Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
And...? There's a lot of stuff that's free. Doesn't make it necessarily better (just as paid items aren't necessarily better). Most of us folk (who have matured to a certain extent) know to use the best tool for the job. In some cases (like when you're working with Exchange) that's Outlook 2003.
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
"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!
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.
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.
Nothing is ever free. Sometimes the costs of migration are more than the cost of staying with Microsoft's licensing. As the now-dead article mentioned, this is why OO is cheap for small companies: They don't have the cost savings of volume licensing that the big kids do.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
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.
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..
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...
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
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.
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.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
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?
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.
And while it may seem that OO.org does everything MS Office does, there may be advanced features in Office that either don't exist in OO.org, or aren't compatible from one format to the other. The article mentioned Excel power users as a key area of concern.
Then there is training to consider. You could spend a lot getting your users up to speed. More than training on upgrade features of a newer version of Office? Well, that's why you do the comparison, eh?
And then there is the cost of conversion. Despite handling Office file formats fairly well, there are often snags when converting, especially for complex documents/presentations/etc....
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
comparing ms word, StarOffice and other word processing software, finding out, that ms word was almost unusable in comparison.
The costs of migration are a one-time cost. The costs of licensing are a continuing cost. Sometimes you have to eat it in the short term to meet your long term goals.
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 agree that very little in life is free, but I don't like your reason for possibly staying with Microsoft Office.
Let's take your example. Yes the cost to switch might be more than the upgrade, but you would have to look at the TCO over the long haul. The cost of Microsoft Office in this case will cost that company $$$ every three to five years. This and the fact that they will have no say at all if they want to hold off an upgrade for lets say 6 or 7 years. The company in the article mentioned that this is probably the core reason that they are looking at alternatives to Microsoft Office, they are happy with Office 2k, and don't want to upgrade now, but they have to.
To use another analogy, it is like someone drinking Pepsi in a nice glass, and wanting to switch to drinking water because it is free, but not wanting to because the new glass may cost to much. Yes the one time cost may hurt a little bit, but the long term savings will more than make up for it.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
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*
Training is probably the biggest real-world issue. Any migration between platforms should always plan on plenty of time spent getting users up to speed. Document conversion would be the next issue, again follow the Law of the Seven P's (Proper Previous Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance).
Getting support on MS Office from Microsoft is a joke - if you value your time and money, you're better off using Google, just as you would with OpenOffice.
When it comes to advanced features there are a lot of features in MS Office that aren't in OO, however, these are features that aren't used by ~80-95% of your userbase, depending on your industry.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
That implies Office 2k3 isn't buggy or quirky - most folk's experience tells us otherwise.
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.
I like your post, except...
"To use another analogy, it is like someone drinking Pepsi in a nice glass, and wanting to switch to drinking water because it is free, but not wanting to because the new glass may cost to much. Yes the one time cost may hurt a little bit, but the long term savings will more than make up for it."
What the hell are you talking about?
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.
It has been said many times before, and better than I could, but:
When you find a bug in a Microsoft product, can you really get hold of the programmers? Is the helpdesk really helpful? Are Microsoft products (Office, in this case) really more bug-free than the major alternatives?
I has also been said that it's often a lot easier to just email or call the OSS programmers and to talk directly to the person who coded the app you are using, and suggestions for new features have more chances of being listened to in the OSS world.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
"Nothing is ever free."
This is true, but sometimes this idea is used improperly. For example, I've heard it said "Linux is free only if your time costs nothing." Well, it could equally be said "Windows is only $300 if your time costs nothing."
So, to say OOo is free is just as wrong as to say Microsoft Office costs $499. If someone said Microsoft Office costs $499 would you correct them? If not, perhaps you shouldn't also be correcting people who say that Linux is free. It's kind of a double-standard.
Engineering and the Ultimate
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
"And while it may seem that OO.org does everything MS Office does, there may be advanced features in Office that either don't exist in OO.org, or aren't compatible from one format to the other."
The converse is true, too. For example, I use OOo Draw all the time, and I don't think there is a corresponding program in Microsoft Office (I could be wrong). In addition, I use OOo's export to PDF/Flash options all the time from Impress, while Microsoft Office does not have those features in PowerPoint.
In addition, with OOo, your IT guys have a much higher chance of being able to solve complex problems, because they have the source.
Engineering and the Ultimate
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.
- Every one of your contractors will burn up 10 minutes every day due to bugs/quirks and they never learn to get around them
- MSOffice never burns up time by being buggy or quirky
- $500 gets you enough licenses of MSOffice for all your users
- All your MSOffice upgrades are free
Not to mention the high costs of security issues with MSOffice macro viruses, etc. and the software you need to purchase to protect yourself from them. My experience with OpenOffice has been quite good. It was a little buggy in its initial incarnations, but has come a long way and is very stable now! If OpenOffice doesn't have quite enough polish for you, check out StarOffice as well.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.
