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OpenOffice.org, MS Office 2003 Compared, Evaluated
kotj.mf writes "eWeek is running a relatively lengthy article comparing OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office 2003, as part of an IT decision whether to migrate a 300-plus userbase office away from Office 97/2000. The not-so-surprising conclusion: OO.o can be a better deal for smaller companies that can't fully leverage Redmond's volume licensing. Hell, it'd be cheap at twice the price."
In a single bound he could double OO user base. This would be a tremendous help in getting it more mainstream.
One of them is FREE. The other is what, $200+?
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
I work for a not-for-profit company that qualifies Microsoft's charity licensing. I haven't ever seen the actual prices, but from what I hear, the per-seat costs for Office are less than even the highest-tiered volume licensing.
:-(
Kinda hard for me to fulfill my conquest of moving our mail away from Exchange.
If you go to the book store at your local college/university, you can pick up OOo at an educational discount.
OpenOffice is Good Enough(TM). Things are sometimes in places you don't expect them thanks to MS Office training (e.g. Word Count is in document properties), but once you're used to it, you'll use it by default.
Despite having Office X on my Mac, I use OpenOffice all the time now. It's amazing how much it grows on you despite the initially underwhelming first impressions.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The only thing that matters to me is whether OO.o comes with Clippy or not!
Open Office is free and you don't get anything good for free therefore if something costs more such as Windows or Office it must be better.
It seems obvious that something that is distributed for free will be cheaper than something that costs money. The true test comes when users are exposed to a new program for doing something everyday. I have known a few people who have had serious problems switching to Open Office after using MS Office for a long time. These were not computer illiterate people either.
_____
Thank you.
"Independent research analyst META Group found that Linux costs are not lower than Windows."
Such conflicting views.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Free vs Not-Free..
Can read MS docs + others vs Can only read MS docs.
I believe OO wins hands down. At least it doesnt have clippy (only that non-annoying lightbulb thingum).
Remember that StarOffice is supposed to be the "Stable" branch that is purchased in quantity for large corperations. Sun really doesn't want large coperations using the free version.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
but then.. compare that mascot to clippy and evaluate again..
Only morons moderate based on a sig.
They're the ones publishing the never ending stream of F/OSS/Linux lies from The Enderle Troll, no?
Save yourself a click.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
I have been using OO for quite some time. I am using the most current version but it still fairly frequently mangles documents when passed back and forth between MS Office and OpenOffice. Same with Powerpoint. Even if your whole company migrates, you still have to deal with people who use Microsoft Office.
Here are the 3 things that will prevent OpenOffice from replacing MS Office massively:
.DOC compatibility
.DOC compatibility
.DOC compatibility?
.DOC almost 100%. Then they'd take over the market IMHO...
- Lack of good specialized dictionaries (in particular, a good medical dictionary)
-
-
Oh, and did I mention
I mean, I know it's hard to be compatible with a format that never was disclosed by Microsoft, but there it is: I personally can testify that, while using OpenOffice internally would be roughly equivalent in functionalities to MS Office, exchanging files with the rest of the world is a total bitch.
Microsoft's stranglehold on the Office suite market rests almost entirely on keeping its formats undisclosed, and on shifting them all the time to keep the target moving. I wish the OOo people could stop doing anything else but supporting at least one incarnation of
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Thats like Apple's logic. The macintosh costs a lot more than a PC and its slower and runs hardly any software, but because it costs more its' better.
"OO.o can be a better deal for smaller companies"
<p>
And how about larger ones?
- no sig.
the single best feature of Openoffice, when compared to any other text program, is the direct export to pdf, that works flawlessly. Nothing new for us, but a great deal for the windows ppl 8)
Use the source, Luke!
With less then 20 comments at the time of this post, we have slashdotted eweek.
It's time to break out the champaigne!
I tried Openoffice for about 5 minutes before becoming completely lost.
I was trying to write a letter and the lack of an animated paperclip popping up and offering to help meant that I couldn't complete it
At the university where I work, MS volume pricing is amazing compared to retail. We get the latest version of Office Pro for around $60, and Windows XP Pro for around $50.. not to mention that both come sans product activation.
It's hard to justify going with something non-mainstream at those prices.. but of course all of the professors end up paying retail prices to get the same software on their home computer(s), so Microsoft still makes a bundle from it.
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous...
They are both very slow to load.
They both feature plain white backgrounds.
The comparison remains ultimately unresolved as the website cannot be found.
That'll teach 'em to host it on a free Geocities account!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Okey... I'm home now and wanted to read few stories. Could everyone please not visit any articles for the next hour or so?
Thanks in advance,
Gunnar
Or hey, you could just use Apple's TextEdit for your .doc files! Many people don't realize TextEdit provides free and native (albeit rudimentary) support for Microsoft Word format.
- Allen Pike
Altering time, one time at a time.
For all the documents you absolutely must exchange with people, PDF fits the bill 99 times out of 100. How often do you email an EDITABLE document to someone, have them edit it, then send it back? OOo's "Export to PDF" fits this nicely. I have a 'stealth' OOo install here at work, most other people fear the fact that somehow I scored Adobe Acrobat. PDF simply rules.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Today I gave up trying to figure out why when I installed Office 2003 onto an XP machine whilst logged in as admin, then logged in as another user, the software did not appear to be installed.
This pissed me off no end. I ended up making the target user an admin, then installed as them too.
It was a short review, but one problem I had with their comparison of PowerPoint/Impress was that Impress had a hard time working with a PowerPoint file that had a lot of imbedded Excel and Word information. Frankly, PowerPoint isn't nearly as good at handling those things as it ought to be either. Most of the testing was done to see how well an office could migrate from MS Office to OpenOffice, so the concern is a legitemate one, but I think that one will see that Impress will handle Writer and Calc files as well or better than PowerPoint will handle Word and Excel files.
I struggled for days and days and all I got was this lousy sig.
Until OO is 100% comptible with MSOffice, it will not be likely a small business would switch to it. It puts them at a disadvantage when trying to look like a big company. Image is everything when you're a little guy playing with the big boys.
The comparison is quite thorough and professional; they just point out strengths and weaknesses for both products without using geek/marketspeak, in the context of how they would be used in their organization, migrating from MS Office 97/2000. A refreshingly unbiased article which contrasts heavily with what we usually get from open source evangelism and corporate marketing departments.
De gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum
They're just another troll for hire.
How this this go? Quote from 2002
Guess you guys got a few months more to fail that one completely. Hold your breath!
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Their findings are just restating what we've heard time and time again. There is trouble with the file format; which is entirely microsoft's fault. Also, the user interface is slightly changed and users will have to learn to cope. Bottom line...it mostly works and users don't like change.
:(){
I'm sure that the article will give OO.o some good ideas of where it's strengths and weaknesses lie, potentially producing future versions that are more likely to go head-to-head with M$ office.
Free Firefox news reader.
Open Office is obviously the better choice for most small to medium sized companies. The problem is that people are resistant to change. The Office zealots will steadfast refuse to change, regardless of cost. People are also scared of change full stop; they feel it would somehow threaten their jobs. They've had a hard enough time getting Microsoft Word to work, having only just figured out how to turn off all the auto-"correction". Now you want them to use Open what? People love their computers AND applications. ;-)
Another problem is the integration of Microsoft Outlook into the Microsoft Office suite, which is turn has its hooks into Microsoft Exchange. Without the "full monty" people aren't going to change.
- It doesn't work for advanced Excel (read: The Finance Department).
- Support options are limited (read: DIY in a small company with limited/nonexistent IT resources to begin with).
- It takes as much as 10 seconds longer to open big docs sent in Office format (read: anything sent to you most people outside the company).
And, let's overlook Outlook in the comparison. (Evolution, Thunderbird, et. al. do not offer the same functionality)
Oh, and feel free to mod me into oblivion for taking a controversial (for /.'ers) stance.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I'd agree that small businesses, shoestring budgets, home, school, charity, underdeveloped nations would be better off going OO.o.
At large corporations, smooth 2-way compatibility with MS Office is a must have and OO.o is not there yet.
It's ironic, though. If a few of the larger MS Office licensees were to pool their resources they could contract out to improve OO.o so that it would be sufficiently compatible.
But there's the tragedy of the commons: even though many would benefit from lower costs, etc., everyone hopes "George will do it" I'll just wait until its good enough for me and meanwhile I'll shell out for MS Office.
But the more small time users lap over the barrier, the more it wears down.
A day will come when a Fortune 500 company makes the jump. It will look impressive, but it will just be the culmination of years of work by others on OO.o
"Provided by the management for your protection."
The only real pain in the ass is the inital conversion.. So you go through hell for a week, maybe 2 depending on how well OO converts the existing documents.
After that, its all gravy.. No need to worry about the MS licensing fees, support, license goon squads. Everyone uses OO's native format, and everything else thats not in-office (docs, etc) get exported to PDF's..
The only complaint ive heard is from the tard^H^H^H^Hpeople who spent money to get that "Microsoft Office Expert Guru thingym" license..
Of course we dont do anything really fancy with MS Office/OO either, just your plain office spreadsheets.. So your milage will vary..
Don't forget that many states depend on the sales tax as the form of income. That includes Washington and Florida and some others which do not have an income tax, but just ask their citizens to report the sales.
If you "buy" free software, the state will miss the budget plans, and all those fun parks, public education, libraries, state universities and highways you've learned to enjoy and appreciate, might be in jeopardy.
What's that, you say? You will spend money on something else that will re-plenish the state resources? Oh yeah, like buying a Japanese car, or hiring an Indian team to do support of your free software, since it's so cheap nowadays. Or going to Walmart and buying plenty of items made in China or Indonesia or buying a server manufactured in the same countries.
OpenOffice in general jeopardizes many public comforts you've learned to have in the US, and it's a primary motivation to move the software support offshore - if I spent nothing on the package, why should I increase my headcount and hire a support person, I can go to India/Philippines and get the same thing for $2/hour, and save even more.
OpenOffice loads most of our documents perfectly. It supports a wide variety of file formats. Its default compressed xml format produces files that are a tiny fraction of the size of equivelant Office documents. My bosses especially like the fact that it's free of charge, and we install it on every new pc we get.
The main issues I have with it are its slowness and high memory usage under Windows compared to Office. I also miss having an equivelant to the Excel solver utility, which can optimize hundreds of variables at once to minimize/maximize a result. My first use of it involved stock prediction. It performed quite well at optimizing a set of over a hundred weights to predict a stock based on years of past data, if only to prove to me that numerically predicting a single day into a stock's with a profitable level of accuracy is almost impossible. I'll be using NN's in my next attempt. Did I mention I have ADD?
The inexplicable increase in the number of stoned seagulls in the OpenOffice userbase...
Step 1: Make an opensource competitor to Microsoft Office
Step 2: ?????
Step 3: Profit!
Wonder if the Corel folks could help out with the file format problems. We use Office 2000 here, and at least once I month I fix a corrupted Word file by importing it into Wordperfect 10 and re-saving as a Word file.
