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EIOffice 2004 vs. MS Office 2003
ryen writes "Designed to compete against MS Office, EIOffice 2004 is coded in Java therefore able to run on both Windows and Linux. EIOffice 2004 offers features which should get a few users' attention, but does it have enough to have people switching from MS Office? Flexbeta has the review." That's Evermore Integrated Office, if you're wondering.
That's Evermore Integrated Office, if you're wondering.
Heh. Not anymore.
Ack, even I'm getting tired of the "we slashdotted your site" jokes.
"Written in Java so it can run on both Windows and Linux"
hehe, what about all the other platforms there's a JVM for? Like, uh, OS X? Solaris?
How myopic.
While I can try out a million different versions of office, and get equal satisfaction. Everything really comes down to standards.
.doc .xls .ppt standards. M$ is still winning the same game, just different players.
Until there is something 10x more superior than
1) Great another competitor, we should support it
2) Its in Java it will suck
3) Java sucks
4) It should be in Perl
5) It should be in C
6) I use vi and troff.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
But the web site doesn't have any trial versions.
Its hard to put down $150 without seeing if it will actually open up my spreadsheet and documents.
The review had an eval copy, but no such animal on the web site. Too bad; Do you have to wait for a warez copy to figure out if its worth buying? Makes me think they have something to hide.
Believe it or not, I think real Excel compatibility is the hardest to achieve because there are so many different macros (VB Script), charting features, and other goodies in Excel that its easy to get "locked in".
... does it have enough features to get people to switch from OpenOffice?
Was this done by Old MacDonald?
"EIOffice 2004 puts a word processor, presentation package and spreadsheet into a single application, not a collection of programs. The integration is smooth and deep, and there's a natural feel to the way it all works together."
Is it good enough to never need OLE?
And yet it still has the fatal flaw of no database program.
Build an office suite with a file based database with a GUI and then you can start to attack the MS Access component of MS Office. Until then, you're replicating Star-Office and OpenOffice for some reason (and then trying to sell it for $149 USD on top of that).
Get paid to code OSS
This is great ! I have been waiting for the helpfulness of clippy combined with the performance of java.
I'm sticking with OpenOffice.org for now. Just MHO.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
In Canada EI stands for Employment Insurance, something you collect when you lost your job, affectionately known as "The Pogy." So looking at EIOffice, does it mean that your employment in an office is ensured, or is it the Pogy Office where you pick up your cheque?
Re: Java GUIs being slow
They can actually be quite fast and responsive, if written correctly. I run eclipse on my PIII500Mhz on Fedora Core 1 and it runs very nicely. Some changes coming down the line in Java 1.5 might actually make it even more responsive, for some things even faster than typical C++ applications (the run-time optimizer cannot easily be duplicated in statically compiled languages.)
I have NEVER seen a Java application RUN on Windows. Instead, they just seem to execute slowly...
Please, to all non-MS developers out there: stop chasing Microsoft!
... well, the instant something doesn't work, or just doesn't work exactly the way they're expecting, they'll dismiss your product as a cheap knockoff.
I understand the motivation behind designing office suites to look like Office clones, window managers to look like Windows clones, etc.: the idea is that people switching from MS products will find it easier to get used to the new software if it looks like what they're used to. But I really think this is a fundamentally flawed line of reasoning, for two reasons.
1. No one will ever be as good at being Microsoft as Microsoft is. You may expend endless blood, toil, tears, and sweat trying to clone $MS_PRODUCT down to the last widget, but you'll never get it exactly right. And if you try to lull users into feeling like they're using $MS_PRODUCT
2. Microsoft interfaces may be the "standard," but they're not the best. In almost every market niche I can think of, there's some product that's faster, more powerful, and/or easier to use than whatever Microsoft is pushing. If you're going to copy something, copy something better than Windows, Office, IE, ad nauseam -- or better yet, start with the best as a baseline and innovate from there.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Five pages compressed into 1 post, lots of pics that I never saw so I think the italics stand for captions.
