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Microsoft FUD Machine Aims at OpenOffice.org
Roblimo writes "If you're using Microsoft Office and considering a switch to (free) OpenOffice.org, Microsoft would like you to read their Open Office Competitive Guide first, in which they tell you how much better/faster/cheaper MS Office is than OOo. Taran Rampepersad, an IT consultant in Trinidad, believes this "Competitive Guide" is nothing but FUD, so he wrote a detailed rebuttal to it -- and released his article under the FDL so you can feel free to republish his piece or share it with anyone you like, however you like." A followup to this story. Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN.
Often it's not even possible to use Office formats between versions. Try to edit an MS Office 2003 file on a system that's using MS Office '97.
And the muscular cyborg German dudes dance with sexy French Canadians
I don't know if any of you read SysAdmin or Dr. Dobbs Journal (I get both) and the Microsof tFUD machine doesn't stop at OpenOffice. In my latest issue of SysAdmin was a pack containing a 180 day time crippled copy of Windows Server 2003 and a "Learning Resource" CD.
I went through part of the CD before I raised the "bullshit flag" over the following:
1. Poor Plug and Play support based on Solaris 2.6 and an equally ancient version of Linux. Did not mention HP-UX, IRIX, or AIX.
2. The only way to have a remote desktop similar to Terminal Services was to use VNC, what about a remote X session?
Microsoft would not get in so much trouble over this stuff if they simply told the truth. Or are they expecting Linux and Unix admins and developers to "jump ship" for some crippleware (not including "Windows Services for Unix" which Microsoft had to Interix to develop!Take that away and you'll see that the initial loading speeds are somewhat comparable.
Open Office provides no database client support.
In OpenOffice if you hit F4 or go to view -> Data Sources you are able to connect to any number of database types via JDBC or ODBC.
I have used this for projects at work with great success, it works in both 1.0 and 1.1.
Obviously the author did not spend too much time on research into what OpenOffice actually can do.
Actually, its not a press release. Its a document sent to Microsoft partners (solution providers) with the speaking points to use when dealing with a customer asking about Open Office. They also have documents like this for Linux, Sun, and many other competing products. I get a box full of them each month, and some times they come attached to Dr. Dobb's Journal and other publications.
I think everyone expects Microsoft to promote their products. And most of the comments seem to be undie-bind-free (at least as of my reading). The only thing that is really interesting is that the argument against Open Office is relatively thin, as the other link shows, and could be the same argument against upgrading from Office to a new version of Office.
But, I'm over it. I switched a few weeks ago and don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about Microsoft products anymore.
Sleep is for the Weak
If a business or pesrson wishes they can get support from Sun's Star Office team
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
MS's take is that quite a lot of developers vist slashdot and they'd be stupid not to advertise here. Personally I don't care about thier product because I really think there are alternatives out there for most jobs. The real targets of their ads are those with purchasing power in their organization. My company has had the enterprise licese with them since 1998 so MS must be doing something right. The PHBs are in their pockets.
-----
One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
Word doesn't produce pdf files because thats not really a word processor format, its a cross-platform display format. They are making it a .pdf format so that the majority of their target audience (linux users) can read it. More linux users probably have xpdf or native acrobat reader installed than open office.
Excel's graphing is nowhere near on a par with something like Matlab. It just lacks the features and flexibility needed for real scientific usage, though it might be acceptable for more basic usage like sales graphs, etc...but its chief advantage is that it is easy for dumb people to learn how to use it. On features it loses, IMHO.
I'd call your logic suspect as well.
MS is NOT just saying that Microsoft Office is the best office suite available. They are specifically comparing the two products and making some very misleading statements in the process.
Not all software vendors go out of their way to attack and discredit all their competition like Microsoft does. I think they are kinda legendary for that sort of thing, in fact.
I don't think people are personally offended by this kind of thing so much as that they offended at MS's overall pattern of behavior. They have always been a vicious, ruthless company willing to lie, cheat, and crush all that stands in their way.
