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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?
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!
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.
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,
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.