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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.
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
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
"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!"
then, they laugh at you
then, they fight you <-- you are here
then you win
Will step 4 happen? Stay tuned.
Oo is vulnerable? lol
Maybe if they find a way to import Office macros..
Trolling is a art,
Can someone give a +5 (thousand) to the MS guy who wrote the part about viruses!? Rolling on the floor from hysterical laughter!
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
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.
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.
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.
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
WHY open office can't format Office Documents correctly.
my other sig is a commando
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.
Death to Clippy
Miserable failure
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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!!!
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
Macros aren't compatible according to the document.
Futher more, it doesn't integrate with Exchange, Access, or any other Microsoft product. The rapscalions! Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the whole point of oo to get away from using ms products?
This signature has Super Cow Powers
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
...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.
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!
"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
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
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.
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!
But I don't want to use an office suite that insults my intelligence. And if I could strip off a big chunk of the clown suit in Windows, believe me, I would. The NT kernel with a MacOS 6 look and feel is as fancy as I would care for. ;-)
And lets not forget the very important rule that keeping code portable helps keep it bug free. The chances are much higher that a bug will come out the more operating systems/compilers/platforms that chug through your code.
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?
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
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.
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.
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
Yes, but the jihad proceeds much quicker when the users are already familiar with the tools they'll be using on Linux. And the jihad is really not about getting people to use Linux. It's about enabling people to use whatever they want.
For fun, calculate how much DDT would be lethal for you!
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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 $EMPLOYER to enhance MSWord?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
...one of their other big points is that OO doesn't have it's own email/PIM client.
Of course it doesn't... between mozilla/evolution/insert your favorite email client here/ they don't -need- to include one.
It's primarily only MS that keeps insisting that different functionality needs to all get sucked into a single monolithic 'suite' (which then gets sucked into the OS)...
Actually the Open Office people inherited it from the original Star Office produced by a german company Star Division. Neither Sun nor the Open Office developers have really dug that deep into it. The first version of Open/Star Office was not that much different than the original Star Office 5.2. That version could be made to look like Star Office 6 just by changing some configuration files inside. They originally removed more than they put in. It used to have a really decent email client and a not so decent web browser.
Almost every point they point make in their document applies equally well between generations of MS Office. The most important point in the document in MS Access compatibility. There are a whole lot of small business applications built on this, and these would need to be rewritten.
It also seems that this document is about the best argument against upgrading to a new version of MS Office.
What they don't say is that most of these "costs" would apply when choosing to switch the M$ 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.
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.
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.
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 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 $300+ cost of buying Adobe Acrobat.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
But if they fix it then a lot of Word users would have to be retrained and M$ 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.
What I think is more noteworthy to point out is that you pay for Microsoft Outlook when you buy the MS Office suite. So, they claim you might have to buy a license to use an Email client with OO.org, what they didn't tell you is you have no choice but to buy theirs if you use MS Office even though you could also use a free one (thunderbird) with MS Office.
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.
- 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?
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.
From the Document Properties for OpenOffice.pdf:
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.
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.
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
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
From NeoOffice
Don't belive the modest site, its very good full OO on the MacI 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
Saying that this leaflet was created on a Mac doesn't help the OpenOffice cause, it reinforces the Microsoft one.
Actually, I'm not sure it says much about either office suite: as someone noted above, the Document Properties reveal that the leaflet was created on a Mac using Quark Xpress.
From the Free Software world, I have hope for AbiWord 2.2 being a usable Mac-like application, and I'm curious about the QT/Mac port of KWord that's in progress. In practice, though, I actually broke down and bought Mariner Write recently. (I'd have bought Gobe Productive if they'd made a Mac port, but Gobe's developers, most of whom came from Claris, failed to recognize what I think would have been a great opportunity for them to eat Appleworks 6's lunch.)
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?
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.
Unless of course, your name is Donald Knuth.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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
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
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
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...
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]It is not what Ma and Pa Kettle do with Access it is what the local computer consultant does with Access. OSS is missing a niche here between a SQL server and a flat file database. I would not use Access for a multi-user system Yes I know other do but I find if iffy at best. But for single user applications it is a solution.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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?
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.
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'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?
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
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
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 &
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.
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!
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 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.
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'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.
...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
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
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?
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
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.
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..."
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.
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.
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
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
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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
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