By Jason Brooks
April 26, 2004
In recent years, open-source alternatives to Office have matured to the point where IT managers are beginning to investigate the viability of moving from the Microsoft Corp. suite to a license-free alternative. So when eWEEK Corporate Partner Ed Benincasa shared his desire to perform a user-based comparison between the OpenOffice.org project's OpenOffice.org suite and Microsoft's Office 2003, we saw a perfect opportunity to compare the suites under real-world conditions.
Click here to see how we tested.
Click here to learn why we think open-source office suites are a better fit in small shops.
Benincasa is vice president of MIS at precision machining manufacturer FN Manufacturing Inc., in Columbia, S.C. Microsoft Office 97 and Office 2000 are deployed to the 300-plus users at the site, and Benincasa is evaluating whether to move to Microsoft's latest suite, Office 2003, or the open-source OpenOffice.org 1.1.1.
Benincasa is looking to upgrade because Microsoft has discontinued distribution of new licenses for Office 2000 and Office 97. Benincasa is exploring his office application suite options because he is concerned about the high cost of an upgrade to Office 2003. He also wants to prevent Microsoft's product release and support road map from dictating FN Manufacturing's upgrade timetable.
"I'm not an anti-Microsoft person, and I think Office is a good product," said Benincasa. "However, we are cautious with our IT budget, and I'd prefer to spend money that directly relates to our business, like investing in things like hardware. Office 97 does everything we want it to do, and we would stay on that suite if we could. It pains me to have to spend money for features and functions most of my end users won't even begin to need."
eWEEK Labs traveled to FN Manufacturing to put the two office suites to the test. We worked with Benincasa and members of his IT staff, as well as several representatives of the user population at FN Manufacturing and its related companies--Browning Arms Co., in Ogden, Utah, and parent company Fabrique Nationale (National Weapons Factory), in Herstal, Belgium.
Also participating in the testing were Corporate Partner Kevin Wilson, product line manager of desktop hardware at Duke Energy Corp., in Charlotte, N.C., and Jeff Worboys, Duke's product line manager of desktop productivity applications.
For a complete list of eVal participants, click here.
We worked with three groups of users, all of whom currently use Office 97 or 2000 for productivity tasks. We tested OpenOffice.org and Office 2003 with sample documents provided by eWEEK Labs and with the testers' own files. We concentrated our tests on the applications' capability and compatibility, as well as on user training requirements.
During tests, most users had little or no trouble moving from their current suite to OpenOffice.org. However, for more advanced users--especially advanced users of Excel--OpenOffice.org did not fare as well.
"The advanced users already push Microsoft Office to the limits and are constantly looking for more functionality, which OpenOffice. org may not be able to provide," said Tina Sanzone, application analyst at Browning. "For other users, however, we can easily customize OpenOffice.org to make it look pretty close to what they already have."
Users who tested Office 2003 found the suite more polished and easy to use than Office 97 and 2000. However, only a few testers--again, mostly advanced users of Excel--said an upgrade to Office 2003 would provide them significantly more useful functionality.
Benincasa said that he has rolled out OpenOffice.org on shop-floor computers for basic document viewing and that the application works well there.
Those who participated in this eVal seemed, for the most part, receptive to a move to OpenOffice.org, but it's important to keep in mind that they volunteered for the test and, therefore, may be more open to a move than the bulk of
The free OO is very expensive if you use it to actually do work(what a concept). If OO just burned up an extra 10 minutes a day for my users by being buggy or quirky, that would cost me $60,000 per user(users bill at $150/hour)!!!! I think $500 for a copy of office 2003 is cheap!
Office 2003 vs. OpenOffice.Org
By Jason Brooks
April 26, 2004
In recent years, open-source alternatives to Office have matured to the point where IT managers are beginning to investigate the viability of moving from the Microsoft Corp. suite to a license-free alternative. So when eWEEK Corporate Partner Ed Benincasa shared his desire to perform a user-based comparison between the OpenOffice.org project's OpenOffice.org suite and Microsoft's Office 2003, we saw a perfect opportunity to compare the suites under real-world conditions.
Benincasa is vice president of MIS at precision machining manufacturer FN Manufacturing Inc., in Columbia, S.C. Microsoft Office 97 and Office 2000 are deployed to the 300-plus users at the site, and Benincasa is evaluating whether to move to Microsoft's latest suite, Office 2003, or the open-source OpenOffice.org 1.1.1.
Benincasa is looking to upgrade because Microsoft has discontinued distribution of new licenses for Office 2000 and Office 97. Benincasa is exploring his office application suite options because he is concerned about the high cost of an upgrade to Office 2003. He also wants to prevent Microsoft's product release and support road map from dictating FN Manufacturing's upgrade timetable.
"I'm not an anti-Microsoft person, and I think Office is a good product," said Benincasa. "However, we are cautious with our IT budget, and I'd prefer to spend money that directly relates to our business, like investing in things like hardware. Office 97 does everything we want it to do, and we would stay on that suite if we could. It pains me to have to spend money for features and functions most of my end users won't even begin to need."
eWEEK Labs traveled to FN Manufacturing to put the two office suites to the test. We worked with Benincasa and members of his IT staff, as well as several representatives of the user population at FN Manufacturing and its related companies--Browning Arms Co., in Ogden, Utah, and parent company Fabrique Nationale (National Weapons Factory), in Herstal, Belgium.
Also participating in the testing were Corporate Partner Kevin Wilson, product line manager of desktop hardware at Duke Energy Corp., in Charlotte, N.C., and Jeff Worboys, Duke's product line manager of desktop productivity applications.
For a complete list of eVal participants, click here.
We worked with three groups of users, all of whom currently use Office 97 or 2000 for productivity tasks. We tested OpenOffice.org and Office 2003 with sample documents provided by eWEEK Labs and with the testers' own files. We concentrated our tests on the applications' capability and compatibility, as well as on user training requirements.
During tests, most users had little or no trouble moving from their current suite to OpenOffice.org. However, for more advanced users--especially advanced users of Excel--OpenOffice.org did not fare as well.
"The advanced users already push Microsoft Office to the limits and are constantly looking for more functionality, which OpenOffice. org may not be able to provide," said Tina Sanzone, application analyst at Browning. "For other users, however, we can easily customize OpenOffice.org to make it look pretty close to what they already have."
Users who tested Office 2003 found the suite more polished and easy to use than Office 97 and 2000. However, only a few testers--again, mostly advanced users of Excel--said an upgrade to Office 2003 would provide them significantly more useful functionality.
Benincasa said that he has rolled out OpenOffice.org on shop-floor computers for basic document viewing and that the application works well there.
Those who participated in this eVal seemed, for the most part, receptive to a move to OpenOffice.org, but it's important to keep in mind that they volunteered for the test and, therefore, may be more open to a move than the bulk of Benincasa's users.
Next page: Sum of their parts
From the article:
> No licensing costs As a free-software
> project, OpenOffice.org has no licensing.
Ooops! - OO most certainly does have a license, just not a *cost* license. Errors like that confuse people making software use decisions...
OO's stunningly good looks on Mac OS X.
do your users need the obscure features of Excel?
Bah, I do. I`m glad they`ve got Windows and Office at work, since my home machine is Linux.
Of course, you could always switch them to Octave/Matlab, but the training costs would be high.
My current OOo-related pet peeve is that I can't get Presenter to go full screen on my secondary display (Windows).. and even if I have the X/Y coordinates using the Win API, it replaces itself in my primary display.
Then again, the Powerpoint viewer has the same problem, and it won't even go OUT of full-screen mode..
S
OpenOffice also gives you the choice of building equations by hand or by text primitives (similar to LateX). Learning the syntax for sums, etc. takes a few minutes, but then it's supremely easy to create the coolest equations with no fuss.
CON: ...
Lack of traditional support Office suites typically do not require much vendor support, but the fact that OpenOffice.org is an open-source project means software support must come from the community, generally spread out across various Web sites and newsgroups.
Ok, so tell me again why the guy was thinking about switching from MS to OO? Oh yeah, "Benincasa is looking to upgrade because Microsoft has discontinued distribution of new licenses for Office 2000 and Office 97"
So MS won't support what they deem "old" products at all, and that isn't listed as a "Con" for them. Yet distributed, widely available support is a "Con" for OO?
And in the "Con" for MS high licensing costs, it doesn't mention that these will be recurring costs, at the whim of Microsoft and their End of Life policies.
In any case, all testers liked Office 2003 and said staying with Office would likely provide the smoothest upgrade path. "It'll be easier to introduce Microsoft Office 2003 to users here at FN Manufacturing than OpenOffice be- cause it's a lot more user-friendly than OpenOffice," said Joan Curfman, business systems supervisor at FN Manufacturing. "Training will definitely be more detailed and will take a lot longer on OpenOffice.org because the interface isn't that friendly. Users here have problems using what we already have. They'll probably find OpenOffice.org even more difficult to use and learn."
Benincasa said training on OpenOffice.org would be conducted in-house, leveraging the OpenOffice.org knowledge developed within the organization through this eVal and FN Manufacturing's previous tests of the suite.
A move to OpenOffice.org could be just the beginning of FN Manufacturing's open-source journey. Benincasa has been pondering a move from Windows to Linux for some of the company's desktop systems, a path the multiplatform OpenOffice.org would help clear.
Sum of Their Parts
We tested the word processor, spreadsheet and presentation applications in OpenOffice.org 1.1.1 and Office 2003 separately, but some of the testers' assessments applied suitewide.
Almost every person who tested Office 2003 expressed appreciation for Office's Task Pane--an interface feature that lets users carry out operations related to the document at hand, such as using the thesaurus while working on a Word document. Testers also said they valued Task Pane as an interface to Office's help system, which they found to be effective.
As for OpenOffice.org, most testers said they liked being able to launch any of the suite's document types from the application they were using. Testers also said they appreciated having all their OpenOffice.org application instances available from the Window tool bar menu item. The Window item in Office's apps, in contrast, shows only open instances of like applications.
Word vs. Writer
All the eVAL testers said they create and work with Word documents every day.
The testers who worked with Office 2003 said there were few differences between Word 2003 and earlier versions of the Microsoft word processor. In a comment echoed by many of our testers, Rick Miller, an engineer at FN Manufacturing, said, "Most tasks I perform are the same or similar [whether in Word 97 or 2000 or in Word 2003]."
That's not to say that there weren't issues: One tester, for example, complained that a key combination had changed and that Microsoft's context-sensitive smart-tags feature got in the way during testing. By and large, however, users were agreed that their familiarity with Word would minimize the time required to get up to speed with Office 2003.
However, the testers who worked with OpenOffice.org said the suite's word processor application, Writer, seemed familiar as well.
FN Manufacturing Validation Engineer Doug Shaffer said that Writer's "layout and command locations are similar to Microsoft Word's" and that it was "very easy to perform the standard basic tasks in Writer."