Don't tell me it is normal, it is too old because:
1) the PII/400 I bought it with is still more than enough for bureautic, and I don't see the first reason to upgrade.
2) OOo can open, even if not completely correctly the Word files I cannot open with Office97.
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.
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.
That doesn't mean anything without actual numbers attached to both cases, which will tend to vary from place to place and from time to time - specifically, does the amortized cost of that one-time payment really add up to less cost than licensing for the same period?
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
That's probably a fair assessment, but with a vastly larger user base, any issue you encounter in Office is more likely to be known and documented (by someone).
When it comes to advanced features there are a lot of features in MS Office that aren't in OO, however, these are features that aren't used by ~80-95% of your userbase, depending on your industry.
Yeah, that is something you'd have to have your users evaluate, e.g. in a trial conversion.
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!
Solving complex problems isn't the job of IT guys? I thought that's the reason for having IT guys. Silly me.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Why do we keep seeing drivel like this?
It has been pointed out again and again and again that Microsoft support for the end-user of Word or Excel is completely useless. If you believe otherwise, you haven't tried to use it. They'll graciously let you report a bug. That's about it.
In the open-source world, there are mailing lists you can post to, where you'll actually get useful help. And if you report a genuine bug, there's a real chance it will get fixed, based on the seriousness of the bug, not based on Microsoft's marketing-driven release schedules.
Further, third-party support companies can offer support tailored to your needs, if it's open-source software. They've got access to all details of the product - file formats, even source code. Nobody can offer support for Microsoft products except Microsoft, because the internals are not publicly documented.
Effective support is available for open-source software and not for Microsoft products. It really bugs me to see clueless moderators bump posts like the parent up to "+5 Insightful". Should be "-5 Codswallop".
"I wasn't advocating migration, nor was I suggesting sticking with Microsoft."
I wasn't suggesting you were. I was just commenting on the fact that many people are quick to point out that "OpenOffice isn't free" but fail to point out that in the same vein "Microsoft isn't $499".
Honestly, I have no idea which would be better for these people, but the first step to figuring it out is to be sure you are viewing them both from the same standpoint and not applying double-standards.
Where I work, I have a pretty large say in what is installed, and we, for the most part, use Microsoft Office because of the amount of documents we receive from customers with macros in them. Many of our installations, however, have both, because of OOo Impress.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Yet another study that says openoffice.org is good, but it isn't ms office. Why does everybody get so bent out of shape when they find out that no one's trying to "clone" MsOffice with oo?
That was Microsoft's big thing too. "You can always use openoffice.org, but we know that you're stupid, and would have to need re-training in order to understand it. Did we mention it's a completely different program? No, really... it's not the same thing."
This signature has Super Cow Powers
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.
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
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.
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.
Everyone always mentions training as a cost for alternatives to MS Office. My company offers free training on all MS Office products. Does anyone take them? No. They prefer to call the helldesk. So I don't see any difference at all between having the Helldesk look up info on MS Office as compared to looking up info on OpenOffice. Training is a red herring.
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.
"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.
What about the refund on the bottle in which the Pepsi came in? How does this factor in with MS Office? And what about at restaurants where they bring you a straw with sodas, but not with water? I'm so very confused...
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
The Microsoft charity licensing is pretty nice.
Well it seems nice on the face of it.
Some believe that Microsoft only offer it cheaper to charities because if they didn't then open source would ne used instead, and they would rather reduce the price just enough to stop that happening.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
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.
True, although the costs of switching are odften short term and the savings long term. Which can be a problem in pitching to senior management. You pitch "OK it's going to save us $200,000 over 5 years for an upfront cost of $10,000 over the first year and $2,000 in the second year." and they only hear the cost part. They see the short term drop in profits and it's effect on their bonus and the share price. Then they say no. In many ways it's easier to sell StarOffice than OpenOffice.org as at least Sun have a marketing department, plus automatic credibility due to being outsiders.
Actually, on the subject of StarOffice. Due to the heavy discount (on purchase, training ("train the trainer") and support costs, remember enterprises like support and training) and free/very cheap consultancy Sun give to public sector bodies in Europe (and I assume elsewhere) it actually works out significantly cheaper to switch to StarOffice than it does OpenOffice.org for such bodies. worth bearing in mind.
Stephen
"Don't write down to your readers, the only people less intelligent than you can't read" - Sign on Newspaper Office Wall
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!
I live the greatest adventure anyone could want. -Tosk the Hunted
- I live the greatest adventure anyone could possibly desire. - Tosk the Hunted
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...