You know, this whole "users only use 10% of features, but they are all a different 10%" line gets whipped out every single time MSOffice is discussed, and it is such bullshit. First of all, the average information worker users about 35% of the functionality of an office suite. They may not actually *think* of using it, but most still use them. Most of this functionality is either handed down to them through the use of well designed and implemented corporate templates, or it is locked into some vicious Excel Macro that Bob on the 12th floor made once, and now everybody uses, but nobody knows how it really works. And Bob *did* get hit by that bus last year. Anyhow, your average cubicle-farm inhabitant uses 35% functionality. Real Research(tm) shows that, dependinig on a bunch of variables, such as nature of business, usage of macro's, user attitude, change resistance and some others, between 78% to 97% of the information-worker population can be switched over to OpenOffice.org, no problemo. The rest need to stay on MSOffice for a variety of reasons (complex macro's that are to expensive to switch, Access lock-in, etc). As a rule, task-workers can switch wholesale.
You know what the real kicker is: even in a worst-case scenario, where you can only move 55% or 60% of your users to OOo it is still worth it Some dumbass somewhere decrees that you can only run one Office suite, because it is not economical to do otherwise. Bullshit. Maybe so if your choices are limited to using proprietary software only, but Open source software changes that - the value of you data liberation screws up most TCO models, and the fact that is is low-cost really offsets a lot here.
anyway, point I am trying to make is that this whole 10% stuff is crap. Don't believe the hype.
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
Umm... no. I have MS Office installed on this computer, and there are no processes related to MS Office running. The reason MS Office is faster starting up is that MS's programmers have been smart about optimizing their binaries, moving the stuff to initially draw the window up front.
Granted, doing such optimizations is boring work. That's probably why it has not been done so aggressively in OO yet.
If a company stepped forward to support OO and guarantee compatibility, we will pay them the licensing fees.
Sun offers a version of OpenOffice called Star Office. They offer support.
OO/Star Office documents are definately compatable with MS Word, but I'm not sure that anyone can guarentee 100% compatability with MS Word, because Microsoft keeps the Office formats a secret.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Not a pb with OOo 1.1.1r3 on Linux.
I almost never use OOo (or MS Office or any spreadsheet btw) but it took me less than 1m to find out how to define my own shortcut for fill down:
(1) select menu "Tools>Configure"
(2) select the tab "Keyboard"
(3) select "Edit" as Category"
(4) select "Fill down" as Function
(5) select an unused Shortcut key in the list.
(6) press the buttons "Modify" and "Ok"
Try gnumeric (http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/), xmgrace (http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace/), gnuplot (http://www.gnuplot.info/) or scigraphica (http://scigraphica.sourceforge.net/).
Office Suite spreadsheets just don't cut it for doing complex graphs.
I've used all of the above tools and I've found:
. gnumeric isn't much better than excel but may be better than scalc
. gnuplot is quite powerful but is command-line/script driven
. xmgrace is nifty - does most things I need, with instant results
. scigraphica had potential, but development has stagnated and has terrible instability/bugs.
As for project, there is MrProject (http://mrproject.codefactory.se/) [aka "planner", according to my Gnome applications menu] which despite being awkward/unintuitive does everything I could ask from it.
For databases, OpenOffice can apparently do it for you if you can wire up ODBC properly. Also, you could use Borland Kylix under linux but that's proprietry; I understand there is a MS Access-style FOSS project for creating database apps there somewhere as well.
- Paul
Is there anything that OpenOffice does that is new?
why yes - it opens corrupted office documents and saves documents directly to pdf. for me thats priceless.
OOo can export any of its documents to PDF, MS Office can not do that by itself. OOo can also export its presentations to Macromedia Flash(tm) which makes it very easy to put it out to a web page somewhere to share. You just click the Flash presentation to go to the next slide. Again, MS Office cannot do that. Those two features are very useful to me. Plus the format for OOo is open so I will always be able to read my documents with out paying the MS Tax. Not to mention that I can keep all my important docs as PDF by exporting them from OOo and not have to worry about some proprietary format going away after the support period has expired.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Xmove is supposed to be able to do exactly that.
I'm a big supporter of OOo here at Linden Hall but I gotta tell you that this is the suckiest thing about Open/StarOffice.