Browning's Sanzone, who tested OpenOffice.org in addition to Office 2003, said that documents took longer to open in Writer than they did in Word. This can be attributed to the fact that Writer must carry out an import operation when it opens documents saved in Microsoft's Word format. For short documents, there's no noticeable difference, but for large files with complex formatting, Writer can take as much as 10 seconds longer than Word to open the same document.
In general, though, of the OpenOffice.org applications we evaluated, Writer presented the fewest file-format-compatibility problems.
Several testers said they were impressed with the ability of Writer to save documents as PDF files, a feature they believe would save money as well as time because PDF export for Word requires a Microsoft add-in that must be purchased separately.
Sadly, OpenOffice is not supported using Documents to Go for palmOS. Even when I save the document as an excel spreadsheet and try to transfer it over, Documents to Go throws a hissy fit and spits out an error. Documents to Go claims no plans to support native OO format, either.
If this company utilizes pda's, then OO is not the way to go.
I do it all the time. My advisor is a big fan of "Track Changes..." in MSWord. Luckily this feature works OK in OOorg so I can get away with it. But you are correct when you say the PDF is better for docs that need not be edited. Just cut and MD5 on the PDF and send it to whoever. If they noodle with it, then you know.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
In my opinion, the ONLY difference between the FREE office, and the one you have to PAY for, is that you get support for one of them. The decision is up to the people, is it worth it or is it not..?
MOD PARENT UP!!! The price difference in liscensing is enormous, and the original poster probably did not intend flamebait.
Another Writer feature that stood out for testers was the application's word-complete function, similar to the auto-complete function of many Web browsers. Writer attempts to complete words being typed based on words previously typed in a particular document. Deborah Hordych, a buyer at FN Manufacturing, liked this feature but said that users would have to be careful that Writer was suggesting an appropriate word.
With a Belgian parent company, FN Manufacturing users were, not surprisingly, interested in Word 2003's translation capabilities. Using a document he created, Kevin Patten, a controller in FN Manufacturing's finance department, was able to use Word to effectively translate specific phrases from English to French, something Patten said he does frequently during his daily work routine.
"Extras like the translation feature are a really nice touch because they cut down on the amount of time I have to spend on a document," said Patten. "Every minute I save on something like this is a minute I can spend working on something else."
Suite considerations
OpenOffice.Org 1.1.1
Pros
# No licensing costs As a free-software project, OpenOffice.org has no licensing.
# Good integration among suite applications eValuation testers said, for example, that they appreciated being able to create new spreadsheet documents from within the word processor application.
# Variety of export options OpenOffice.org ships with PDF export capabilities, as well as support for saving presentations in Flash format.
Cons
# File-format compatibility issues Although OpenOffice.org does a good job of handling Microsoft Office file formats, small formatting inconsistencies will require reworking of complex documents.
# Lack of traditional support Office suites typically do not require much vendor support, but the fact that OpenOffice.org is an open-source project means software support must come from the community, generally spread out across various Web sites and newsgroups.
# Interface differences OpenOffice.org is similar to Microsoft Office in its design, but users will need some time to grow accustomed to differences between the two.
Office 2003
Pros
# Familiarity Most knowledge workers use some version of Microsoft Office already, and an upgrade to a new version of Office presents the flattest learning curve.
# File-format compatibility Microsoft Office file formats are de facto standards, and no rival suite handles these proprietary formats as well as Office does.
# Advanced features Office 2003 has more features and capabilities than competing suites. Although many users do not require or use much of this functionality, advanced users, particularly of spreadsheets, often find it vital.
Cons
# High licensing costs Microsoft Office licenses are priced at a few hundred dollars each--a cost that can be difficult to justify when your users require only basic productivity suite functionality.
# Advanced features require latest versions Some of the most compelling features added to the last two versions of Office--such as extensible smart tags, document protection and Smart Document creation--are not backward-compatible with earlier versions of the suite.
Next page: Excel vs. Calc
I dont think you can compare a complete package without including what comes with it. Doesnt that skew the results somewhat?
Download Office 2003. You pay nothing and you avoid OpenOffice. Works for me!
Looking from a software admin's perspective, if I haven't upgraded to a supported MS Office I probably don't care to. That's assuming I have plenty of older MS Office licenses.
The real opportunity I can see for running OpenOffice and ditching MS Office is where we have X computers running MS Office and we have expanded to where we now need 2X computers running some Office software. If upper management wants to get out of that one cheap, I could probably strongarm them into adopting OO.
The users would probably complain at first that they can't use Open Office because of a few small differences between it and MS Office. I got that a lot when we went from Office 97 to Office XP. I usually just remind them at that point how adept they are at running Browser-based games, P2P apps, and AOL IM while I'm not looking. A few new format/location changes in their office product won't kill them.
If you need document compatibility from MSWord, save it to an rtf file. 5 mouse clicks. That's it. Opens in OO.o just fine. Even the most brain-dead customer can be trained to do this. Doesn't have the "Super-Mega-Microsoft-Man!" formatting, but for transferred docs, I find that it's rarely, if ever, needed. Granted, I'm a programmer, and I usually only receive bad data and technical documents in Word, but still...
Love your country always, but respect your government only when it deserves it. -- Mark Twain
Someone had installed openoffice on her machine and it stole the .doc association. The program (unlike word) was unable to perform the copy and paste operation from a browser (IE) and make it look vaguely readable (IIRC it dribbled characters down the right margin), so she spent hours/days trying to work out how to get it to work. Argh!
Excel vs. Calc eVAL testers were split between those who use spreadsheets very little or for fairly simple tasks and those who are accustomed to using Excel 97/2000 as an analysis tool. The latter group includes some of FN Manufacturing's finance and engineering personnel. They leverage Excel's statistics capabilities, among others, and appreciated the improvements made to the Pivot Table feature in Excel 2003. OpenOffice.org's Calc offers a similar feature, called DataPilot, but testers had trouble locating it because of the differences in the way Calc and Excel are organized. Our advanced testers also were interested in Excel's Watch Window feature, something Microsoft added to the application in Office XP. A Watch Window is a separate, small window that remains "on top" and enables users to monitor a selected set of cells. Calc does not have a similar feature, but this wouldn't likely be a deal breaker for FN Manufacturing users because the versions of Excel they currently use don't offer this functionality. Among the more casual spreadsheet testers, the differences between the spreadsheet applications were less jarring. Romuald Dufour, an IT manager at Fabrique Nationale, said of Excel 2003: "There was not much difference between Office 2000, OpenOffice.org and Office 2003 for my use." Melinda Vause, who works in finance at FN Manufacturing, said Calc felt "similar to Excel, and it would be easy to learn the slight differences." Most of the Excel spreadsheets we used during testing were not heavily formatted, but we did experience compatibility issues between Excel and Calc. For the most part, these problems related to charts. OpenOffice.org tester Vause noted that "graph names were converted to row numbers in some cases, and some formatting was dropped." The severity of these issues differed from document to document, and the significance differed from tester to tester. FN Manufacturing bookkeeper Suzan Widener re- ported that the Excel-formatted spreadsheet she used during the eVal was compatible with Calc. However, Joan Curfman, who tested Office 2003 during the eVal but who had been part of an earlier OpenOffice.org test group, estimated it would take weeks to convert FN Manufacturing spreadsheets from Office 97 and 2000 to OpenOffice.org. Next page: PowerPoint vs. Impress
I work at a school -- We don't license MS Office for the students, but this year is the first that we have put MS Office on every faculty machine (about 60). I also put OpenOffice on every machine. We have been 100% Wordperfect until this year, but the new president "likes MS Office", so he's slowly forcing everything that direction. When I rolled out this year's install image, I had made a bit of a mistake (completely unintentionally). When someone double-clicks on a MS Office document, it opens in OpenOffice instead of MSOffice. This has basically "forced" everyone to use OpenOffice.
And HARDLY ANYONE has noticed. Only two or three of the faculty (those who call themselves the Techno-elite . . . yeah right) have switched it back to MS. Most people don't realize they're not using MSOffice. I'm of the opinion that I could COMPLETELY remove MSOffice, rename all the OpenOffice icons to the MS equivalent, and we'd be in business.
Office 2003 vs. OpenOffice.Org
April 26, 2004
By Jason Brooks
In recent years, open-source alternatives to Office have matured to the point where IT managers are beginning to investigate the viability of moving from the Microsoft Corp. suite to a license-free alternative. So when eWEEK Corporate Partner Ed Benincasa shared his desire to perform a user-based comparison between the OpenOffice.org project's OpenOffice.org suite and Microsoft's Office 2003, we saw a perfect opportunity to compare the suites under real-world conditions.
Benincasa is vice president of MIS at precision machining manufacturer FN Manufacturing Inc., in Columbia, S.C. Microsoft Office 97 and Office 2000 are deployed to the 300-plus users at the site, and Benincasa is evaluating whether to move to Microsoft's latest suite, Office 2003, or the open-source OpenOffice.org 1.1.1.
Benincasa is looking to upgrade because Microsoft has discontinued distribution of new licenses for Office 2000 and Office 97. Benincasa is exploring his office application suite options because he is concerned about the high cost of an upgrade to Office 2003. He also wants to prevent Microsoft's product release and support road map from dictating FN Manufacturing's upgrade timetable.
"I'm not an anti-Microsoft person, and I think Office is a good product," said Benincasa. "However, we are cautious with our IT budget, and I'd prefer to spend money that directly relates to our business, like investing in things like hardware. Office 97 does everything we want it to do, and we would stay on that suite if we could. It pains me to have to spend money for features and functions most of my end users won't even begin to need."
eWEEK Labs traveled to FN Manufacturing to put the two office suites to the test. We worked with Benincasa and members of his IT staff, as well as several representatives of the user population at FN Manufacturing and its related companies-Browning Arms Co., in Ogden, Utah, and parent company Fabrique Nationale (National Weapons Factory), in Herstal, Belgium.
Also participating in the testing were Corporate Partner Kevin Wilson, product line manager of desktop hardware at Duke Energy Corp., in Charlotte, N.C., and Jeff Worboys, Duke's product line manager of desktop productivity applications.
We worked with three groups of users, all of whom currently use Office 97 or 2000 for productivity tasks. We tested OpenOffice.org and Office 2003 with sample documents provided by eWEEK Labs and with the testers' own files. We concentrated our tests on the applications' capability and compatibility, as well as on user training requirements.
During tests, most users had little or no trouble moving from their current suite to OpenOffice.org. However, for more advanced users-especially advanced users of Excel-OpenOffice.org did not fare as well.
"The advanced users already push Microsoft Office to the limits and are constantly looking for more functionality, which OpenOffice. org may not be able to provide," said Tina Sanzone, application analyst at Browning. "For other users, however, we can easily customize OpenOffice.org to make it look pretty close to what they already have."
Users who tested Office 2003 found the suite more polished and easy to use than Office 97 and 2000. However, only a few testers-again, mostly advanced users of Excel-said an upgrade to Office 2003 would provide them significantly more useful functionality.
Benincasa said that he has rolled out OpenOffice.org on shop-floor computers for basic document viewing and that the application works well there.
