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Associated Press Reviews OpenOffice
blacklily8 writes "Peter Svensson of the Associated Press has reviewed OpenOffice and declared it a Microsoft Office killer: 'Microsoft Corp. killed off the competition for office software suites and became a de facto monopoly in the area, with what result? The competition is back and, this time, it's free!' Svensson thinks the better Word/WordPerfect file conversion, ability to save as PDF, and new BASE database component make the beta a better candidate for success than the previous versions--and when the kinks get worked out, step back!"
We won, the battle boys! Microsoft is no more!
and when the kinks get worked out, step back!
You mean it's still buggy?
Yes it is, but it's already a lot better MS Office, and doesn't have annoying clips, dogs and cats either.
Would one of those kinks be the OO version of PowerPoint?
Peter Svensson of the Associated Press has reviewed OpenOffice and declared it a Microsoft Office killer:
Anyone care to point out where this was said, because I obviously missed it when I RTFA...
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
A few months back I was in the job market, and making my resume look correct in MS word was a chore, since I use Open Office on my machines at home. I did still have a windows laptop, so I was able to fix the formatting each time I made a change, but, point being, untill either EVERYONE is running open office, OR the formatting translates 100% correct, it's not a 100% viable option for the enterprise.
(Ironically, I got hired by a company that uses Open Office instead of MS office)
Don't Tread on Me
Wasen't StarOffice supposed to be an "Office Killer" too?
The battle for Office Suites is no longer on the desktop. MS Office as A LOT of features built in. Frankly, more than anyone will ever use.
The new battle field is Online Collaboration both in business and personal arenas.
"It's not rocket science, Smithers! It's only brain surgery!" --Mr. Burns
We won, the battle boys!
So you're speaking to "the battle boys", and telling them that you won? Microsoft has all the battle boys, so I see no reason why they should be celebrating.
I enjoy NeoOffice/J on my Mac, but I fear these types of reviews that have people comparing a mature, decade old Office Suite to a FOSS project still so very immature.
By drawing attention to it, it incites review. A good thing. But if CIOs and CTOs have a team review these early versions of OO.o for deployment in their enterprises, and the teams recommend against them, it will be that much harder to have a further review at a later date. "We already looked at OO.o, we didn't want to use it. Move on" they might say.
Timing is crucial in marketing and the FOSS community has made great strides with Linux, but only when Linux got to a maturity level somewhat past what I see from NeoOffice/J and OO.o
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
The article makes a point about it being able to save as PDFs - if OpenOffice becomes as popular as they say it will, would it kill Microsoft's own upcoming Metro format?
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
I've heard of problems with macros, and some of the other more advanced features of Office. As much as I want to see it go, I don't think this guy's looking as hard as he needs to to really make such broad statements.... 'There are some bugs' in a single-page review is kinda... lacking.
My little site.
I hear many people complain about OpenOffice.org not opening their MS documents with correct formatting, but these people don't realize that this is not a limitation of OpenOffice, but a result of Microsofts closed and proprietary document formats.
When I've used OpenOffice.org's document format, I've been very pleased. Especially since sxw is just a zip package that you can open up and edit by hand.. this make automating document processing really easy..
I'll be perfectly fine if MS Office disappears and never returns.
The road between democracy and tyranny is paved with secrecy in the name of security.
"The beta of version 2 fixes many of those problems. It opens Word, WordPerfect and Excel files flawlessly. Saved files open fine on Microsoft programs. It also adds a database program that's similar to Access." Opens Word files flawlessly my ass.
click me
I'm glad that OpenOffice is getting some mainstream press. I still have my doubts if it'll ever come out for OS X (and yes, I know it'll run in X11, and no, that doesn't count).
What they really need to do is stop trying to emulate Microsoft Office. You'll never make the MS Office killer by making MS Office.
Here's how average Joe Idiot thinks:
"So you're saying it's exactly like office except free? I don't trust it. I'll just pirate Microsoft's instead."