This has been an issue since day uno and I can't figure out why they haven't prioritized this - especially in light of the fact that Sun is using the code to go head to head against MS! Sure, the install process will be completely changed in V. 2.0, but that's at least a YEAR AWAY!
As it is, I have to use a script and a reg hack to make StarOffice work for all users in my labs without foolishness. I can kind of understand why Sun may not want it to work with Terminal Services - they require you to call them if you want to install it on a term server (unbelievable in itself); but not supporting multiple users in XP HOME??!! WTF??!! This is the sort of thing MS can pick on because it's totally true.
Installation issues should be fixed ASAP!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
On a Mac, every Carbon and Cocoa application can export to a PDF by itself. Just click Print, and then the "Save as PDF" button.
Here's the margin for learning LaTeX. Paste this into your document, change the name, date, title fields:
p ackage{doublespace}o r{Jonathan Rockway}{ singlespace}
\documentclass[12pt,letterpaper]{article}
\use
\usepackage{fullpage}
\auth
\date{27 March 2004}
\title{test.tex}
\begin{document}
\begin
\maketitle
\end{singlespace}
Then type your document here, ending each paragraph with a blank line. If you need bold text (hint: you probably don't) use \textbf{bold phrase}. Use \emph{word} to emphasize a word. There, you're done. You have a beautiful document and all you did was type. Wow. Also don't forget to:
\end{document}
There. Run that thru LaTeX and see what you get. You'll like it.
My other car is first.
I installed OO on one place at work. Multiple people are using it from different workstations, no problem. But that's because I'm using an OS that was designed with that kind of usage pattern in mind from the beginning, not one for which it was an afterthought. Someone who wants to run OO on their workstation either runs it off of the shared NFS drive, or runs it through remote X-windows. This took no effort at all to set up. It just works by default.
There was a problem with the install, though, that has nothing to do with network versus personal use - if you have a bad font file installed somewhere in your system, Open office's installer crashes becasue it tries to read all the fonts in the system with it's own font rendering library (instead of using the one in the windows server) before it gets to the last one in the path, which is the one it actually uses in the installer. If any of the truetype fonts are corrupt (which can happen if you got them from a download), it never gets far enough along to read the font it wants to use for installing.
That's a huge problem, but it's been fixed in the open beta version, by giving the installer a fallback font to use that's ugly but guaranteed to work, when the font it wants to use is not working. (I would prefer a fix that just stops trying to use it's own font engine altogether and just uses the one that is in the x server, since they can all handle truetype fonts well now - and the only reason for OO having its own font renderer is now moot.)
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Regarding the speed issue, yes, right now OpenOffice does take really long to start. Now, let's use this as an example to illustrate the difference between the community model and the MS model...
OOo is scheduled for some nice optimization and speed increases in version 2.0 (and some major overhaul of the code if I'm not mistaken)
Office is actually getting SLOWER with new releases - only you don't notice it because when it comes out you have a faster computer! And good luck trying to direct the development of MS Office...
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
On the other hand, OOo needs to be able to export to PDF, so that you can print. On my Linux box at work, I didn't have the problems ESR ran into setting up CUPS, but OOo refuses to recognize that I have a printer available. Every other application I've tried can print with no problem, but not OOo. So, I have to save as PDF and print with any of the four PDF viewers I have (they all see the printer).
I doubt it's office screwing them up. It's probably a poor save function. After all, Office decides its own format so it's not like they CAN screw it up. Even if it's saved invalidly everytime, it's still the proper form. That's the beauty of being the originator. MS cannot help it if a group of people cannot figure it out, and furthermore, they don't care. They want and NEED you to spend money on their product, not download OO. That's why real businesses tick.
Edit the default properties. You can pipe OpenOffice through any print daemon you want.....so if CUPS itself can print there is no reason OOo shouldn't print as well.
You don't find it a bit twisted that VA Linux owns a site called Slashdot that posts articles that bashes competitors and calls it "tech news?"