Those who participated in this eVal seemed, for the most part, receptive to a move to OpenOffice.org, but it's important to keep in mind that they volunteered for the test and, therefore, may be more open to a move than the bulk of Benincasa's users.
In any case, all testers liked Office 2003 and said staying with Office would likely provide the smoothest upgrade path. "It'll be easier to
Excel vs. Calc
eVAL testers were split between those who use spreadsheets very little or for fairly simple tasks and those who are accustomed to using Excel 97/2000 as an analysis tool.
The latter group includes some of FN Manufacturing's finance and engineering personnel. They leverage Excel's statistics capabilities, among others, and appreciated the improvements made to the Pivot Table feature in Excel 2003. OpenOffice.org's Calc offers a similar feature, called DataPilot, but testers had trouble locating it because of the differences in the way Calc and Excel are organized.
Our advanced testers also were interested in Excel's Watch Window feature, something Microsoft added to the application in Office XP. A Watch Window is a separate, small window that remains "on top" and enables users to monitor a selected set of cells. Calc does not have a similar feature, but this wouldn't likely be a deal breaker for FN Manufacturing users because the versions of Excel they currently use don't offer this functionality.
Among the more casual spreadsheet testers, the differences between the spreadsheet applications were less jarring. Romuald Dufour, an IT manager at Fabrique Nationale, said of Excel 2003: "There was not much difference between Office 2000, OpenOffice.org and Office 2003 for my use."
Melinda Vause, who works in finance at FN Manufacturing, said Calc felt "similar to Excel, and it would be easy to learn the slight differences."
Most of the Excel spreadsheets we used during testing were not heavily formatted, but we did experience compatibility issues between Excel and Calc. For the most part, these problems related to charts.
OpenOffice.org tester Vause noted that "graph names were converted to row numbers in some cases, and some formatting was dropped."
The severity of these issues differed from document to document, and the significance differed from tester to tester.
FN Manufacturing bookkeeper Suzan Widener re- ported that the Excel-formatted spreadsheet she used during the eVal was compatible with Calc. However, Joan Curfman, who tested Office 2003 during the eVal but who had been part of an earlier OpenOffice.org test group, estimated it would take weeks to convert FN Manufacturing spreadsheets from Office 97 and 2000 to OpenOffice.org.
Next page: PowerPoint vs. Impress
Response: Yeah, but what about Outlook? What about Access? What about Publisher? The client/server relationship in Outlook gives a lot of useful features. Until the open source community makes a robust product to compete directly with Outlook, the topic is moot. Many businesses still have crappy Access mdb files providing a front end for SQL. Surprisingly, every organization has a moderate percentage of people that use Publisher. When you bend over to buy Office, you get a complete product with every little feature that your employees seem to actually use. Also, there's no cost in support, training, and downtime. If 90% of other businesses are using Office, we'll be using it to ensure smooth transactions. Business does not revolve around the IT department and their open source advocating,Microsoft hating soldiers.
Comment: Office has downtime because it's crap and displays errors constantly.
Response: That's funny. Every computer I've deployed hasn't had this problem. Maybe you should go back to your "For Dummies" books. Don't forget to do some reading to understand Exchange so you don't fuck up the server. Of course if you do fuck things up and are unable to fix them, it's all Microsoft's fault. The Man is out to get you.
Comment: Outlook will infect your network with uber-viruses and kill puppies!
Response: Puppies are evil and a company that doesn't keep up on patches and AV software when using the most targeted software is just asking to be punished.
-Lucas
I do a lot of PowerPoint presentations in my line of work. I played around with OO for a bit especially the Presenter application. Two key points:
1) There seems to only be a single slide theme in there. OO needs to bundle more presentation templates in there. (Fortunately I have my own)
2) It's hard to browse between slides. With PowerPoint, all you have to do is hit page up or down to change slides in the editor. OO has these weird tab things you have to click on.
comparing ms word, StarOffice and other word processing software, finding out, that ms word was almost unusable in comparison.
Uh.. I hate to tell you folk this but let me let you in on a little secret... .DOC documents have incompatibilities with varying versions of MS OFFICE! :O The HORROR!
.DOC as if it's some sort of Mecca of compatibility. Truth: It SUCKS and it's BROKEN. I mean, everything's cool, as long as you don't go back too many versions, or use the wrong copy of Works, right? Well... In light of this, how can it be said that OOo is any less compatible only being 3 years old?!
.org can afford to keep up with General Electic's IT budget. Smaller schools such as ours can't just plunk down this kind of money every two years to insure compatibility with MS's latest fashions.
Geez, people treat
You know, not every
With OOo's XML I do look forward to being able to see my documents 20 years from now just as they are today (hopefully on a flat screen the size of my house of course).
Seriously. When I arrived at this school we had students using different versions of Works and Office at home and in the dorms (not to mention Wordperfect and even Wordpad!) Then you had international issues with MS Office, which I understand most of these are resolved now in 2003. Still...
Open/StarOffice let us completely standardize our documentation here. It allowed me to offer a free copy of the software to every student, parent, and teacher. It's not perfect, but then neither is MS Office.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
That sounded like an oddly "In Soviet Russia" comment, but I think you see my point. They are the majority, therefore they "win" when it comes to battles. That is how Word got its foothold, that is how it is going to keep it. I say Word instead of Office, because they are all just tagalong junkyard dogs. The word processor is what got them there.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
/rant on/
.doc format of them.
.doc interface as it evolves or face many slow and painful years prior working toward open products.
/rant>
Haven't we covered this many times before?
Assuming only one of your users (whether you support 1 or 1,000 of them) needs to exchange editable complex documents with a MS Word shop even occasionally. Adobe doesn't cut it, nor do any of the commercial or open products. (Try a complex document with images and outlines within different parts of a table.) Yuk!
So...... if you start by converting your existing base of users to an open product, you are already supporting TWO word processors and the conversion of documents between same.
Now you've got to deal with resentment between those users who think you are "favoring" the ones you "let" buy MS Word. Can you say Career Limiting Maneuver (CLM)? Sure I knew you could.
I don't care if Word costs $100 a year per copy and open is free because the competent support desk resource costs are far and away our resource whose demand far exceeds hours available.
Meanwhile, any external vendor who tries to send us non-MS stuff has never given us grief when we require
I'm not saying this is fair. I'm not saying this is right. I am saying this is reality.
Either we legally and ethically reverse engineer EACH
I'm more hopeful by colinux (http://www.colinux.org/) where one has a fighting chance of introducing non-MS components (PHP, MySQL, Apache) and running them in tandem with MS office as needed.
Live Long and Prosper - Thanks Leonard. You are missed.
I d/l-ed OO a couple of months ago, to try it out... I've since removed it, and decided to check, again, next year. My conclusions were (basically):
OO might be fine for joe/jane six-pack, but there are (currently) some issues:
compatability
capability
compatability
&c.
My main bytch would be in the implementation of Calc: it's nowhere near the same league as Excel. .xls files in Calc, I got a whole bunch of junk -- formulas which did not, and could not translate between the two applications.
When I tried to open some of my
When the basic formulas couldn't be translated (yes, I read the documentation, tried manually translating functions, and gave up -- Q:how does Calc deal with array functions? A: It *doesn't*) I despaired of ever getting complex analysis translated between the two (with the current release, at least).
So... to ya'll @ OO.org... get some statististicians/mathamaticians/&c. on the programming team for Calc, issue a press-release/post, when ya've got something more impressive than a basic DBGrid wrapper, and I'll check it out in the next revision.
I love the principle behind OOo and wish them all the luck, but until they fix some of the major bugs, like the three-year-old autofilter bug in calc that allows you to modify/delete data that you can't see (Bug 2977), OOo will remain the tool of secretaries and non-power-users. One cannot use calc for serious scientific work (yet). *sigh*
If it's saved as a .SXW, then opened, how does it compare with a .DOC?
A lot of the problems are to do with the switch, not the running. In other words, they are one-off costs.
For most conversions, I've found no problems, with a few minor issues, where some manual adjustment has been required. Then, it's in .SXW.
OOo may not have perfect filters for dealing with formatting MSOfc files, but I've definitely had it successfully open MSOfc files that office wouldn't open. I believe it was a file that had crossed from a pc to a mac; office just puked and crashed on it. (Also, you can't get wordperfect filters for MSOffice for the mac - only for the PC, which sucks. my recollection is this isn't true in OOo)
The only thing I can say in defense of MSoffice is
the OOo does always seem to be one interface generation behind - which usually doesn't matter. Not having an OSX interface definitely kills it for some people, though - it looks too much like a Windows program. The last OOo I was using (1.1RC5, I believe) looked basically like Office 2k, in my opinion. Actually, I hate the XP interfaces, but not everybody does.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
Deal breaker for a school system in my area: It does not install right on multi-user windows 2000 machines. Each user has to do a mini-install, and many places don't want to give people this right. OOo says they will be using MS Installer Technology in version 2, so that will be a big help.
One of the main problems with OpenOffice on the Mac is that it does not yet use Aqua for its user interface, and a side effect of this is you cannot use the different international input modes in OS X to type in OO. So I can't just switch to Chinese and start typing in OO, as it does not know how to handle it. Without that, half my use for a word processor goes out the window.
There may be a way to rig the X11 environment or OpenOffice itself to allow Chinese input in another fashion, but it's just one more usability knock against the program when run on Mac OS X. Ugly UI, incosistencies with the Mac's interface conventions, international input kludges, etc. Not to mention the performance issues, and missing niceties like AppleScript automation (which can be done on ANY native OS X app, even if it's not designed for it), non-crappy file dialogs, etc.
Microsoft Word may have its share of problems, but at least it can start in less than 45-60 seconds, and it follows most of the Apple UI conventions. So while OpenOffice is nice, it definitely is not a decent substitute for Office X at this stage.
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
Say I'm creating an Outlook 2003 group appointment. With 2 clicks (inside Outlook), I can create a portal site for the meeting which includes a discussion list, document/picture library, agenda, surveys, etc. No programming and very easy for the average user to accomplish.
Say I'm in Word working on a document and I'd like to get my attorney to look at it. With 2 clicks (inside Word), I can create a portal site to allow him to review the document. We can discuss it using the discussion features, and he can create different versions. Using the web folders functionality, this entire process is seemless (no downloading the file locally, editing it, and uploading...just hit save and it saves automatically back to the portal).
Open office would be a nice product but it doesn't integrate well with OS X. You can't copy an image from one OS X program and paste it into Open office. That was my biggest problem. It would also be nice if it wouldn't rely on X11. It doesn't have to be an aqua app or anything but just run natively.
I ended up buying AppleWorks instead and it is great. much better than Office and obviously flows with OS X computing a lot better than Open Office.
As a side note I uninstalled the Microsoft Office Test drive that came with OS X long before the trial period expired.
Conserve Oil, Recycle, Boycott Walmart
If a small company can look at the weaknesses of a product, they can honestly decide whether or not to use it. Now you might think that the ones you listed are big issues, but they might not be . It would depend on the company. I can certainly see how some companies could look at the list of flaws and still decide to use it.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I have put OpenOffice on three machines in our office, but mostly for the ability to open and use Excel and PowerPoint files. I have used Writer in place of Word and it was pretty quick to learn and I wouldn't complain about some of the problems with it when it is free and very full featured.