MS Office is bloated, awkward and confusing. They need to make it *better* than MS Office. Do something innovative, instead of just copying.
I don't know how well Apple's iWork is selling (I heard not so well), but it's a hell of a lot nicer to use than Office because they looked at it from a different angle. It's missing some stuff, but Pages is a hell of a nice app for version 1.0.
OpenOffice needs to do the same thing.
Slashdot: 24 hours behind every other site or your money back!
Or heck, you can even save it in MS Office doc format.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Geez, Zonk, bother reading the article before putting up the misleading summary? Here's what the author said:
"My colleagues and I encountered some other problems with OpenOffice. Installation was difficult on some machines because OpenOffice relies on Sun's Java software, which does not come pre-installed on all Windows PCs....
"Write crashed a few times while saving documents, but we were able to recover the files. Hopefully, this is an issue that will be solved in the final version.
"OpenOffice was also slower in opening and saving documents. For example, a large spreadsheet took 4 seconds to open in Calc but only 2 seconds in Excel. That's not much, but the difference can be magnified if your computer is old.
"Base, the database program, has a confusing interface but Access isn't much better in this regard. The "help" files for the entire suite are not as thorough as those for Office."
Yup, sounds like an Office killer.
Honestly, how does tripe like this summary get published?
Don't worry about word compatible. Just make it a PDF.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
For simple documents, I just use RTF or similar. When it gets more complex, PDF does the job quite well. And personally, I enjoy laying out things in html with css. Easy to check in multiple browsers, with enough experience you can get a nice looking and consistant rendering. Plus then I only have one version to worry about.
Yeah. MS had to F-up Word into an SDI app to make the Outlook editor work. Thanks a lot Outlook weenies.
I'm a plain old text editor guy. VIM when I'm feeling fancy. However, OpenOffice really is a no-brainer when compared to MSOffice. Especially when you compare the price (free, versus $500). I use it for spreadsheet work all the time and love it.
The only problem I've really had with previous versions (other than a less pleasant interface than it now has) is the somewhat poor format conversion ability. Importing MSOffice files of various types were a pain to an impossibility. So far, I've had no problems importing them with the new beta.
I was talking to someone who operates a small office the other day and he was complaining about the thousands of dollars it was going to cost to equip a handful of users with Office on their machines - when all he needed to do was some spreadsheeting and office memo/document type stuff.
I pointed him at OpenOffice.org and he was blown away. Everyone in the office had it installed, operating and using it productively by the end of the week. It was difficult convincing them, however, that there was no catch. That it was really free. After all, you have people like some random guys on G4TV and radio-based "computer shows" and some websites spouting idiotic bullshit like "If a program is free, you can be sure it has adware, spyware and maybe viruses". Talk about hyperbole.
The issue I run into though when recommending it to people is that they instinctively believe it will be crap because it's not from MS. I'll reply with something like "But it converts most Word documents perfectly," but they just aren't interested.
For OO to succeed it needs to have a marketing campaign similar to FireFox. It needs to be a product that people get recommended to them from non-geeks.
I've got to hand it to MS. They've done a top notch job scaring people into using their products.
Did you ride the short bus? http://sh.ortb.us
But when you have questions, who will you turn to? The world lost a great thinker when MS "retired" Clippy.
http://nerdfortress.com/
I believe MS takes in about 10 billion dollars a year in revenue from their office software - about a third to a fourth of their total revenue.
MS has already been cutting a billion or so each quarter recently to make the street estimates and keep the stock up while the insiders unload their shares. Even relatively small percentage drops from either volume or pricing for their office software is going to have catastrophic effects on the stock price as they start to miss each quarter's street estimates.
Just keep plugging away OpenOffice guys. You don't take out MS's office completely, even a modest market-share size in the 10 to 20 percent range is going to be devastating to MS.
When the word gets out that you can pilot a penguin down the hill like a mad man...watch out Bill Gates!