- 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
And in part two of your statement you list the huge problem with Open Office. Maybe in someone's personal life they can deal with the inconsistencies of a file not opening correctly, but in an enterprise situation (such as the one I am in) we cannot afford this. I am talking about documents that are hundreds of pages long that will be converted to PDF. Each of our document writers have office 97 and office XP on their machines for their various projects. It is expensive either way, and each company needs to look at the pro's and con's of using MS Office, Open office, or any other program you can think of. -A
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
"The only good windmill is a tilted windmill."
To be fair, Office 97 to Office 2003 (or whatever) != migration in the sense that the article uses it. I think most would consider that an upgrade, not a migration. You point, though, stands in that there is certainly an upgrade cost.
Battling Beasts
(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.
THe company i work for utilizes software assurance. We pay an upfront fee and get almost all our MS software (server side and desktop side). We probably save 50% off the retail value. We are a company of roughly 110 people. Big pricedifference from what you have listed. All our software is the pro edition. -A
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
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.
I can more manage a file not opening properly in OOo that I can manage a file not opening at all in office 97.
The same, of course, it true of MS Office, only much moreso due to the massively larger user base.
It has been pointed out again and again and again that Microsoft support for the end-user of Word or Excel is completely useless.
Of course it has. MS bashing is a huge hobby for all kinds of people. I've encountered many problems with Office, all of which I've been able to solve with a little help from support.microsoft.com. Microsoft might not be as helpful and efficient as you'd like, but "completely useless" is overstating the case.
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
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.
Yep, and when you add that new computer to your network, what version of Office is it going to have? This is one of the reasons the guy in the article is looking at OO. Sometimes you are allowed to load an older version of the software, but seeing that Microsoft is now having you register versions online, the day of loading older unsupported software is coming to an end. At least as far as Microsoft is concerned. So yes you are still on office 97, for now.... What will your company do when it starts getting Office 2003 documents and can't open them?
I will add one more thing. I believe that it will only take OpenOffice to get around 25% of the desktop market before compatibility issues start to go away. I believe that at around 25% Microsoft would be forced to make a converter to open OO docs, much like they had to for Word Perfect for years. Just my opinion though... I would just imagine that their customers would start to demand it though...
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
You seem to think that the only reason for technical support is a bug in the program. Far from it.
The main reason for technical support is user error, which is not something that freely-donated open-source support handles very well. When Joe User can't format his Word document the way he wants because a feature isn't working the way he expects, he doesn't want the person on the other end of the phone / email to tell him to RTFM. Paid support (through Microsoft, or as you mention, third-party paid support) is generally trained to handle this.
Moreover, I don't have a problem with your argument, but I dislike your disdainful attitude. If you think the software purchasing decisions made by the vast majority of American businesses are -5 Codswallop, then put your money where your mouth is and start your own fucking Fortune 500 company.
Your personal experience at using software (open source or otherwise) does not accurately predict other people's experiences.
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
A key difference between OpenOffice and MSOffice is the file format. OO's is open. MS's is not. As a business or individual do you really want a third party dictating the file format of your critical business or personal information? It is interesting this was never mentioned in the evaluation as an issue.
Most people think MS's DOC format is a standard It is not and MS keeping it closed is the only way they maintain their Office monopoly. MS in effect has control over your information. It amazes me how so few business people 'get it' when it comes to this issue.
I think the biggest real world difference is the risk to daily business activities. Whether this is perceived or real can be argued. In the end IT staff can do all the research and testing they want to ensure OO can read and write Office formats, but the best way to be sure is to use a Microsoft product (that OO created word doc you sent to the lawyers at the deadline better be compatible (and yes, I know you shouldn't be sending the actual word file, but this is the real world, with real users)). For a little/lot of money you protect your business and your job. I know real compatibility doesn't even truly exist between versions of MS products, but it exists 99% of the time).
A reasonable suggestion for OO advocates to propose is the use of a mixture of installs. For instance, in our case, developers and other technical staff can use OO for almost all daily activities (if they need full Office features, there's a computer they can make use of for a few hours). The marketing and management staff use Office exclusively to ensure compatibility with clients, etc.
It's a confidence thing. As a company uses OO more and more, hopefully this kind of set up would be required less and less.
Of course, the down side of this is the cost of supporting two products (which for smaller companies is fairly negligible).
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.
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.
The actual numbers are an individual thing.
I didn't take this as a "one is better than the other" type of article.
In some cases "one is better than the other". It just depends on what you are doing.
Which one?
That depends on what you need.
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.
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?
Yep, "RTFM" sure is helpful ;)
>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.
You may need help to realise, but those that say that are implying that the cost on top of licensing is dominant.
Many people do say that linux is not free in a perfectly valid attempt to stop a lot of people being burnt by the fact it is not yet ready for them.