But, in our field (legal), we need Word or Word Perfect. So, we've been buying copies of Works 2003 which contains Word XP/2002 at 40 bucks a pop on eBay. We just don't need Excel or PowerPoint to pony up for MS Office, and can use OO.org when we need those programs.
I would love to go to OpenOffice in its entirety, but the problem is that many popular and specialized programs in the legal field support Word or WordPerfect and will never support something like OO.org (heck, our scheduling program doesn't support the main file being on a Linux server, which would have saved us some money for getting additional licenses for WinNT).
Our scheduling program (Amicus Attorney) supports creating documents through its scheduler/address book only though Word or WordPerfect.
Until OO.org figures out a way to interact with specialized programs in specialized fields (legal, medicine, engineering, etc), I think it will be hard for many companies to make a switch.
What you write or what they write? Either way, if you're a teacher, and a computer program can tell better than you, I think that confirms my theory regarding why I find high school so boring.
... "was that too complex for you to understand? The F-K quotient was pretty low"
OTOH, what if we could leverage the F-K'ing algorithms into spam-filters? Or use the F-K algorithms on a date
Since the 2000 versions (which is the earliest version of Office I ever used), all I ever did was right-click on it and click "Hide." Gone for good.
Of course, since XP Clippy isn't even on by default. I always forget he exists until some Slashdotters mentions him.
The article misses the most important reason to consider Open (or Star) Office - portability. Its a well-established (but unfortunately often forgotten) good business principle to never tie yourself in to one supplier.
Until a couple of years ago there was no 'good enough for most purposes' alternative to MS Office. Now there is, and companies finally have freedom to choose their desktop systems.
Switch to Open Office and you can migrate gradually to Unix or Linux desktops using the same Office system throughout. The mere possibility of doing this should be more than enough justification for most businesses evaluating Open Office.
Sometimes I question the intelligence of the people writing these things. People were complaining about trivial things. Large documents not saved in their native format taking as long as 10 extra seconds to open. Be fucking glad you can open them at all in open office. Office can only open it's own native file formats. If anything, I'd bitch Office can't open other formats. Furthermore, cons were listed as basically "OpenOffice.org isn't Office, so your users won't be used to it". Statements like that are moronic. Of course it's not Office. It stands on it's own. All the cons basically stem from "It's not Office". People complained about things as trivial as they had to learn new key combination shortcuts. If your organization is so fickle that you'd choose Office over OpenOffice.org because of different key bindings, slightly different layout, and documents taking slightly longer to open, then I say go ahead, waste your money.
Hooray, another pointless Clippy joke that illustrates Slashdotters haven't used a version of Office later than '97 (just like BSOD jokes).
I've never seen Clippy on any of my Office installations. I only ever saw him on the Office installations in college, which used 2000. It was just a matter of right-clicking and telling him to "Hide." Never saw him again.
Meanwhile, OpenOffice has that godawful light bulb that pops up every 30 seconds when any little event happens. How the fsck do you turn that off?! Grr.
Moderators this is on topic. Remember an earlier article about a LUG prez resigning of the military application of Linux? Yeah, I though so. This is exactly the same. People need to know that OO is being used to create weapons of mass destruction.
To help readers guage the ease with which corporations could switch from MS Office to OpenOffice, the article includes caveats like the following:
"Certain Impress capabilities, such as three-dimensional text in presentations, did not carry across to PowerPoint."
This is hardly even "semi-beta stuff." It's "proof of concept." Which means it's great if you're a programmer and want to tinker, or you just want to see what Open Office for OSX will look like in a year or two, fine, but if you actually have to use Office to, I don't know, prepare documents or something, you're better off sticking with the X11 version. And if you want a real OSX interface, you're better off with MS Office. I don't like MS, but that's what I use, because it gets the job done.
If you're interested in development releases of Office products, you might also check out AbiWord which has also just been released for OSX, but again, it's not ready for prime time.
One problem that all companies have with moving to open-source stuff like this is that they truly wonder if it'll be around tomorrow; or in what form. If the core developers for this have a falling out, the project can cease, or even worse, it starts splitting into many different directions. While it's easy for a home user to pick their favorite flavor, a company simply doesn't snap it's fingers to make decisisions most of the time. With MS, they know the whole place can quit and be replaced. Sounds silly, but when it comes to mid-level technical people who are simply worried about the people in the office and how quick they can get their work done (and not having to upgrade too often or explain new things too often), this matters a ton.
hang on, it'll be along soon...
The free OO is very expensive if you use it to actually do work(what a concept). If OO just burned up an extra 10 minutes a day for my users by being buggy or quirky, that would cost me $60,000 per user(users bill at $150/hour)!!!! I think $500 for a copy of office 2003 is cheap!
If they spent an extra 10 minutes a day, wouldn't it mean that they'd bill their clients an extra 60,000$? Making the company richer.
Heh.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
For some reason it has become unacceptable for people to consider changing the way they work or think. How was Microsoft so successful at making people this way?
.DOC format, the WordPerfect stalwarts realized that they were going to have to switch.
.DOC compatibility. Most of all Open Office offers a price that can't be beat. For a company that has just finished a conversion from WordPerfect to MS Office or is still on the throws of such a conversion, switching to Open Office may not make sense yet. But, for most others, refusing Open Office simply because it is not exactly the same as MS Office or because it will take a little while to get used to it is just ludicrous. How did MS convince people that any change is too much trouble?
There will most certainly be difficulties in converting any enterprise, large or small from MS Office to Open Office and the larger the enterprise the bigger the problem it will be. But, these problems are not insurmountable!
The fact is that many/most corporations have already been through just such a conversion. Before MS Office there was a product called WordPerfect Office and everybody used it. Microsoft came along and offered some better features such as a decent GUI and Object Linking and Embedding(OLE) as well as a competitive price and people started switching. WordPerfect reacted too slowly and allowed a momentum to build. But, not everyone was interested in the new features and countless WordPerfect Office users refused to ever give up venerable office suite. But, as time went on and more and more people started using the incompatible
Most of them did the conversion and for many of them it took years to finish. Some companies still haven't finished converting from WordPerfect to MS Office, even after years of work toward that end. The point is though that they all survived. They all learned the new MS way of doing what they needed to.
Today, Open Office offers a very similar feature set to MS Office. Open Office offers good, though imperfect,
Yes, OO needs to be compatible with MS Office in order to be sold. However, they will never ever ever be 100% compatible because the file formats are "closed" and MS would sue all of you if you managed to reverse engineer the format 100%. Not to mention it will change again in Office 2005, 2007, and so on just to keep people buying the latest version.
OO needs to concentrate on being "compatible enough" for most people, and extending functionality and useability on their own path. In the end this will help them against MS office because MS must change things around to justify selling new versions, whereas OO can maintain a stable interface and user experience.
Support is also a major issue for companies. I can just imagine some government agency IMO deploying OO and then having to tell the CIO they "downloaded it off some website". Furthermore, when the first user starts screaming for support, you'd better be sure what you are doing and be able to get the answer. That's why many just suck down the money for MS because they can guarantee support and they can blame MS if there's a bug or security hole, etc. Open source code only does that IMO any good if they know how to read it and are willing to bet their job there are no security holes.
is a panacea - or closer to it than .doc. While it's true that XML structures will change, they're text, meaning that anyone with 10 minutes and some knowledge of Python/Perl/$script_language_in_10_yrs can write a script to convert XML type 1 to XML type 2.
That's partially because OO's XML schema is open, and partially because it's text-based, rather than binary. Heck, if I'm on a computer without OO, I can (in a pinch) edit my OO files by hand in Notepad.
When people talk about support, they always say "hey, you can always call MS."
But have you? Do you? When a problem occurs, the go-to guy is the IT guy in the company. And that guy (or gal) either searches the net or asks a friend.
Have you, and IT person, ever called the MS helpline? If so, were you able to get an answer?
... that water is more healthy than Pepsi.
Hey, this part of the analogy even works when comparing OpenOffice.org to MS Office!
It will be _VERY_ difficult to make OO read and save perfectly MS Office docs. What we need to do is to install both in the same machine and start producing documents with OO.
;).
I started doing this, and it promotes the knowledge and use of OO. As of version 1.1.1, I am proud to present it to the people. Right now, MS Office CANNOT READ OO docs _AT ALL_. ***Isn't this a great advantage?*** In a few years, when MS Office finally can read and write OO docs, it will be too late or too expensive for people to pay for MS software just to read their OO documents. Office is its worst enemy. Too bloathed, too user un-friendly, too expensive, and the power that it has is not really a big deal for 90% of the users. It is just that it is the "default" application that converts a PC into a typewritter machine. People is surprised when I install a program without the need of a stupid number (as if a # were to stop illegal copying...), and to print PDF is a brilliant add-on. Very well done! Did I stay it is multi-plataform compatible too? This is a modern kind of software my friends.
Hint: Have you ever switched the IE icon with Mozilla's, and the MS Word icon with the one from OO and saw what happened?
After all, no IT dept runs a well oiled machine, as we all know.
With a free product, your own IT guys are the only resource if you encounter a bug or difficult error situation. If you're paying for a license, you have another level of support, i.e. the developer.
Have you ever tried to get support for a bug in MS Office? It's non-existant (the support that is... not the bugs, which definitely exist). You agreed to the EULA that the software was not fit for any purpose. And you PAID big-time to do so.
Too funny.
The Microsoft charity licensing is pretty nice. The non-profit I do IT for can get Office XP Pro at $62/seat.
Of course, these days, what with OO.o, Mozilla Mail, Trillian, Gimp, etc, there is becoming less and less of a need to purchase commercial software.
dinner: it's what's for beer
I work for a GE subsidiary and I took the initiative to load OpenOffice on my machine here at the office.
I have yet to have anyone complain about spreadsheets or text documents from my machine.
True, I will often have formatting trouble when I open documents that have a special MS feature enabled, but other that than that, OO.o is all I use.
I know visio isn't part of MS Office, but it might as well be. I have had to use it almost as much this semester as word, and visio was the only thing that prevented me from doing several large (15-50 page) papers in OOo. If they had a visio workalike, they (I'd) be set.
I believe that you guys are all missing the point. MS Office is probably free for companies like FN Manufacturing. As a matter of fact, everything is free to the guy holding the machine gun.
FN Manufacturing Website
Newsforge reports on why OpenOffice will never catch up to Microsoft Office. Worth a read!
"I compare [open source vs. non-open source] to science vs. witchcraft." linus
I feel like I've been poisoned. I used MS Word )and the other Office programs) for years. I recently dumped it in favor of OO. Mind you, I never used Word heavily, nor do I use OO heavily now.
But I still can'y (read: not patient enough to) figure out how to do some of the things I could easily do in Word. The arrangement of the menus and toolbars just feel foreign after growing accustomed to Microsoft's.