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
So, aside from the difficulty of supporting .doc in the first place, there's the obvious problem that MS likes to change the .doc format with every Word release. This makes it effectively impossible for OpenOffice to guarantee compatability with Word at any given point in time.
.doc version treadmill no longer becomes a relevent obstacle because the network effect will favor the current, working versions of the .doc format?
However, every time MS releases a Word update, not everyone upgrades. The same format pressure that keeps OO out of the running in many places also forces upgrades, but not everyone does.
I suppose my open-ended question is: At what point will there be enough of a population that uses versions of Word (or other word processors) that are well supported by OpenOffice that the
In this vein, I can only hope that Microsoft continues to shoot themselves in the foot with things like Licensing 6.0 (sounds like a parody of MS software) that makes people stop and reconsider whether a treadmill with handcuffs and no 'stop' button is something they want to jump on. I doubt we'll be that lucky, though.
In the meantime, go OpenOffice!
The enemies of Democracy are
I say this as a person who desperately wants to ditch MS Office:
OpenOffice isn't quite good enough yet.
The look and feel of the program is a bit too rough. For example, they inexplicably have a huge "Styles" pane on by default that covers 1/4 of the document.
Also, the compatibility is not what it should be. I create Word docs in oowriter, but then when I open them in real Word, the page breaks are all wrong! What used to fit on one page wraps to a second, or vice versa. It's quite frustrating when I prepare a lot of Word docs for printing by others, when I know that essentially all the others are using real Word. I have to reboot and examine the document to make sure of what it really looks like.
Ditto for ooimpress, the PowerPoint clone. It is hard to use it for lots of small reasons; death by a thousand cuts. It isn't easy to pull up a Slide Sorter view and move the slides around, cut and paste them, select ones from one file and put them in another file, and so on. When I create a new slide, it ignores my Master Slide template and the dimensions of the text areas come out all wrong. It also again doesn't look the same as a real PowerPoint file, and when I view the same slides in real PowerPoint, the text falls off the edge or bottom of the slide. Argh!
I realize the challenge OOo is up against, and I applaud their efforts. But OOo is no Office killer, not yet. More work needs to be done.
"but these people don't realize that this is not a limitation of OpenOffice, but a result of Microsofts closed and proprietary document formats."
Most people don't care and just want it to work.
Open Office has always been slow as hell on any machine I've ever used it on. I really like the 'save as PDF' option but opening a document, even saved in the OO format takes about forever and a day.
and when the kinks get worked out, step back!
Every FOSS project seems to have this hope.
OpenOffice has bene saying this for years, IIRC.
I don't think I'm going to hold my breath waiting for this. This is one area where cathedral development seems to be far superior to bazar development...
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
"there's the obvious problem that MS likes to change the .doc format with every Word release."
Yeah, they release new versions so often -- once every two or three years is a really frenetic schedule. Treadmill? Hell, that's not even a hamster wheel.
I thought vi killed both of these guys before they were born.
Or heck, you can even save it in MS Office doc format.
That's the point, the formatting doesn't survive going from OpenOffice to Word. And if the employer says "Please submit your resume in Word format," I'm not about to say "Buzz off, here's a PDF."
The power of MS Office is rooted in corporate culture. It's not a technical issue.
No decent corporation can afford not to have it.
No decent corporation is willing to send documents to clients which MAY cause incompability.
No IT directors would take this risk.
Nobody was fired to use Microsoft.
Who cares if it cost a fortune for the company as long as it prevents you from getting fired.
I still use Latex for my resumé. Initialy I used Latex because it was the easiest way to get a PDF output cross-platform, now because I have some nifty macros defined which really have me a personal taste to the CV. Would go for OO if starting from scratch now though.
Atheism is a non-prophet organisation
heh, thats exactly what I was going to say.
Don't Tread on Me
I can't format page/paragraph/font without using the TAB key a zillion times. There need to be ALT key combos for every field in those dialog boxes so a user can switch to any one of them instantly without mousing or tabbing.
