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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."
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).
Or you could download it. What's the educational discount for, anyway? Knock 50 cents off a preprinted CD?
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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.
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!
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...
I wasn't aware that a free product was ever provided at an educational discount. That just seems wrong. However a day after netscape released netscape for free again, the campus bookstore was still selling it for an educational discount of $50. It was funny then, but it was even funnier 3 years later when it was still being offered at that price.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
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.
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.
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
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..
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
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...
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.
Yes, you can get better pricing; this is just intended to give people a ballpark idea of the licensing costs involved (excluding the cost of tracking and managing licenses down the road). With these licenses you can also run Office 2K2 (XP) or Office 2K instead of 2K3 on the machine(s) in question.
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It's hard to turn off Clippy? Really?
Just click on him, hit "Options" in the dialog box he brings up, uncheck the "Use Office Assistant" box and Clippy dies a quick, painless death. Not exactly "digging through menus trying to disable him".
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
I love using Open Office! The only thing I miss is that it doesn't offer the Flescher-Kinkaid garde level scale in its word count feature - being a pre-service teacher, I often use it to determine if test items or other text written for kid's assignments is way to easy or dificult. OO is great - and I have never had any of these Power Point/Word compatibility problems, I am always sending and exchanging files with MS Office users.
I agree that OOo on Mac is pretty painful. But for some odd reason, I keep using it instead of OfficeX. If it *really* bothers you that much, you can try one of the builds at:
http://www.neooffice.org/
It's semi-beta stuff, but it's supposed to be all of OpenOffice without X11.
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Until OO is 100% comptible with MSOffice, it will not be likely a small business would switch to it.
But there's the problem -- because MS Office file formats are proprietary and can change at any time, OpenOffice (and other third-party apps for that matter) will probably never be "100% compatible" with MS Office. This is why we need open standards.
See here for the outline of a talk that one of my college professors gave a couple years back regarding this.
Totally agree
I have a small company and really TRIED to switch to OO. That's why I gave up:
- lack of comprehensible, user-friendly database. Sure, you can hire a MySQL expert, but it is cheaper to buy MSAccess. And for any business, it's not wordprocessing that counts, it's databases!
- presentations one can create are quite nice, if not for one thing.... I would NEVER show then to any client. ONE world-lack of antialising makes any drawing/schema look totally unprofessional and amateurish. I'd rather show them a sequence of JPGs instead. - any post-creation work on a document is a mess. Notes are just supersmall yellow rectangles that you can't see when you review something, and the whole logic of reviewing is in its infancy.
Do not misunderstand me, both OO and StarOffice are great products. But for businesses where efficiency is the key and the OS you run is quite irrelevant, every single piece of functionality is a very valuable asset.
http://www.automatiq.se
comparing ms word, StarOffice and other word processing software, finding out, that ms word was almost unusable in comparison.
In Office 2000 SP2+, he comes back on next time you restart Office. I'm thinking this is one of those "features" that Microsoft added to make you upgrade.
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I use Impress in OO quite regularly, don't know what you're talking about, because I use pgup and pgdn all the time to navigate between slides. In fact, just to make sure I'm not crazy, I just tried it, and it pgup and pgdn work just fine to switch between slides.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
What about the hidden cost of migraine that the office helper generates.
Not to mention all these people implying that there is a big cost in migration. To the best of my knowledge, two out of ten people will ever realize that you actually changed their office suite. So far the the remaining two are the ones that are happy about the text auto completion in OpenOffice.
Another issue is that while MS Office is the standard and all that. I've never seen a stranger mix of widgets than I got trying to run Office 2003 on a Window XP and it gets totaly unusable if you will test it on a 2003 server. This MS claim of having one platform and a standard interface is only true if you only install one, the first.
Actually, Office 2003 Basic Edition doesn't have PowerPoint, just Word/Excel/Outlook. Your point about Outlook being in all editions still holds, and Office 2003 Basic is an OEM edition, so you can't find it on store shelves.
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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.
"Cost to install is not the only cost. 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."
Err, let's correct this one right here, and anyone else who's thinking that openoffice is unsupported, could you please subscribe to users@openoffice.org for a couple of days to see the quality of questions and responses being given to anyone who asks for help.
These are developers answering questions, and there are several people who work 40 hours per week answering openoffice support questions. There is absolutely nothing cheapskate about the OpenOffice support.
I actually have once. When they wanted me to pay for support to submit a bug, I laughed at the guy and hung up.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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.