This isn't necessarily MIcrosoft's fault (I could just as easily have been addicted to an alternative program, just less likely due to Microsoft's dominance.) And it's not OO's faultm either. They shouldn't make their toolbars and menus look just like Microsoft's and limit their "innovation" (I hope MS hasn't trademarked that word!)
Nonetheless, my mind is poisoned and its taking some time (instead of effort) to purge myself.
You obviously have to look at the Total Cost. Microsoft Office works with Windows and everyone knows how to use it. Simple. You don't have to hire techies to setup your network if you don't have them. You don't have to retrain all of your employees either at VERY expensive classes or at the expensive of even more expensive productivity. Hell, it even costs money to THINK about switching to research which one costs more in the total cost.
Are you a moron? Have you ever held a job?
you could have a qualified admin who can do BOTH. I realize it's a difficult concept for most unix admins to grasp the concept of being proficient in more than one tool, but...there it is...
Which is more painful? Going to work or gouging your eye out with a spoon? Find out!
http://www.workorspoon.com
it's great if you're a programmer and want to tinker, or you just want to see what Open Office for OSX will look like in a year or two, fine, but if you actually have to use Office to, I don't know, prepare documents or something, you're better off sticking with the X11 version.
I know they have that disclaimer, but I've used Neooffice/J (the Java version) for work-related purposes for about three months now. The newest version is really stable and has a lot of Mac-specific bells and whistles including Mac fonts, traditional apple-key commands and shortcuts, the OS X mac print dialog, and much, much faster reaction time than the x11 version (in my experience).
I'd recommend giving it a try. For actual use. Really.
W
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
So, its the cost of changing that is important. However, if you were going to be starting a new 25,000 member org, OO would be a better choice. At that point, you don't have to worry about those "ancillary costs with a move," since you won't be moving.
Forward - thinking CIO's will look past that move cost, and also consider the security benefits.
...for what is about to become of him too. Isn't that just a wee bit disturbing?
I deployed OpenOffice to our call-center agents, in order to facilitate communication with them. This choice was mainly driven by cost: we couldn't afford the implementation of applications like SharePoint portal and didn't want to invest in license fees for the agents. Although most agents are not power users, they were very familiar with the MsOffice suite. Furthermore, they are allergic to change and don't do any effort to understand what could be the cause of that change, and how it can improve their work. Our biggest worries were that 1) our templates would have to be reworked, 2) the agents would lose all productivity while fighting with this new application, and 3) the application would stop working. These worries were not justified. 1) We had one template to rework, but it was already an approximation of a PDF document that was delivered without source by our supplier. The corporate templates were not used by the agents and they were mostly 'receivers' of the documents. Even if the memos became misaligned, they were still readable and agents didn't complain. 2) The agents required no training at all! As I said, they are light users and seldom produce documents. When they do, they use mostly the tools on the standard toolbar. The only issue was that we had to show them how to 'Save as...' when they had to share their documents with the back office. 3) The application was very stable. We were running it on Windows NT4.0 workstations (the ACD client runs only on NT...) and appart from a slow startup, the agents had no problem. In conclusion, I can recommend using OpenOffice for a targeted group, that doesn't produce many documents and communicates the documents internally.
Strange how any study posted remotely negative toward Linux is torn apart by Slashdotters, but any IBM or VA sponsored study that glorifies Linux is held up as "proof" and never, ever questioned.
I still remember that "Linux Most Breached OS on the Net" study, and all the dancing people did to avoid the study's conclusion.
I'm not so insecure that a fault in my OS is a chink in my ego. If a study says something bad about my OS, big fucking deal...I acknowledge it and patch or configure around the problem. I mean, it just doesn't piss me off the way it pisses off other people. Maybe it's just me. Same with console wars and whatever other religious debates take place...
I don't understand the problem with migration if you are using MS Windows. Damn it.
Migration means that you already have MS Office.
MS Office and OO.o are not mutually exclusive. You can have both installed on every Windows machine. So, old documents can be acessed with MS Office and new documents can be produced in OpenOffice.
Why do people think about trashing MS Office CDs and licenses when the subject is migration? You can have both for some time!
Stop bitching about costs. There are no such huge costs.
- It doesn't work for advanced Excel (read: The Finance Department).
The article was rather unclear as to this being a compatablity or functionality issue. In other words, is the problem OO cannot work with very complex Excel sheets or OO does not natively offer the required capablities.
- Support options are limited (read: DIY in a small company with limited/nonexistent IT resources to begin with).
I am not sure what you are trying to get across with this comment. Are you implying that Microsoft will supply code fixes/enhancements because you asked them?
- It takes as much as 10 seconds longer to open big docs sent in Office format (read: anything sent to you most people outside the company).
I can assure you, OO is infinitely more accurate and far faster when opening MS-Word files than Word is when opening OO documents. Please try it for yourself if you don't believe me.
And, let's overlook Outlook in the comparison. (Evolution, Thunderbird, et. al. do not offer the same functionality)
It has been my experience that Outlook and Evolution offer similar levels of functionality. However, Outlook does work much better as an Exchange client than does Evolution, even with Ximian Connector.
If VISTA is the answer, you didn't understand the question
"The only good windmill is a tilted windmill."
I was trying to email a friend a table from a webpage. We have to use outlook 2003 here at work due to exchange, but they let me run FireFox for a browser after I showed them it doesnt hurt anything.
Anyways, I would highlight the table, copy it, and paste it into a email and it would be totally unformatted. After about 5 tries I fired up IE and it worked perfectly.
So anyone know if its a problem with outlook or a problem with Firefox? I dont seem to notice this at home with FireFox/Thunderbird combo.
(cut and paste from email)
Microsoft SharePoint is Microsoft's take on a Wiki.
Search google for "wikiwiki"/"wiki wiki" for details.
Important: If you haven't delt with wikis before, I suggest taking some time to look at them. Very very interesting stuff. Very practical as an information collaboration and storage/search system.
The differences in Microsoft's approach are basically;
* Document-centric -- specifically MS Office document suite from Word through PowerPoint with very tight integration with the FrontPage way of page design.
* Good for checking or logging existing documents into the system.
* Good for people who basically want a filing cabnet for Microsoft Office documents.
These good points cause problems that are not usually an issue with other Wikis;
* SharePoint is not easy or practical to use if the primary tasks involve;
+ Colaboration in general.
+ Searching existing data.
+ Editing/creating links and subdocuments.
+ Auditing.
IF you deal with folks where Microsoft lock-in is perfectly fine (as SharePoint inceases lock-in), and the negitive parts of the software are also not concerns, go for it. Otherwise, treat it like any other Wiki and decide from the list of available ones not just this one brand.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Has anyone considered making an OpenOffice training video and releasing it on a freely-distributable CD image? If I ever used either of these programs for more than plain text I'd consider doing it. What software would you need to capture the screen video (showing new users where commonly used things are in menus, or walking through and interactive Basics of OOo program)? Just a thought. It'd only have to be done once unless the basic functions changed in newer versions.
And yes, I know there is Documentation and Help files, but some people just want to be spoon-fed or walked-through.
Lets not forget that at the moment it might be less functional, but you will be able to upgrade for free. The more people use and contribute to Open Office the better it becomes.
The fact is that if those individuals were forced to pay 200 Dollars/Euros/Pounds for MS Office, I am sure all of them would seriously look at the additional features that MS Office provides over OpenOffice.org and decide then whether or not they are worth that money.
I am not defending OOO's "inferiority" to MS Office, the fact is that it is purely a matter of perception - I personally, for example, do not embed one document within another or use VB programming - therefore OOO's feature-set is perfectly adequate for me and the only problem I have with it is importing some documents that others have created with MS Office.
Likewise, if MS Office is the accepted benchmark for office packages currently, then I hope that OOO evolves to the point where that benchmark is challenged purely on the basus of document compatibility and useful features.
However, everyone should remember that MS Office is a commercial package that most people run illegally. Any comparison should take cost of the respective products into account and whether it is worth buying MS Office purely because of the extra features it has over OOO.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Even though style can be used in Microsoft Word, I find that in OO it's a sort of mandated policy. OO encourages you to, out of the box, use styles to define everything. It goes along with CSS web standards. Structure your data first, then style it up. OO forces you do that.
I find that when I get people using the stylelist they are more effective presenters, writers, motivators, can sell their ideas better, and waste less time reusing old documents for new purposes. They sat down and took the time to structure their thoughts.
If they want extra space around all Paragraphcs, bullets, headers (level1-levelx), fonts, backgrounds, anything you can think of, they just click it in their style dialog.
Makes re-using proposals a breeze. Change some content, one click, update table of contents, and bam - new proposal made specifically for that special client.
I find MS Word aids you in being sloppy in the short run. You want a heading, click "bold" change text size, etc. A lot of important documents are rendered un-reusable via this method. I've watched people literally spend all afternoon, changing font sizes, indents, bullets, just because the boss wanted a different look.
Get people on OO and they'll be more effective. It's a no-brainer.
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
Not prime-time ready, but it's getting there... (OpenGroupware). It's getting built on much better foundations than Microsoft's, of course.
For the time being, if you want a solution that works now and if you don't mind that it's not so closely integrated to your Office apps, you might consider Plone.
It doesn't sound cheap to me.
100,000 employees X 67$ = $6.7 million bucks
And that is the approximate size of the company I work at. And I don't use any of MS Office advanced features.
People upgrading from previous versions of MS Office can usually use a new one without need for suport. People migrating from MS Office to OO will need some support.
The vast majority of people outside a company are going to send Word, not OO documents.
I'll beg to differ with you on the Ximian experience, but it just may be my particular way of using each product.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
the one thing that openoffice (or linux desktop) lacks is a good visio clone. sure there's kivio, and openoffice draw, but there are some basic functions that arent there. for instance, the technical 'stencils' arent really complete, especially electrical ones. and i cant even rotate the shapes that i draw. if i want have a gate in my drawing, i want to be able to rotate it.
it'd be great if there's grammar check too...
spell check is there though, but not grammar check
my blog
-Lucas
We've had the same slight issues here - OpenOffice.org is a little slower on the load, but other then that, it's doing a great job.
What was great is the XML file format - it allowed us to generate alot of our documents automatically, and have them converted to PDF for print, or to a Writer document for editing/quoting. It makes it really easy to generate a nice doc from a database with only a few backend apps/scripts.
While Benincasa estimates that FN Manufacturing would pay as much as $400 per seat for Microsoft Office 2003, Duke Energy's volume licensing agreement would make an upgrade to the latest Microsoft Office suite much less expensive, said Kevin Wilson, product line manager of desktop hardware at Duke Energy and an eWEEK Corporate Partner.
Total bullshit. I used to work for another, bigger entergy (opps, I just named it) company. They had zero training for and very poor understanding of M$ junk. Every "upgrade" broke formating worse than the conversion to OO does and caused massive compatibility headaches of the sort people like to say is a reason to avoid free software.
You claim:
At large corporations, smooth 2-way compatibility with MS Office is a must have and OO.o is not there yet.
