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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."
One of them is FREE. The other is what, $200+?
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
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
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.
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.
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)
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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.
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.
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 know people have posted before have given specific examples of problems, but personally the only problems I've had between MS document formats and OO.org are with tables, and even then only occasionally. Maybe that's because I'm only working with Office 2000, and avoid XP 2000 and 2003 like the plague.
BTW, it's kind of hard for OO.org to be compatible with a format which is completely closed. I think it's a marvel it works at all!
The only way it will be completely perfect is if Microsoft tells OO.org how to. And that'll never happen, because MS will want money for it.
Do you know of a way it's possible for OO.org to improve the compatibility?
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?
How often do you email an EDITABLE document to someone, have them edit it, then send it back?
.DOC, whether it's justified or not, just because they don't know any better. Last time I was looking for a job, most emailable job application required a resume in .DOC format. If you send PDFs instead, people will plain and simply dismiss your application immediately, as someone who don't want to follow the rules.
Well, I do often enough that it's a big problem for me. But that's not even the problem. The problem is the rest of the world insisting on
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The best part of the lightbulb (as opposed to clippy) is that it stays out of your way and is trivially turned off. In fact, it doesn't bother me enough to turn it off, unlike Clippy, who makes me gnash my teeth in rage and almost crumple my mouse as I try to find a way to disable it. Note that clippy has no "Shut the hell up and leave me alone" option in his stupid little dialoge - you have to sit there looking at him while you dig through menus trying to disable him.
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!
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..?
I dont think you can compare a complete package without including what comes with it. Doesnt that skew the results somewhat?
Thank you for the explanation of that joke. In my experience, explaining a joke usually makes it TWICE as funny.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
My resume exists in .doc .pdf .html and .php (dont ask it was a april fools day joke using mysql).
I always send .doc and .pdf and explain why and let them know I prefer them to view the pdf because i can make sure it looks the way I wanted it to look. (its an accepted fact that ms office doesn't always look the same in different versions.)
It landed my my current postion fairly well. Hell, i know a few designer friends who's resume is a flash program on a buisness card cd. Looks very awesome.
I guess it depends on the job, some companys want smart creative people, others want drones. If you know the job wants a drone, and you need a job, be a drone.
Whoa. Don't hurt yourself jumping to conclusions. It was your assertion, not an established fact, that so many advanced features are lacking in OO.org that a finance department couldn't function. From the article, however,
and Finally, Note that there is no mention of impossibility or the apocalypse.If there were a company with ... no contact with the outside world....
Again, no users cited this as a major issue. Support was also a con, but given the similarity of the apps and the general ease with which the users transitioned, it didn't appear to be a deal breaker. If you've got something besides FUD and hyperbole, I'd be happy to consider your point of view...
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.
"The only good windmill is a tilted windmill."
I think you'd be right. I've had many conversations where people *think* they use software X when it turns out they have something else entirely. Asking if they want to switch, though, will lead to quite a bit of anxiety.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
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.
If an organization chooses a commercial product for $62/seat over an open source product for gratis, is that the fault of the commercial product? Seriously, either the organization doesn't know any better, or the open source product lack sufficient goodness. But don't blame Microsoft for pricing themselves competitively.
dinner: it's what's for beer
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.
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?
How often do you email an EDITABLE document to someone, have them edit it, then send it back?
:-?)
.doc or .txt or .swx or whatever the OO.o format is.
My job is to negotiate contracts, so I do this 20 or 30 times a day... and based on the last 3 or 4 jobs I've had, this kind of behavior is the rule, rather than the exception. I've never sent anyone a PDF in the context of my job. What do you do for a living? (are you hiring
In fact, I refuse to do business with people who force me to look at their docs in PDF format. I'll often angrily close the tab when I click a link and Acrobat starts to load.
HTML, people. If you need to present something, and you need to protect your secrets so carefully that an NDA isn't good enough, or you spent so much hard work on whatever your stupid document is that don't want me to be able to make edits or to have cut/paste access to the content, send me a goddamn hard copy. If you want to communicate efficently, either post your content in HTML or send me a
(yes, I hate all-flash sites too-- go to hell, BMW. GO TO HELL! Thank goodness for the flashblock xpi for mozilla- it makes the web usable again).
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
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!
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.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but you're not going to get anywhere at all in the business world by thumbing your nose at the product whose formats control 90% of document exchanges. Although M$ is undeniably an abusive monopoly, and their products suck more the Michael Jackson on technical merits, the fact is that you have to interoperate well the the market leader to have much hope of toppling the leader.
And a slight nitpick: MS office is only compatible with it's current incarnation; The article even says that it's breaking things with 97 and even 2000.
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.
The formula editor is the reason why I stopped enduring Microsoft Office in writing my thesis. Actually, the Microsoft one is. Of course this also saved me the hassle of trying to edit large documents with Microsoft's product.
I wonder why the stability and size-tolerance of OOo was mentioned nowhere in the article. I translated two books using it, each 300+ pages (and the first one on an old K6/300 machine), with zero crashes. A Microsoft Office user's wet dream. I'm now doing a third translation and choosing the tool for it was a no-brainer.
blow your mind already
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.
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.