EIOffice 2004 Vs MS Office 2003 - Page 1
.doc. This and the fact that EIOffice looks extremely similar to MS Office shows that huge efforts were placed to attract MS Office users into switching. Other file formats that EIOffice can save and open are PDF, PowerPoint, and Excel, rich text format, html and txt format.
Posted by Team Flexbeta on 26 May 2004 (28566 views) Rating: 4.94 EIOffice 2004 looks so much like MS Office 2003 that you wouldn't have a hard time getting used to the graphic interface once you get started with it. Coded in Java, EIOffice features a word processor, a spreadsheet application and a presentation graphics application. All three applications look and behave similar to MS Office's applications; Word, Excel and PowerPoint. EIOffice is able to edit and save MS Office file formats as well as a few other formats we will discover soon.
Word Processor
From the screenshot it is clear how EIOffice's word processing suit looks extremely similar to MS Word. The order and shape of the icons are not the only similarities, so is the labeling. For example, the tabs, File, Edit, View, Insert, and Format are all labeled just like in MS Word and in the same exact order. The word processor offers many features such as spell checking, password protecting document, tracking changes and a thesaurus. There is a nice feature which lets you transform the document you are currently working on into a presentation. Though the transformation isn't 100% the way I wanted it to be, a few editing here and there molded the document into a nifty presentation.
EIOffice 2004 Word Processor and MS Word
Another feature which EIOffice 2004 carries is its ability to suggest the entire word you are typing before you finish typing it. For example, when typing the word "feature", by the time the letters "fea" are typed, EIOffice suggest that the word you are trying to type is indeed "feature" and highlights the word for you. A simple enter on the keyboard accepts the word.
The spell checker in EIOffice 2004 works very well though the suggestions are not as relevant as that of MS Office 2003. Using the misspelled word - woship, EIOffice 2004's suggestions were Yoshi, wish, wash, midship and welsh. The same misspelled word in MS Word brought up the correct suggestion: worship or worships. I don't have any idea why EIOffice 2004 suggested Yoshi as a possible correction to the misspelled word. Unfortunately, EIOffice does not offer grammar checking like MS Office does.
Mispelled word in EIOffice 2004
There is a nice application bar floating on the upper part of the current document which enables fast switching from one office application to another. With a simple click of the mouse I was able to toggle between the word processor, the spreadsheet application, and the presentation graphics creator. This is made possible because EIOffice is one application which bundles the three previously mentioned applications.
Switching Application Bar
EIOffice 2004 is able to open and save MS Word file format,
EIOffice also features a nice scientific editor which includes many scientific figures, shapes and symbols. The figures include diodes, transistors, and capacitors. There are also chemistry symbols such as chemical reaction formulas and atomic structures. Apart from the typical math functions and figures, EIOffice also includes curve functions such as the exponent function and the sinusoid curve.
Science Editor in EIOffice 2004
Presentation Graphics
My one complaint about EIoffice is the file formats. The last thing we need is yet another file format. OpenOffice/StarOffice, KOffice*, TextMaker*, and Abiword can all save documents in StarOffice format (* these two will have that feature in their next release). We have a rule here at SteamyMobile that you can use whatever office suite you want, so long as it uses the StarOffice format, meaning that in the future, when document search and indexing programs are released, they will all be able to use the same format. If EIOffice could that, we would use it too.
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mobile porn
El Office - A product of Mexico
'mmmmmmmmm.... forbidden donut'
IIRC, Lotus Development Corp v Paperback Software Intl demonstrated us in 1990 that copying the look and feel in exact form is copyright infringement.
And if you use C/C++ your application will be easy to make fast, no matter what you're doing.
This is a very silly claim, at least as bad as the one you were responding to, that if an application is written in C/C++ it will be easy to make fast.
Then why do we have so many very-poorly-performing native applications out there.
I have seen enough cases where a well-designed Java app outperforms by an order of magnitude a poorly-designed C++ app.