I'd say M$ Office has a long way to go as well but I've had zero problems with other word processors. Star Office, Open Office, Word Perfect all do a better job between versions, themselves and Microsoft Office.
A day will come when a Fortune 500 company makes the jump. It will look impressive, but it will just be the culmination of years of work by others on OO.o
It is always this way with big dumb companies.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You're absolutely right. You can't get anything good for free. Just look at Apache. It's free and it's a piece of crap! I'd never use it for any of my web hosting. And it's a good thing not many other people do either, or it'd just take down the whole internet.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
Since I've been out working in the real world for a few years now, I've realized something that wasn't apparent to me at first: one of your dollars != one of your company's dollars. If you truly work at an organization with 100,000 employees, $6.7 million is pocket change.
Geez, people treat .DOC as if it's some sort of Mecca of compatibility. Truth: It SUCKS and it's BROKEN. I mean, everything's cool, as long as you don't go back too many versions, or use the wrong copy of Works, right?
Don't forget these other show stoppers:
Microsoft formats are a Byzantine mess that work only if nothing at all changes. It's almost as bad as the bad old days of never having a hope to read anything written on a different computer.
I can contrast this with moving work from Star Office 5.2 to 6.0 and OO on three different distributions. They looked the same everywhere I took them. PDF printing, of course, looks the same regardless of OS used and I've printed Star and Open Office pdfs on scores of computers. The only thing that's ever changed has been the quality and resolution of the printer.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The article states in the Cons for OO.o:
.docs better than MSOffice 2003 (something that I suspected for some time) yet it is viewed as worse than MSOffice for its file compatibility? I would imagine that this means that OO.o doesn't handle MSOffice 2003 documents as well as MSOffice 2003 does ... but that isn't quite fair. I wonder how well MSOffice 2003 does with OO.o's documents in OO.o's native format?
" File-format compatibility issues Although OpenOffice.org does a good job of handling Microsoft Office file formats, small formatting inconsistencies will require reworking of complex documents."
Yet in the page before it states:
"In general, though, of the OpenOffice.org applications we evaluated, Writer presented the fewest file-format-compatibility problems."
So OO.o imports old MSOffice 97 and 2000
Others have already argued against your assumption on OOo having worse support in practice. However, there's also a more "corporate-friendly" approach. There are actual companies that sell you bags of warm fuzzy feeling; ie. systems that contains OOo or StarOffice, and which IS supported by professional support organization. Most notably Sun Microsystems does that with their JDS Linux distribution, but others (Novell+SuSE, RedHat) as well.
The reality is that lost productivity from incompatibilities with MS Office will cost more for your company if there is any need to send/receive document with other comapnies who use MS Office. Our company is trying out MS Office, and most people using it bitch about the compatibility problems.
BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP
Come on, keep backing up.
BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP
OK, keep coming
BEEEP BEEEP BEEP
More
BEEEEP BEEEP BEEEEP
OK, you are almost halfway now. Boy, you sure are far up Microsoft's ass.
If a company cannot survive without Microsoft Office, then they might as well pack up and go home.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I am a freelance writer, so I'm naturally interested in word processing and free things.
.doc format so that they can be easily read by editing and layout software. Does anyone know if these programs support Open Office?
Now, most of the time, my editors request that I send them my articles in
On a related note, does anyone know if there's an OSS equivalent of Quark or Pagemaker?
I found NeoOffice/J and put it on my MAC. I have no speed problems whatsoever, it absolutely screams.
It loads fast, converts large documents before my finger is off the key.
I think there is no performance problems whatsoever on my DUAL 2 Gig G5 Mac.
Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Customers, for example.
OO can't read all MS docs; therefore OO can not completely eliminate MS software unless you only get docs from other OO users, an impossible restriction in most jobs.
For example, I often get MS docs from customers and management, and sometimes they use features OO does not understand [certain kinds of inserts become invisible, for example].
"Tell them to not do that" is an unacceptable response. I have to deal with it.
So, even though I my main computer runs Linux, I ALSO keep a Windows box with Outlook and Office XP 2003, just to read the occasional MS doc which OO doesn't like. To be truthful, I also need Outlook to deal with our corporate Exchange server [I do use Evolution+Connector but it is too unreliable to depend on exclusively]. I put up with this mess so I can use Linux; but it would be crazy to expect non-hackers to get work done this way.
It's also expensive, but what't the alternative?
I suspect we'll be seeing a Slashdot posting soon for it?
:)
"G4 Cube turned into circular table saw"
and that it is treated as such is a symptom of the screwed up monopoly we live in. As far as I can tell according to this article the one and only pro M$ office has is compatibility with itself, barring advanced users of excel who are boardering on needing real statistical software and not just a spread sheet.
Not really making me want to buy MS Office.
I suspect that the fish Gully is packing around is a Red Herring.
OpenOffice loads most of our documents perfectly.
I've found the same doing a similar analysis as these guys. But the problem is that word most. When there are a few hundred going in and out per day, even a few ends up being too many.
Seems to me that OOo still wants me to perform an eleven-step process to satisfy a basic usability requirement for applications on current versions of Microsoft Windows.
Use Evolution instead of Outlook? Bewa
The problem is not in Office 97.
The defect is in Office 2K3. This is the product which should be changed to have the option to save in 97 doc format, just like Ooo does it when we choose differently from the default sxw.
They are trying a lock-in -- again!
It should be obvious by now, but they are trying to get the money from people who do not need 2K3!!! Anyone using the "free" converters is helping them.
And to anyone saying the 2K3 format is better, I say: let's have it open, then! Prove this is not about lock-in. Just prove me wrong, it's easy!
And people wonder why there are bugs in Word which were there in Word 97 and still haven't been fixed.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
We are starting to see good moves in this direction, Mozilla is better than IE, Eclipse rocks. But lots of the other stuff is still playing catch-up.
Theres lots of things which could easily be improved. Get an intelegable help system (i've yet to find anything useful in the MS help). Get some good looking chart. Major fix needed for Excel as its way behind the capabilities of the serious numeric programs. Work on some better DTP like features in Word (personal fav would be a good way to print A5 booklets).
The open source movement does have a lot going for it, lots more eyes, brains and ears. What are the features which bug you, thats where to target.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
I've yet to see a resume format that Rich Text Format could not handle with ease. And Word can even open them! And if the latest copy of Word can't, Wordpad can.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Why is it always assumed that if it doesn't open Office documents PERFECTLY, it's incompatible, and if it isn't EXACTLY the same as office, it's not user friendly?
First of all, even if it doesn't open all Office documents perfectly, it does a pretty damn good job of it. At least it opens them in the first place. MS Office can't open OpenOffice files at all and there is no real excuse for it not to, the standard is out there for anyone to use. They are just too lazy/greedy to bother. Microsoft is all about "choice", as long as you choose them of course.
As for "User Friendliness", that is a very subjective thing. "User Difference" is more the case. I personally like the way OO works far better than the way MSO works, especially the equation editor and position of images/tables/whatever-else-you-might-embed. If you take someone who has used neither, it's a toss-up which one they would prefer. The only time MSO is guaranteed to be considered more "user friendly" is when the user has used MSO all their life, or it has a feature that OO doesn't.
Software Assurance is only available with Microsoft volume license programs. With Software Assurance you pay an additional 50% up-front and receive all upgrades to the licensed product for two years. You do not automatically receive the upgrades, but instead must order the upgrade media (about $35 per set) when it becomes available.
You say you save 50% off the retail price. At distribution there's a $10 difference between Office 2003 Standard Retail and Open License Program licenses (no Software Assurance). For 100+, that difference widens to about $30 per license.
Software Assurance ADDS 50% to the purchase price. This is only slightly higher than the generally-accepted 20% annual maintenance and support, but unfortunately Software Assurance does not add any support. Also, you need to buy the installation media (about $30) for new versions.
--- A man with a briefcase can steal more money, than any man with a gun. [Don Henley]
From the article: "It pains me to have to spend money for features and functions most of my end users won't even begin to need."
With MS Office, all those $$$ are not going towards "paying for features you don't need". With 80% profit margins on Office, most of those $$$ are not paying for any features at all, they're paying for filling up Microsoft's coffers (i.e. their $50+ billion cash reserves that make them so 'virtually unsinkable' and allow them to pay huge fines for crimes they commit as 'part of doing business'. Those cash reserves are enough to theoretically run MS for five years with zero income, and allow them to sink huge losses on products like X-BOX to gain market lead.)
Microsoft could slash MS Office prices by a factor of 4 and still make far more profit than would be considered obscene at most normal companies - AND you'd still be able to get ALL those "unneeded features" for that much lower price.
My other UID is three digits.
No, actually, the company's dollar is the same as your dollar. The fact that you don't think that it is means that your company has done a poor job educating you about your responsibilities as an employee and team player. It is possible to save millions for your company, millions that go directly to its bottom line, if you behave responsibly, purchase carefully, and, in general, treat the company's money as though it were your own -- and everyone around you does the same.
You will understand this someday if you start your own business. In the meantime, you are making sourcing consultants rich (who will walk through the door and point out abuses, such as $3 light bulbs, $700 Palm Pilots, and other purchasing stupidities), and you are one of the many termites eating away at the foundation of your enterprise.
Now, you may be someone who disagrees fundamentally with the notion that a company should be allowed to make a profit. In that case, you're behaving perfectly rationally. Spend away! Drive the thing into bankruptcy! Viva la Revolucion! Etcetera!!
No matter how large your company is, $67 per seat isn't very much, compared to the cost of a computer, monitor, desk, phone line, and salary.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
That first paragraph is cute and all, but you forget one important point: no one gives a shit. The good old days of profit sharing are gone, and no one really cares about saving a company money if it means that a) you're getting paid and b) the company isn't going out of business.
I'm not poorly educated, just disillusioned.
My problems with OOo:
1. No native OS X port.
2. No reveal codes.
If OOo had EITHER of those two things, I would use it. But it has neither and as a result, I use TeXShop (yet to learn LyX) for anything official or formal, and TextEdit for the rest. But then, I've never used MS office, it was always WordPerfect (and I am longing for a Mac/Linux version).
Ah, businesses reclaim GST, and your exchange rate is whack. You are ignoring state taxes in the US, so I think it is reasonable to ignore the GST.
The real equivalent price is 829*10/11*0.7347
ie $553
And I think you can do much better than buying from Harris
Very dark, very unhappy thoughts. Sounds like you would be much happier working somewhere else? Best wishes to you, my friend. I hope things improve for you.
So, the best thing to use with Microsoft's email server is Microsoft's email client? Whoa, that's pretty insightful.
On a related note however, Evolution is a delight to use with Exchange and IMAP mail, the only features missing are being able to *send* meeting requests, and to use the Global Address list. I actually prefer Evolution's Meeting Request interface when recieving meeting requests from Outlook users.
""" ...generally trained to handle this.
"""
Yes, and their official training and the official party line of Microsoft's PSS is 'We don't do user training, we don't do how-tos'
And yes, I do know, because I *did* use to do PSS.
