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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.
The only thing that matters to me is whether OO.o comes with Clippy or not!
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
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.
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.
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?
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I saw that shot more than a few times back when Starbuck was a man. ~ lucabrasi999
A transition doesn't have to be painless to be worthwhile. It certainly doesn't have to be painless to be cost-effective. Microsoft has gone a LONG way to make sure that any transition will result in a good dose of pain. Break it sooner or it only gets worse.
You start by telling your employees that your switching. Explain why you're switching. Explain that you know it will be inconvenient or even a huge pain in the ass. Tell them you're counting on them to put out a lot of effort and come up to speed as quickly as possible on the new software. You're proud of you're employees, and you know they'll make you proud again.
That won't eliminate any of the end-user frustration. It will, however, make the transition a success; because it lets the users know that the decision is made, and that there is an expectation for them to adjust to it.
You don't want to ignore your employees by any means; but you sure don't want to give up significant cost savings (which by the way indirectly benefit them) just because they can't learn the new menus.
After all, who's in charge?
The true test is your ability to make good financial decisions and to make those decisions work.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
"I must be missing something"
A sense of fucking humour?
Sadly, OpenOffice is not supported using Documents to Go for palmOS. Even when I save the document as an excel spreadsheet and try to transfer it over, Documents to Go throws a hissy fit and spits out an error. Documents to Go claims no plans to support native OO format, either.
If this company utilizes pda's, then OO is not the way to go.
I like OpenOffice.org as much as the next guy, or maybe even more -- I've used OOo on my Windows box exclusively for about two years now. But, I just can't get used to OOo on my PowerBook. I really wanted to like it, but the OS X version left me wanting more. Really, it's hardly a port at all -- it's just the Unix version running under X11 for OS X. So, it has the Unix interface and it's lacking the usual Mac OS niceties such as the Aqua look and even the nifty Finder-ized open/save dialogs.
At this point, I'm just torn between trying to find MS Office/Mac for cheap (perhaps an older version) or just waiting for the proper Aqua port of OOo (even though that could be a while).
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
I love using Open Office! The only thing I miss is that it doesn't offer the Flescher-Kinkaid garde level scale in its word count feature - being a pre-service teacher, I often use it to determine if test items or other text written for kid's assignments is way to easy or dificult. OO is great - and I have never had any of these Power Point/Word compatibility problems, I am always sending and exchanging files with MS Office users.
I 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.
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..."
"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
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).
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.
... that water is more healthy than Pepsi.
Hey, this part of the analogy even works when comparing OpenOffice.org to MS Office!
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.