Word does this. OO.o does not. Get with the freakin' program, OpenOffice. It's the simplest feature of all and I keep telling myself the next version will have it. But it never does. It is very frustrating.
You've obviously never used OO... maybe not even M$... I've used both and for 90+% of the tasks OO is as good or better.... Sure there might be some obscure thing that M$ supports, but I can't think of it right now....
OO works, M$ Works.. OO does'nt cost me 300-400$
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
It sure can't beat Applixware's application builder though, or sor small footprint either...
http://www.vistasource.com/
And if the employer says "Please submit your resume in Word format"
Then send a .txt renamed to .doc. Microsoft Word will handle it correctly.
Well, in a way, this (openoffice) is more like giving M$ taste its own medicine - or I would say poison!
M$ has long been copying other innovative/first-of-its-kind softwares, and marketting/selling them successfully to kill the origial ones. Now openOffice is doing the same - by giving similar/better/slightly less functionalities with familiar look-n-feel.
M$ has one more battlefront open to guard its fort ress now! Nothing sweeter than this!
My experience has been that not even microsoft office opens microsoft office docs with 100% formatting accuracy 100% of the time. try opening and editing back and forth between two differant versions and see for your self!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
That is where "save as PDF" gets handy.
Why don't people see that it's a bad idea for Open source to have a monopoly? People can beat Microsoft because they make poor software, OSS (generally) doesn't.. but 1 or 2 features doesn't make it "better" then "being free". So if OSS gets a monopoly like Microsoft has it could very well mean the end of the IT industry got a good decade..
I like muppets.
Or heck, you can even save it in MS Office doc format.
The way I read his message, he is doing that. His problem is formatting his resume so it looks right when potential employers view it in Word.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
Opens Word files flawlessly my ass.
Got any substantiation? Or did you mean "Opens Word files of my ass flawlessly"?
I've used NeoOffice/J, and enjoyment is not a word that comes to mind.
I'm glad that NeoOffice/J is available, and I'd like to encourage it's existance as an alternate to MS Office, but my experience with it is painful at best.
I don't know if you actually use Word, but I can open .doc files from as far back as 95 in Word 2003 without a hitch. In fact, I can even *save* them in Word 95 format, though some extra-fancy formatting gets lost (I've never experienced it, so I can't really comment on what's lost in the translation). So when you say the "current, working versions of the .doc format," what you really mean is a .doc format written by Word *97* or newer. Are you really complaining because they're not making their product completely backwards compatible with products released over nine years ago?
I used OOo for about a year, and I found it to be more bloated than MS Office ever was. It's close enough to Word XP/2003 that it's comparable (esp. if you take into consideration the price points), but there's no way I'd ditch my legal copy of Office 2003 for OOo. What I'd *really* like to see is a lightweight edition of Office 2003, programs that have just the basics (including stuff like track changes, I suppose) and addons as necessary in order to get features that you absolutely need, a la Firefox. OOo is simply emulating MS Office, which is doomed to failure because there's no way that they can ever meet or exceed Microsoft, except by price.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
Slashdot declares imminent demise of Microsoft or one of their products. I don't know if I've ever seen such a thing.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
If they really want to make Open Office become more popular they need to start with a new naming scheme. I propose putting the lette "O" in front of each program to keep with the open source spirit. Now you can have OWriter, OImpress, OMath, ODraw, OCalc, and OBase.
but I fear these types of reviews that have people comparing a mature, decade old Office Suite to a FOSS project still so very immature.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. According to Wikipedia, StarOffice began development in 1994. This is 11 years by my math. It's like saying that Windows-NT is old and mature but Linux is brand new.
Every time someone sends you a .doc formatted file, tell them you can't read it and to please send plain text or postscript.
.doc versions of documents. While you're at it you might do the same for that flash crap [-)
There's really no need for any other formats for documents that are to be printed.