For something to succeed it should only be pushed on people when it is ready, and for a home computer user, i don't think we are there yet.
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.
show some balls and reply your exchange servers IP address below.
ahh, the irony...telling an AC to show some balls
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.
Not fair. There is a significant learning curve from Office 97 to 2003. Different menu layouts, different commands, different terminology, etc. That is not to say that the migration would not be even more costly to OO, but it is a consideration.
--- A man with a briefcase can steal more money, than any man with a gun. [Don Henley]
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.
Hell, yes!
Here is Australia, it's MUCH MORE than just $499.
For example MS Office Pro 2003 (see Harris Technology, which many businesses buy from here in Sydney:
Price Inc GST $829.00
That's about USD$750 (depending on exchange rates)
So, yeah, I'd correct whoever claims Office is only $499...
Important info:
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net
http://dieoff.org/synopsis.htm
http://www.peakoil.net
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.
What I write. I'm not a high school teacher - I will be an elementary school teacher. I've used it to determine the grade level of the test questions and directions I'd written for a fifth grade language arts test. If I write an assignment of test, and I run it through Flesch-Kinkaid, and it comes through a 8.5, I need to simplify my test. Unfortunately, some of my 5th grade kids might be on a 3rd grade reading level - so having my test directions and questions at the 8th grade level would be unfair. Its not used to "dumb down" an assignment - its used to simplify and clarify - and its much more difficult to judge the readibility of a text than it seems. Run an essay or composition through it - see what you get. Cheers.
"The main reason for technical support is user error, which is not something that freely-donated open-source support handles very well."
Please forgive me for yelling but apparently many people here are deaf. YOU CAN BUY SUPPORT IF YOU WANT TO. YOU CAN BUY ANY LEVEL OF SUPPORT YOU WANT FROM MULTIPLE VENDORS.
Did you hear that? You can buy support if you want or need it. In summary.
Free support for OSS projects is better then free support from ms (mainly because MS does not offer free support for the vast majority of it's products). Paid support is frequently better for OSS projects because the people supporting are usually the developers and/or have access to source code.
"If you think the software purchasing decisions made by the vast majority of American businesses are -5 Codswallop"
having worked for many american companies I can state without hesitation that the software buying decisions are made by morons based on some magazine they read on an airplane or something their buddy told them on golf course. -5 Codswallop (my new favorite word) sums it up beautifully.
evil is as evil does
Best time to do this is when MS introduces a new version of windows and office. There is enough of a difference so that all your workers will need to retrained some anyway. If you are going to send them all to training anyways it makes sense to extend the training and skip the upgrade.
evil is as evil does
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)
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.
having worked for many american companies I can state without hesitation that the software buying decisions are made by morons based on some magazine they read on an airplane or something their buddy told them on golf course
Tell me about it...
Many software purchase decisions are made with only a minimum amount of investigation. They are often made by small isolated groups in a huge enterprise and then blessed as a standard and forced upon user and IT groups who had no input into the decision (sometimes a good thing, but not often).
In the fortune 500, self-preservation is the name of the game. The last thing anybody wants to do is rock the boat. If you deploy Office 2K3 and spend $50 million on it and something goes wrong, you just keep plugging away at it until it works, and then start on the next upgrade cycle. An expenditure of that size was probably signed by the CEO himself, and consequently the decision will be blessed as the correct decision. On the other hand, if you deploy OO and something goes wrong, you'll be out on the street for risking the company on a cheap gamble...
Go to computerworld.com and do a search for the phrase "ERP", you might want to cross-reference it with "lawsuit". You'll probably get about the same number of hits with or without the latter keyword.
The reason people spend big money in the Fortune 500 is that it means that a big-name executive has his name on the decision, and consequently the people below him will have his protection when stuff goes wrong.
Also - departmental power is generally a function of budget, and buget is a function of spending. If you spend more, you get more to spend.
A responsible IT group might not spend millions a year on licenses. However, when their developers want to buy new mice for their PCs they end up with $10 economice since the manager can't go over his $10,000/year budget. On the other hand, a group which spends money on licenses as if it were water gets the nice toys since it is much easier to pad a $50 million budget. Ditto for donoughts at meetings, etc. And of course, the department with the best perks has the highest retention rate...
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...
<SNIP>
I'm not a MS flag-waver, have used OO.o off and on for quite awhile, and can quite confidently state that the points you made about MS Office can also be said for OO.o. Given the choice between the two with cost not being a factor, I'd pick MS Office any old day of the week. I realize the context of TFA is all about $$, but still... c'mon... OO.o is still crap. If its aspiring to be like MS Office, its doing a good job in that regard... ugh..
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
Ok, let me change the question a bit. What is your company going to do when it gets a function that only office 2003 supports and your office 97 can't open it?
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.