No, although I do find debate-by-interrogation to be a little perverse. I doubt you'd ever be happy with Slashdot's anti-MS tint, even if the site was funded by CmdrTaco's lottery winnings. The connection between Slashdot and OSDN is no secret, and if that perturbs you there are undoubtedly greener pastures over yon fence. Slashdot is mostly a community deal, and you're outnumbered. Deal.
Imagine the outcry if some other company owned a site that called itself a news site and posted articles negative toward Linux. We'd hear endless rants from the zealots about how it's "biased."
In essence, stupid people would do stupid stuff. No surprise there. Somewhat surprising that you don't see the connection between these zealots and Slashdot iconoclasts such as your self.
On a more serious note, I've read your comments and journal, and I'm convinced that you've nailed the issue dead on. Slashdot is horrible, and I don't think there's any hope for it (at least, I got better things to do than try to fix it). I advise seeking an alternate news source for your daily fix.
Considering the number of comments mentioning MS Office's inability to save PDFs, it should be mentioned that only Windows version is crippled in this manner. MS Office v.X for Mac can save PDF files just fine. Just go File / Print and a the bottom of the print dialogue you'll see "Save as PDF". I love that feature as I always e-mail my documents in Word and PDF formats. While OO is a great piece of software it has many problems. Its word processer is generally on par with MS Word, but it's equivalent of MS Excel is not something to rave about.
This has been a problem for us as well, but I have been able to fix it on Windows machines.
/net install does. But you can make these changes in a LOGON script.
r ap.ini y }
a me/Appication%20Data/OpenOffice
It is possible to install OpenOffice.org as an administrative user, and then move the program menu items to "All Users".
In that state, it is possible to share one OpenOffice installation amongst all users by making the "user" directory in the OpenOffice.org1.1.0 directory writable for everyone.
The downside of this is that all users will share the same preferences, on the machine. So when someone else logs on he/she will get the preferences of the previous user, will see what documents (filenames) that user worked on, etc.
To fix that, you need to make some simple changes to the installation that are similar to what a user install after a
After installation, in the file %PROGRAMFILES%\OpenOffice.org1.1.0\program\bootst
change these lines:
Location=$SYSUSERCONFIG/sversion.ini
and
UserInstallation=${$Location:$Section:$ProductKe
In the file %USERPROFILE%\Application Data\sversion.ini (which will have to be created when it does not yet exist when a new user logs on) change this:
OpenOffice.org 1.1.0=file:///C:/Documents%20and%20settings/Usern
Copy the user directory from the %PROGRAMFILES%\OpenOffice.org1.1.0 to that location when it does not yet exist.
Now the OpenOffice settings will be in the user profile and will roam to computers where this user logs on.
After putting these actions in LOGON scripts, we now have automatic installation and roaming of user data with OpenOffice.org
But I agree that this should be automatic, just as it is with Microsoft Office.
but if MS office would run on Linux I would drop Windows like a red-headed step child
You should have seen this comming from a mile away: ms office runs easily on linux.
Why; do you need to be in the "in crowd" of Office software? I must be missing something, because what does anybody else have to do with your choice of software? You can import and export those Microsoft Office files with OO.o, so what's really stopping you?
Then, of course, there's that damn "how to train the users" problem.
I'm sure you didn't employ morons. They can handle it.
So rather than bother getting the latest MS Office just for the spreadsheet and the occasional slideshow I started to use OpenOffice more and more. Since 1.1 I haven't hit any brick wall in terms of functionality. It really does all I need to do for my home / work requirements. It also has some brilliant features of its own such as being able to print straight to PDF which is just awesome.
I was pretty nervous of it to begin with, but now I don't know any reason to switch back to MS Office. I submit timesheets with OpenOffice, I write letters with OpenOffice. It works, it's free and MS is 450 out of pocket. Good riddance.
Besides, MS Office seems to double in disk space with each release for a barely discernable functionality improvements. I suppose someone somewhere needs whatever that bloat is there to provide but I suspect most people don't. OpenOffice takes a mere fraction of the space and provides nearly the same functionality and certainly enough for mere mortals.