If you're a flaming radical who want's to tear down MS, script an automated message for every 'webmaster' who offers only
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
I have the same experience. Whenever I do work in OO that needs to be sent to others using Word, I always run it through Word first to make sure it works fine. I typically find small formatting differences. In particular, the pages break in different places. I think this just has to do with the font being used. In some situations this is a small point, but there are many times where the layout has to be perfect, so I can't afford a small glitch to make the document look bad.
I typically enjoy a system when it is elegant. Something open source projects tend to lack. Not to be finicky, but the icons for OpenOffice that go on your desktop are aliased and jagged when they could be using alpha transparency. The icons also don't seem to have any meaning as to what program is such as 3 horizontal lines. Why not take a moment and clean it up and out do microsoft in elegance and graphic design to actually capture potential users eyes!
Why are there good coders in the open source community but heavily lack on good graphic designers and UI?
MS Office is a monopoly because it is a monopoly -- its not the best set of applications, but it's prevalence forces anyone who is a supplier to conform to the IT choices of key clients. A two-person shop can't convince a $1 billion organization to change its IT infrastructure.
Sadly, we have enough minor glitches between our Mac Office documents and our PC-using clients to scare us away from Open Office for documents to/from clients (i.e., 95% of our office application work). The only consolation is that we get paid the extra labor for dealing with Word/Excel/Powerpoint and the well documented annoyances. Even so, what enrages me the most is that a recent upgrade from Mac Office 98 to Mac Office 2004 proved that MS has done almost nothing to fix long-standing bugs in 6 years and 3 versions (and has added a few new "annoyances").
I may be a wimp in not taking the OpenOffice plunge, but when your livelihood depends on being "easy to work with" its hard to take risks that could mean the loss of 33% or more of your income.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I think it depends on what you use to format your Resume, I think. I didn't experience any incompatibilities going from OOo to Word at all; occasionally I see problems the other way when tables and the like get too deeeeeeply nested.
On the other hand, I've since switched to using HTML for my resumes, and have yet to see any complaints. And I can edit it in VIM if necessary, *and* I can simply post it on my website if I need to. (although nvu is much nicer to make a resume in )
Thinking outside my Head
I RTFA, and, although it says that it is "a Strong Competitor" nowhere does it state that OO.o is "an Office killer".
WTF is going on with Slashdot these days? The submission as written should never have been accepted, as it is blatantly incorrect. If someone from AP had actually said that it was an Office killer, THAT would have been news.
This is a short review of the beta version of the program that basically stacks up its new features against Office, finds them improved in some ways, lacking in others, and then concludes EXACTLY what everyone here already knows: If your needs are minimal to moderate, then it is far better than MS. If you rely on features that are specific to Excel or Powerpoint, then stick with MS Office.
I've been using OpenOffice on my home PC for about a year and a half now. I don't do heavy clerical work on my home computer, so it works just fine for my purposes (in fact it's probably overkill) I recommend it to anyone who wants a good office suite for their PC but doesn't wanna shell out 200 bucks or whatever it is for MS Office.
It's a damn good little program and I'll continue to use it for as long as they maintain it.
I actually find LaTeX resumés have the subtle advantage that they just look better. No, seriously. Everyone does their resumés in Word, and it isn't hard to spot Word documents, no matter how you mess with fonts. A LaTeX document just looks different - a little cleaner and sharper and more like professional typesetting.
Anything that can make your resumé stand out from the others in a good way is well worth pursuing.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
You say you want keyboard equivalents for each field in Writer's text formatting dialog boxes. Have you filed this request in OOo's issue tracker, possibly with some keyword implying higher severity for requests needed to meet Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act?
After it achieves market dominance the OO team will continue to refine and make it more usable, as opposed to M$ who seems only worried about making convuluted data formats that are harder for other apps to read.
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
accept .doc resumes.
It's criminal to require a job applicant to purchase a software package to apply for a job.
All right, I constantly hear that MSO is bloated, but is it really? My files in Word open in 2 seconds tops. OO.o takes ~10 seconds, even with the Quickstarter. And IIRC the install sizes of both programs are about the same.