I also miss having an equivelant to the Excel solver utility, which can optimize hundreds of variables at once to minimize/maximize a result.
Whoa! You can't be serious. If you have to optimize something with hundreds of variables, you should look into real programs to do the task. To be frank, results from excel solver are shit. Optimization is a large field of applied mathematics and can't be reduced to MS Excel click-through feature. See for example this and this.
--
Jari
Have you ever had a problem with Microsoft products?
Have you ever gotten satisfaction from Microsoft?
How about that Word document that has lots of section breaks, headers and footers, excel and PowerPoint embedded objects, and is about 100 pages long? That darn thing always locks up Word. The solution from Microsoft is to break up the document into smaller documents.
I could have told you that solution without waiting on the help line forever!
Tons of things do not work correctly in Microsoft Office. More things are very counter-intuitive. Excel's number-formatted-as-text is a great one.
Retraining? I don't see it.
Most users can barely use Word as it is. They click here, then click there, type a little, get confused and come to me for help. They never bother to click on 'Help' and figure out their problem themselves.
Open Office menus are similar, common shortcut keys are almost identical and the interface is so similar, many users do not know the difference. I can take any one of our employees and sit them down behind Open Office and have them producing Word documents immediately.
There is no training cost, because they were never trained on Word either!
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- I live the greatest adventure anyone could possibly desire. - Tosk the Hunted
- 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
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.
I have one version of office. I paid it. It is 97. And it cannot open recent word documents. So saying M$ as no migration cost is PURE BULLSHIT.
Go visit the evil empire and download the free converter for Office '97 to open up Office 2k3 files.
In addition, you might want to check out the other free downloads available for Office '97.
For those of us who haven't purchased MS Office yet occasionally need to read MS Office documents, there is always the free MS Office document viewers if Open Office.org doesn't do the trick.
Not only is OO 1.1.1 free, but so will be OO 2.0.
OO 1.1.1 is less complete than Office 2003 and using OO 1.1.1 is a question of whether OO 1.1.1 satisifes the needs of that particular user.
I'm using OO 680 milestone 32 from late March which is from the development branch that will become OO 2.0. It is significantly better than OO 1.1.1 with regard to usuability, stability and importing external formats. OO 2.0 will be far more complete than OO 1.1.1 and be a far more serious candidate to replace Office 97 and Office 2003.
I'd suggest anyone considering switching from Office 97 to OO 1.1.1 or to Office 2003 to hold off until OO 2.0.
Have you, and IT person, ever called the MS helpline? If so, were you able to get an answer?
Sure...a few times. This last time, it was an issue regarding the registry, and a tool from MS to migrate into AD. A hive on the Registry was, due to this tool, made read only. A particular Outlook application we were building needed user access to this hive.
So, we ended up having 4 tier 2/3 MS guys (AD, Office, Win2000) on the phone for almost 2 full days. Way more cost to MS than the $250 we paid for the support call. I found them helpful, knowledgeable, and we got the answer in the end.
Years ago, we had a programming issue in Visual FoxPro. "How do we do X?" The MS guy ended up saying, "No, it can't be done that way"
Two days later, we called him back and said "Hey...here's how you do it"
and that it is treated as such is a symptom of the screwed up monopoly we live in. As far as I can tell according to this article the one and only pro M$ 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.
>Go visit the evil empire and download the free converter for Office '97 to open up Office 2k3 files.
This would be great if it worked for windows versions prior win2000. Bullshit argument holds.
The free Microsoft Word viewer hasn't been updated in years, and it can have problems opening the docs produced by newer versions of Word. If you don't believe me, go to the MS and download some of the docs and try to open them. The last three times I had the unfortunate pleasure of trying to get something from them, the formating in the Word viewer was very messed up.
Wish they would keep putting things out in PDF format they made on a Mac like they did for the OpenOffice.org comparison.
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]
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.
Why this was modded insightful I don't know.
From the save as dropdown in Word 2003:
Word Document (*.doc)
XML Document (*.xml)
Single File Web Page (*.mht)
5 more formats and then..
Word 97-2003 & 6.0/95 - RTF (*.doc)
Works 6.0 - 7.0 (*.wps)
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
One of them will allow you to create a pdf file from any document since it acts like a printer (Much like Adobe's). Check out PDF995.
Why check out adware when you can do this just as well for free with vanilla Ghostscript and RedMon?