Most (though not all) companies do have in-house or contracted technical support for user error. Paying MS or any other technical company a glob of money for user error is a huge waste of money. You pay MS or other technical companies for the non-user error technical support like bug reporting, bug fixing, etc. The fact is, though, you really shouldn't have to pay to report or help fix a bug that is the fault of another company. It'd be like finding defects in all the cars you sell and paying the manufacturer to get them fixed.
The only advantage paying a company has, innately, over getting equivalent software for free is when a bug is discovered there's possible motivation for the company to fix the bug so the user might be inclined to buy future versions. However, the only way that works is if the *buyer* actually pays attention to bugs, notices they're not being fixed, and then proceeds to buying from someone else. If there are no buyable alternatives, the next best thing would be to take something that's free and turning the money that would have went to buying software into improvements to the free thing.
So, the best step at the moment would seem for most MS Office buyers, if they're actually seeing problems, to go first to Wordperfect or StarOffice. But technical support for user error is still something that'll be handled in-house.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
WTF?!? "Windows just works."??? You must be using a different Windows than the 5 or so versions I've tried.
It's true that you don't have to decipher manual pages: since the documentation is hopeless, if you can't figure it out without manuals, you're stuck. But "no configuring bullshit"?? I've spent months of my life that I'll never get back chasing down weird Windows configuration problems. Have you ever tried to hook a Windows box to a network, for example?
Of course, all this is before the frequent crashes. None of my 5 Linux boxes have crashed in over two years. My wife's Windows 98, then 2K, then XP Pro box has crashed weekly through all of these incarnations.
"Windows just works." IHBT.
On the other hand, it's still profit that has to be made somehow.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
In Soviet California, Sun thinsk StarOffice kill you!
(Wow, this sucks. Please mod it down.)
Type, type, type, get to bottom of screen.
JUMP
What the. . ?
Blink.
Re-Acquire cursor.
-My document has suddenly been advanced, not one line, but five lines for no reason other than I happened to be typing near the bottom of the page. Some smart alec programmer thinks that it's fun to make my eyes go jiggy in the name of. . . What? He thinks I'm going to get confused if I have to use scroll keys to advance my document all by myself? If you can jump me ahead five lines and do it in such a way as to not rip my attention away from the cursor, then that's great. But you CAN'T. Maybe this is because my brain is broken. Or maybe it's because people who program word processors don't also have to use them for a living, because they're programmers!!! As I see it, anybody who doesn't have a problem with this maddening 'feature' is either a more evolved human than me, or is somebody who doesn't use a word processor for a living.
And you can't turn it off! This 'jump ahead 5 lines feature' is hard-coded into the program! Jeez! A radio button was too much to ask for? --And this 'feature' is not just in Open Office. Nooo. Lots of word processors provide this back-asswards idea of convenience.
I'm currently using Abiword. Even though it has its little quirks and faults and imperfections, it doesn't try to user-friendly me into the ground. I'm a grown up, and I bloody know how to page advance all on my own, thank you very much!
-FL
I secretly converted my mom (age 59) to OO.o during Christmas... She has not noticed yet!
Only thing I did was point her Office Icons to the corresponding OO.o app. (Microsft Word icon opens OO.o Writer), and have Writer save to *.doc, and Calc save to *.xls formats by default.
I'm thinking of telling her, but I might not!
"Have you, and IT person, ever called the MS helpline? If so, were you able to get an answer...?" Called once about a bug with sync. delays with Outlook 2000 and IMAP servers causing Outlook to hang. Problem finally fixed in Office2k - SP3. By this time I had already converted 90% of my office to Mozilla! Thanks Microsoft for not fixing compatibility issues in your software. Can you guess what finger I'm holding up?
the document viewers actually suck really really hard. They are very unfriendly have a habit of choking for no reason.
It looks like MS sabotaged them to nudge people into buying Office, but you can't rule out genuine bugs
(it is MS after all), but its just too hinky to be useful..
Ok, I might not be the best writer in the world - I might not even be in the top 1/2. If you're writing for a magazine, I would hope you have better transition paragraphs than those I wrote in high school papers.
If I am going to read your magazine (re: infotainment) I would hope that I would have an entertaining read while I drew out information.
Gaaaah! Painful words, make stop!
Too right. The software purchasing decisions of the typical medium to large company are atrocious. The worst case I saw was a defence contractor that spent more than a million dollars in a year on a support contract that had four support calls for the entire year (telephone, not site visits) with none successfully resolved.
It takes talent to spend a million dollars on nothing.
I have been on the client end of hundreds of software support contracts. Anybody who says support contracts are worthwhile are either incompetent (and need their useless security blanket) or are in software marketting (and want the free money that software support contracts give).
I believe Office 97 and below are no longer supported. Therefore no future patches.
f h; en-us;LifeOfficeFam
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=
Will office 97 be vulnerable to future bugs????
Will Microsoft release a patch for it if it is? I believe the answer is No.
Last patch was:
Microsoft Security Bulletin MS03-050
Vulnerability in Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel Could Allow Arbitrary Code to Run (831527)
Issued: November 11, 2003
Support ended: 16-Jan-2004
However in all fairness, most Microsoft Office users are probably running unpatched (to current) anyway.
Who will guard the guards?
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*** Please move on to another topic ***
I always send my resume in PDF. I used to send it in .doc format, until some headhunter gave my resume to a company. When the hiring company contacted me directly, it soon became clear the headhunter changed a lot of stuff to make me look better so I would get the job through his office. I sent the company the PDF of my resume, we talked a little more and we connected... I don't work there now, cause I just didn't make the final cut (3 jobs out of 380 applicants), but the company was far more impressed with my original resume than the altered one. I contacted the headhunter and politely asked him not to spread incorrect information about me and asked him to delete me from their database. .doc (1 company specifically asked for .doc and I didn't give in :)) and I explained my reasons. They all accepted this, and even said that they didn't realise that these things could happen. Anyway, using PDF does make you stand out, but sometimes this can work out positively. For the record, I'm employed now, and I never sent in a resume, I was hired on reference alone, which I think is a bit ironic.
Since then I have applied for 3 jobs, and indeed all people asked me why I sent in a PDF instead of a
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
Ryanw,
You obviously don't use more than one version of Word. Because if you did - you would know that each version of word is not compatible with itself - let alone some bug fixes of the same version.
Word compatibility is a crock. Most probably spread by the same people that think Coca-Cola is the only decent cola drink (think "keeping up with the Jones'").
On the other hand, the lack of a decent spell check, and the fact that the letters move slightly when you scroll the screen (yes, they slightly jump) would be acceptable criticism - but this continual "bullshit" compatibility myth drives me nuts.
Why is the world so in love with wysiwyg word processors? They're simply awful. Slow, confusing, labyrinthine beasts which usually produce inconsistent, poorly formatted documents.
I don't want to waste time selecting bolds and font sizes and aligning tabs and battling clippy.
I want to type words in to a computer, using the editor I want to use and a typeface and colour scheme suited for a computer screen, then have those words come out of the printer properly formatted in a professional, readable, predictable way.
I don't want to either spend an hour tidying a document up after I've written it, or distribute documents in the horrible, amateurish jumble of spacings, fonts, weights and sizes that most people seem happy to turn out.
So, I use TeX, and my docs get written more quickly and look better than your OOo/Word/KWrite ones. As I only have to think about what I'm writing, not how to lay it out, the content of my document is quite possibly better as well.
And don't give me the "it's too hard" argument. You could train someone to use a simple text editor and TeX just as quickly as you could train them to use Word for most purposes. I'm no kind of TeX guru at all, but for 95% of what I write there's a ten line preamble and a few \section tags. Then I have a copy of OOo around for the 5% of stuff TeX isn't suited to.
I'm more hopeful by colinux where one has a fighting chance of introducing non-MS components (PHP, MySQL, Apache) and running them in tandem with MS office as needed.
coLinux is a parallel OS; it doesn't run anything native, you have to log into it over ssh or an X server.
If you want to run things like PHP on Windows, you should either be using the native ports where available, or Cygwin. CoLinux is great for developers, but it's not going to work for end users any time soon.
Actually, the place that disillusioned me has recently become my former employer. So things are looking up. But thanks for the good wishes. :-)
One way to erode the closed .doc format strangle hold is to get your government to specify using only published standards for its file formats.
All of these are neglecting to take the cost of all the 'extras' that you actually need to run M$ OFfice 2003 and the per-user licenses for those services. Then there are the DRM headaches.
They are only using one of the most widely used bug tracking systems, especially for open source projects.
If I can get a large organization of mostly non-technical people (the National Office, that is, not the entire association -- yet!) to learn and use Bugzilla with little to no pain, then I have faith that a well-dispositioned and patient Slashdot user can certainly figure it out in a few minutes.
@HbFyo0$k8 tH!$
My comments to the review is:
q -conce pt.html/ OOo_2_0 _timetable.htmlh tmlj ect_is sues.htmlw w/mail _list.htmld ex.htmlc t/www/cont ributing.html#donating and others.
The review is considered as neutral and good.
Yes Openoffice.org 1.1.1 still have some problems
1. Openoffice.org 1.1.1 considered as slow. But we will fix this on Openoffice.org 2.0
2. Yes, Openoffice.org still have compatibility problems. but many of them will be fixed in Openoffice.org 2.0. so we will see that Openoffice.org will open and save almost smooth enough.
3. It will need training and some effort to move to Openoffice.org.
but Openoffice.org 2.0 will make it smoother.
4. Regarding support. there is some options: you can ask in users@openoffice.org and you will find the answer very quick compared to if
you contact your technical support of commercial software.
Sun also offering free support for OpenOffice.org users.
5. If the test/evaluations target is for 2005 I suggest the evaluator test Openoffice.org 1.1.1 and also look at the 2.0 version Q concept and time table. it will change the decissions I believe. because it already contain much better situations compared to 1.1.1 and it will be ready in January 2005.
6. To all Openoffice.org lovers, don't be too proud about Openoffice.org, we still have some problems which we need to solve. some of them already known and also on progress for solving it.
but some others maybe not yet know. we need your participations to reports any issue. and also good if you can help solve it.
Openoffice.org 2.0 Q concept here
http://development.openoffice.org/releases/
Openoffice.org 2.0 time table
http://development.openoffice.org/releases
if you want to test current Openoffice.org 2.0 series build you can check it here (beware this is still developer release, read the release notes)
http://download.openoffice.org/680/index.
If you have time to help Openoffice.org
- If you found any problems please report it here
http://qa.openoffice.org/issue_handling/pro
(don't just wait the problems solved, by submitting the bugs you will help make next Openoffice.org better, and wait for the next release it maybe will include the fix for your problems)
- If you are a developer you also can help Openoffice.org to be the real good office suite
look at some mailing list here
http://development.openoffice.org/project/w
here is the pages for developers.
http://development.openoffice.org/in
- If you are not a developer but still want to help. there is still many things you can do, such as join the QA http://qa.openoffice.org/index.html or marketting, donating
http://development.openoffice.org/proje