I am all for using C/C++ where it is appropriate, but C/C++ is no magic silver bullet when it comes to performance any more than Java is. In either language, if you have carefully-constructed libraries, porting can be quite straitforward and if you have a design that plays to the strengths of the platform, performance can be reasonable. Performance and portability are always a matter of design. It does not just happen as a result of choice of platform.
When are people going to learn that consumers don't care what language a program is written in? For some reason, the Evermore Software folks are attempting to use this as a marketing bullet point (it's the first point on their web page, even), when Joe User really just wants to know why it's better than MS Office.
I write Java to pay the bills, and as such I'm a big supporter of the platform. But users just don't care. In fact because of the Microsoft FUD machine, saying it's Java might even be a turn-off to quasi-technical people. I once had a government purchasing manager say "Java? We're moving away from that because Microsoft no longer supports it." Idiotic yes, but to paraphrase Forrest Gump: Customer is as Customer does.
Writing Java apps is key for the software developer, because your market suddenly is no longer linked to the hardware platform your customers have. You can sell it to anybody. But from the customer standpoint it simply doesn't matter.
They were having to create the UI from scratch, and there were some very basic things not portable i.e. font sizes in AWT (given in pixels on PC and in points in Mac).
But by far the worst performance problem reported by a majority of people testing it was that people were demoing it as a browser applet and thought the download time (mostly over modems at the time) was part of the startup time of the program.
The Java word processing engine was much faster and more reliable (due to redesign) than the C/C++ version of WordPerfect at the time on the same machine.
I suspect it was also suffering from poor garbage collection and other JVM problems.
And no one understood the great modularity and pluggability that had been designed into it, due to political problems at Corel, who could never figure out a business model for it.
Do you mean "creepy" like in the middle aged guy who hangs out near high school and oogles 15 year old girls while wearing a trenchcoat?
Yes.
What is the market for this thing? Its not going to compete against MS Office- no db just to start- and it can't compete with OpenOffice - price alone- so who's going to use it?
While I am not the biggest fan of OpenOffice (disclaimer I have tried OO and deinstalled it in favor of MS Office- flame away)I would use it in a second over this thing because OO is free and OO really does have some nice features.
B O R I N G
Swing
Quoth the server, "Nevermore." =)
"Yeah, well, Dracula called and he's coming over tonight for you and I said okay."
*WORD* is the easy part.
Even powerpoint is almost a non-issue
How about Access/Excel...
So for any clone, ask these questions
Yes, but does it run crystal reports?
Yes, but does it run access (.db7) and have access-like switchboards off of which MANY soho businesses live? [Dentists, doctors, small mom & pops..] The JET engine may suck, but its the de-facto standard for mom and pops.
Yes, but do the macros they use at every major investment bank and packages like XLMiner work?
When there is a suitable ACCESS replacement for small business and something that runs crystal reports and data mining packages like XLMiner run, Microsoft is in trouble.
That last 10% of features will keep many major institutions around until near the bitter end.
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
I'll go a step further. .doc often breaks when you move it around, but it doesn't matter because everyone BELIEVES that it'll work anywhere. The reality doesn't matter much (in this case) only the perception of it.
plus-good, double-plus-good
They can actually be quite fast and responsive, if written correctly. I run eclipse...
Actually, Eclipse doesn't use the standard Java GUI library (Swing), and uses the IBM developed SWT, so it takes more than just coding the app "correctly".
The standard Java GUI can be written to be fast and responsive without using SWT however. Just check out the IntelliJ IDE.
http://www.intellij.com
I used it exclusively for my Java development, until I switched to Eclipse because of cost. Swing development can be tricky and responsive apps become harder to develop with it. Good thing thread programming is so easy with Java, because with Swing, you'll need to use it plenty.
-B
The advantages of MS Office are:
The advantages of OpenOffice are:
What the heck are the advantages of EIOffice?
So, WTF?