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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."
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)
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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
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
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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 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.
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..."
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.
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
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).
"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.
Perhaps it is you that needs experience. Although it has gotten better over the years, the MS products have had serious bugs that advanced-functionality users have repeatedly experienced. For specfific examples, try these: While opening a document from a WINDOWS2000 server, MSWord(also 2000) dies and corrupts the file. At what point is there a user fuck-up? Maybe they should not have double-clicked to start the file up and done a File|Open instead. Dumbasses. Or the same error in reverse, where changes were made and the save dies (icon selected), again corrupting the file and thereby losing the changes (the backup save is close but not complete). Perhaps the user should have done File|Save. Shitheads. And the Man IS out to get me... It's time to start skimming the gene pool
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.
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!
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".
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...
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it's great if you're a programmer and want to tinker, or you just want to see what Open Office for OSX will look like in a year or two, fine, but if you actually have to use Office to, I don't know, prepare documents or something, you're better off sticking with the X11 version.
I know they have that disclaimer, but I've used Neooffice/J (the Java version) for work-related purposes for about three months now. The newest version is really stable and has a lot of Mac-specific bells and whistles including Mac fonts, traditional apple-key commands and shortcuts, the OS X mac print dialog, and much, much faster reaction time than the x11 version (in my experience).
I'd recommend giving it a try. For actual use. Really.
W
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
"Cost to install is not the only cost. With a free product, your own IT guys are the only resource if you encounter a bug or difficult error situation. If you're paying for a license, you have another level of support, i.e. the developer."
Err, let's correct this one right here, and anyone else who's thinking that openoffice is unsupported, could you please subscribe to users@openoffice.org for a couple of days to see the quality of questions and responses being given to anyone who asks for help.
These are developers answering questions, and there are several people who work 40 hours per week answering openoffice support questions. There is absolutely nothing cheapskate about the OpenOffice support.
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
"The only good windmill is a tilted windmill."
(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.
Lets not forget that at the moment it might be less functional, but you will be able to upgrade for free. The more people use and contribute to Open Office the better it becomes.
The 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
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.
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, $6.7 million is pocket change.
>Go visit the evil empire and download the free converter for Office '97 to open up Office 2k3 files.
This would be great if it worked for windows versions prior win2000. Bullshit argument holds.
You may need help to realise, but those that say that are implying that the cost on top of licensing is dominant.
Many people do say that linux is not free in a perfectly valid attempt to stop a lot of people being burnt by the fact it is not yet ready for them.
For something to succeed it should only be pushed on people when it is ready, and for a home computer user, i don't think we are there yet.
show some balls and reply your exchange servers IP address below.
ahh, the irony...telling an AC to show some balls
Sorry to burst your bubble, but you're not going to get anywhere at all in the business world by thumbing your nose at the product whose formats control 90% of document exchanges. Although M$ 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.
"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
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)