problems. My experience tells me that might be true for some classes, but is absolutely not true for classes where exact reproduction of formatting is important.
rtf is format invented by microsoft, in 90s ? but definitely newer than word .doc invented in 80s.
OpenOffice.org 1.1. Click the button on the tool bar to the immediate left of the printer icon. It looks like a PDF icon, and I'll let you guess what it does. No distiller required.
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...
There is the question of 'de facto standard' formats, however. I'm not bashing OO here, but the fact is that .doc is an extremely widely used format. Maybe even like gif or jpg, at least a png or bmp. It really should handle .doc's the way they're supposed to be handled, of course. And due to the incredibly wide use of the .doc format, it could be considered a 'fault,' as you say. The burden isn't on Word to provide interoperability with a so-rare-it's-almost-obscure format, but on OO to fit in with the mainstream.
Again, not saying OO is bad...you people scare me...don't hurt me.
NeoOffice -> Download -> one of the NeoOffice/J mirror sites -> NeoOfficeJ-0.8.2.dmg
[RANT]Come on three maybe four clicks, ok so your a mac user and you can't right click to save the url, but please.. [/RANT]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.
So you didn't even consider paying $50/seat to Sun for StarOffice, which is effectively OpenOffice with professional support.
True, but we're working on it.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Actually, MS Office has been around a LOT longer than that. Office 95 was version 7.0 I think. Before that, you could get Word 6.0, Word for DOS was still around, Word for Mac was still around, Access 1.0 (and then 2.0) were in the stores.... All told, the first bundled version of MS Office was probably back in about 91 or 92, but Word and Excel have been around since Windows 3.0 came out. I can still remember the competition between WordPerfect 4 and 5 and Word 5 (at least, I think it was v5). So Office has been around for close to 15 years, with Word, at least, being closer to 20.
All years in this post should be taken with a grain of salt. I smoked a whole lotta drugs in high school...
Dammit, I meant to post that anonymously!
The fact that a *.doc was opened and the bullets didn't show seems about as insignificant as whether or not my work car is black or grey. The content was displayed fine and that's what counts. On those very, very rare occasions when you cannot view the content it only takes 30 seconds to export to pdf. I haven't run into a single professor/student who was unwilling to do so...and if I did, I would make sure they got nothing by LaTeX and sxw files from than on out. hehe
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.
Of course now that Word 2003 is circulating, some .docs are actually WordML, which was "invented" last year.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
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.
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...
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
Microsoft Word/Office or any other Microsoft products after Bill Gates gave this interview in 1995.
And no, it's not a fake.
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
Not that I've got anything against OOo, but check out pdf4free, which is a free tool which can install itself as a printer (plus it is VERY simple to get up and running). We use it exclusively, it's quick and the PDF output is nice AND very compact.
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.
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.
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