Now I do have some criticisms. The first is the OpenOffice UI looks lousy. It looks like it was designed for Windows 95 and has never changed. Some of the icons are very confusing - maybe the Ximian ones should be used. And certain buttons such as the text colour / highlight dropdown buttons have a counter-unintuitive behaviour, where clicking on certain bits of the button make it popup but other parts don't. I'm assuming also that future versions will make use of theme engines that most OS's provide to ensure a native look & feel.
Secondly, the OO people must recognize that nearly all of their 'business' is ex-MS Office users. The easiest way to spread the word about OO is to offer new users an experience (toolbars, menus and keybindings) that closely resembles MS Office but for free. This would also make OO considerably easier to pick up and use and could mean the difference between OO being dismissed entirely as too difficult and the user raving about it to all his / her friends.
Finally I do miss outline mode in MS Word. Does OO have this functionality? I've searched and searched but have seen nothing like it. Now this would be a useful feature, especially for writing long documents.
The cost savings are enormous. Think about the current Microsoft Office paradigm; $450/desktop at retail rates (slightly lower for volume purchases). Now, compare that to OpenOffice.org on the same Windows desktop at a cost of $0.00/desktop. Multiply that out over say... 3,000 desktops, for a medium-sized installation. Let's say that you have a volume price of $200/copy of Microsoft Office in this case. You just saved yourself $600,000 in just licensing costs , and just for one application . Multiply that out across many more Free Software applications that run on Windows natively. Do you think you could use a spare $600k to improve your business, or hire some more staff, or upgrade the existing computers, or buy new applications for your core business process? I bet you could.
That's just for a small-to-medium sized business. Take a Pfizer Pharmaceutical for example... 70,000 desktops, most of them running Microsoft Office. If they get a nice cheap volume price of $100/copy of Microsoft Office vs. the $0.00/copy of Oo.org, they just saved $7,000,000 (yes, million) dollars by moving to Free Software on their existing Microsoft Windows desktops. $7 million dollars saved, in just licensing costs ! Yes, there are some advanced things that Oo.org doesn't do yet, but it will fit the needs of 90% or more of "office users".
But wait, that's not all (insert catchy As-Seen-On-TV jingle). If you ever decide to switch your users to a Linux desktop, they can continue to use the same exact applications that they were used to on the Microsoft Windows desktop; i.e. OpenOffice.org in this example. There is zero training curve, downtime, or lack of productivity.
Also, Oo.org provides MUCH more functionality, in terms of file formats, usability, interoperability, than the current Microsoft Office suite, and Oo.org is improving every single day in leaps and bounds. Is Microsoft Office improving this fast? Unlikely.
The switch is a no-brainer, and you don't even have to run Linux to reap the benefits.
(Note: I don't work for or endorse OpenOffice.org in any way, I just believe in Free Software very strongly, both as an author of Free Software, and an evangelist in the community)
OOo's FTP site has the 1.1 version for OS X, though I'm not quite sure why it's not on the main page.
S X/
(or pretty much any other mirror listed on http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/ooo-osx_download s.html#download)
Download it at: http://www.binarycode.org/openoffice/contrib/MacO
Word has never been a suitable tool for writing academic-styled publications -- people manage to do it, but as you point out, it's a struggle. One principle reason is that the software does not support the concept of displays, floating displays in particular. Pick up almost any textbook on a technical subject, or look at journal articles, and they are full of floating displays. It's pretty easy to recognize typesetting software written by/for academics -- TeX and troff come to mind -- because they make it easy to handle floating displays. Add three paragraphs, delete four others in a different place, rearrange text, and the displays still come out intact, and in sane places.
I have wondered for many years why MS has refused to incorporate a serious display capability into Word. Perhaps because it's hard to do in a WYSIWYG way -- until the software is doing the final page layout, the positions of the collection of floating displays is not precisely known.
Here is a good break down of MS's restrictive EULA. As you can read, it does not. There is ONE exception and that is for a laptop and MS Office. If you have two computers at home, you cannot put the same copy on both computers without violating your MS EULA, unless one computer is a desktop and the other is a laptop and ONLY the same person can use it. So that means you cannot put it on your desktop and use the same copy for your wifes laptop without violating the MS EULA.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison