Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
Ah, Microsoft is feeling the heat the free software community is lighting under their asses.
Got any of that "Ronson Fast Lite" left?
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.
I was just thinking the same thing. Last time I tried OO, I concluded it was "not ready yet" and went back to Word & Excel. The fact that MS thinks it's worth attacking makes me think the newest version must be worth another look.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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.
Seems like one of their big arguments is that there is no database client. I thought openoffice had a database client, am I wrong?
This signature has Super Cow Powers
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.
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!!!
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.
Not really. It has a data front-end that can be plugged into a backend database, but nothing as self-contained as Access. This is about the only valid complaint about a "lacking" office app in the OSS world. For the small office there's nothing like Access.
Don't get me wrong, I haven't used M$ Office since college 5 years ago (it was crap then and still is) but there is nothing like Access in the OSS world. Yet. There are some excellent front ends to e.g. pgsql/mysql/etc. but nothing Ma & Pa Kettle's General Store can fire up w/o being a DB admin. Is there?
BTW, that bit about OO users being more susceptible to viruses is really funny - it made my day.
The heat from below can burn your eyes out
OO.o doesn't provide basic functionality.
It fails to write Word-compatible .doc format documents.
You are correct -- in a heterogenous environment, MS Office is better then Open Office.
However, how many environments are running the same word processor, nevermind the same version?
This is more anecdotal then hard evidence, but have you tried to read a complex document written in an older version of word into a newer version? OO.o seems to get it more correct then the latest release of MS Office.
Have you ever tried to import a non-word format into word?
Now, consider this rebuttle:
By using Open Office.org, you have several benefits to promote a heterogenous environment. Due to the fact that its free, everyone can run the latest version. Since it runs on a variety of platforms, you are not locked into a single vendor of OS or hardware. Your employees can run the same version at home without additional cost, and transfer those files to the office without any compatibility issues.
Also, being a large commercial open source project backed by several large businesses, you recieve the quick bug and security fixes of OS, yet have the security of a fortune-500 company.
But when the first column of every table comes out in reverse-video when displayed in Word, and Word can't fix it, then there's something very wrong with what OO.o is doing.
Well, since the table isn't being displayed properly in Word, it sounds like there's something very wrong with what MSO is doing. Something like:
editor=check_editor()
case editor in
OO) display_tables_wrong();;
MSO) work_properly();;
esac
Not that Microsoft has ever been shown to use such underhanded tactics, I know.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
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...
- 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!
I live on a university campus... And ALL of the presentations I've seen were done via OO.o or StarOffice (before OO.o was around), mainly because the professors chose it.
In the labs they have both Word and OO.org.
Y'know... If you want OO.org on the labs computers, maybe you could ask one of the CS assistants around. They usually serve pretty good intermediaries between the students and the Admins. Chances are that if you want it, that the admins would also prefer to have it (especially if there exists any sort of unix-department at your univ.), and unless there is some sort problem the higher ups have with OSS, you're likely to get it.
Just speak up and stop being a pussy.
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. If there was an open source alternative to powerpoint that was significantly better and for efficient with an editor that was extremely simplistic (anyone can pick it up) it may have a chance of taking over powerpoint, but it just seems that so many people think of presenting lectures automatically think powerpoint.
.xls was that sometimes when a friend opened my spreadsheets in Office XP, she'd have strange split windows she had to turn off. There was some formatting weirdness with sharing a .doc file with a partner for a memo assignment, but in addition to using a different program, she was on Mac (so, whole different font system, etc.) Still, in neither case was it a show-stopper.
On my computer, I have OO for all my word processing and spreadsheet needs (and have gotten through two terms without any longing for Word or Excel), but I had to install PowerPoint to do freelance presentation design work. If I can figure out how to actually submit comments to bugs on the OO site, I will feedback Impress religiously in hopes that it becomes as facile an alternative as the others.
With respect to word processing and spreadsheets, I've shared files back and forth with MS Office, whether using it myself at school or having a partner editing the same files. The only problem I ever really noticed with
But, dude, just because you can't replace PowerPoint yet doesn't mean you have to install ALL of MS Office. Get away with what you can!
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
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.
Title: competitive OpenOffice.qxd
Author: Gravity
Application: QuarkXPress(tm) 4.11
PDF Producer: Acrobat Distiller 4.05 for Macintosh
How about eating your own dogfood before complaining against other brands Microsoft?
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".
Interestingly it does OO is great in a homogenous environment. I work at a large size corporation (5000+) that has just switched EVERYONE to OO. there have been some glitches moving things over, but most of them had to do with excel file macros etc. Now that it is very uncommon to recieve a .doc,ppt, etc file from anyone inside the company, I just don't think about the MS software anymore. All it takes is for someone higher up to have a little vision and a reason to control expenses, and this could be your company soon.
this sig is deprecated
...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