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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.
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,
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.
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.
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
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
My emphasis, there. And I couldn't agree more. Handling issues of inaccessable Access databases is incredibly important, and is notorious for chewing up helpdesk hours.
Especially when Office 2000 broke Access compatibility with 98 databases, and forced everyone to upgrade (or to not touch the database with Access2000 so that those who had not yet upgraded could still get to their data).
OfficeXP did the same thing to 2000 databases - all it took was one XP user to touch the database, and all the 2000 users would suddenly be out of the loop. I fully expect Access2k3 to be the same way.
So yes, consider those Access databases as a major component of the cost of data migration. When one version of Access touches the database, be ready to install and deploy that same version to all your other clients, because with Access, you migrate your data whether you're ready to or not. And you pay every year for the privilige! Hooray!
I 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
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...
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.
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.
It seems Microsoft is learning from the administration of GW Bush in this regard. When dealing with an opponent, claim that the opponent has your flaws, whether or not this is true. This strategy is tailored to a news media unaccustomed and unprepared to investigate or otherwise do any more than quote sources. It becomes Microsoft's word (excuse the pun) against the diffuse band of evil virus-writing hackers who also happen to write open source software.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
The 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...
Sure you can. One of those is mine, in fact: OO.o doesn't have an overbar (opposite of underline) font attribute for text. Really a problem for doing technical documentation, but to date nobody has wanted to bother with it. Including me, as it happens; if it were important enough to $EMPLOYER we'd have added it already.
Of course, MSOffice doesn't have overbar either. Wonder what it would take for $EMPLOYER to enhance MSWord?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Actually the Open Office people inherited it from the original Star Office produced by a german company Star Division. Neither Sun nor the Open Office developers have really dug that deep into it. The first version of Open/Star Office was not that much different than the original Star Office 5.2. That version could be made to look like Star Office 6 just by changing some configuration files inside. They originally removed more than they put in. It used to have a really decent email client and a not so decent web browser.
I love it. They touted Office's lip service to XML as an advantage, forgetting that OO's internal file format is pure XML with an open published DTD. A decent programmer can make software to read and repurpose an OO document with 100% accuracy.
Anyone with knowledge of both can blow away most of these arguments. However, some do have merit in certain circumstances.
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.
- 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!
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.
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 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?
No, but when Japanese manufacturers started producing more reliable vehicles Ford, GM, and Chrysler all had to resort to intensive marketing strategies until they could develop something that was more competitive. It worked pretty good too.
They thought they were in control of the automobile world and were proved wrong; the same *might* be happening to Microsoft. For quite a while they had little to no competition; now they are seeing some real threats on the horizon, and they're only doing what anyone else would do in the same position. They simply became too comfortable with having a large piece of the pie, and now are having to fight to keep as much of it as they can.
What?
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.
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".
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
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...
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?
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
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/
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
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.
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