E = m c^3 Don't drink and derive E = m c^3
i'd like to be able to use openoffice, but i'm not willing to give up my favorite OS for it. can anybody offer some enlightenment on why openoffice doesn't run on openbsd? i'm genuinely curious. is it something to do with the portability of the code? some aspect of openbsd which makes it somehow hostile to openoffice? whatever the case, i really hope it's something than can be addressed in the future; just this past week i've had MS word 2000 mangle my résumé for no good reason...
if i'm a grammar nazi, you're an illiteracy nazi.
This makes no sense to me and i agree with you, I prefer PDF too, but for some reason they want it in .doc format so they can edit it i guess. I mean PDF is far more universal than .doc and they only need to read the file, so this should be a non-issue.
Slashdot is kind of like Playboy; we aren't here to read the articles.
Didn't know they were still in business!
-- ac at work
Disclaimer: I am a Mac OS X OpenOffice.org developer and a founder of the NeoOffice project.
I personally agree with the parent...marketing something that's not yet ready is a horrible idea and bad impressions have worse long term damage than no impressions at all. Part of the problem lies with the way that OpenOffice.org was built as a community. Unlike Linux and some other FOSS projects, the community wasn't built up around engineers. There are very few engineers outside of Sun that actually are real major contributors to the project.
The OOo community was built around marketing. Finding community members to assist with marketing was one of the first and most successful community building drives for OOo. The marketing community behind OOo has done some amazing things and may be the reason why OOo has such mindshare over other open source office suites like KOffice (and Sun marketing has helped push OOo as well).
Honestly, OOo didn't get as recognized as it is today due to its underlying technical merit. It got there as the result of a lot of hard work by that marketing community. If any fault can be found, it may just be that they are overexuberant about OOo and may oversell it at times.
Neo's slightly different in that it was founded by engineers. There's no marketing push for Neo in any kind of organized fashion. There's no money spent on marketing it at all (all donations go to host our servers and for helping allow Patrick to work on it full-time). It's technical merit over OOo X11 is the only reason why it's known today. To me that seems like the logical path for FOSS.
I really don't see the necessity in marketing something that's free.
ed
problem is most employers require .DOC format, and it's not even a matter of that being simply a preference, and an RTF or PDF would just be fine (which, in the real world, of course it would be) - but a matter of their resume submittal forms simply won't accept anything that is not named *.DOC
Don't Tread on Me
To get me to completely stop using MSFT Office, FrameMaker, and a few other programs, here's what OO has to add.
Fixing some bugs in OO would mean that the software would evolve into a better application. Sorry Kansas, I guess you just outlaw this fine alternative to MSOffice.
What has Sun every done for the community, anyway? I have zero reason to trust them, and you can be sure they're only looking for a way to line their pockets. I will breathe a sigh of relief when they finally die and we can say there is one less evil corporation in the world. Thank goodness there are corporations on the other hand like IBM that Love Linux and promise not to enforce their patents for preventing unauthorized access to a rotating shaft against us.
I have friends for whom I've set up their Office Suite on their home computers.... I have given (installed for them) the various generations of Open Office and watched in disappointment as they repeatedly gravitated to the "free" Microsoft Works (ironic name) to create documents.
But last night, a breakthrough! My friend's daughter had written an assignment with WordPad and was having problems with it, especially wanting to spellcheck, have tighter formatting, etc. Her mom immediately imported the document into Open Office and showed her how to use THAT and told her to use Open Office as a first choice! (And this was without my "influence". In the past, to get anyone in that household to use Open Office I'd have to be there pointing it out and asking them to use it.) Reaching a tipping point, perhaps.
This to me is the most frustrating thing about office. It's great when it works, but god help you when a big document starts freezing and spazzing out after rearranging your doc.
I really like the project notebook idea in 2004 (mac) but I've also had this get corrupted on me - extremely frustrating waste of time fixing this.
On a different note, where is the Mathcad for 'nix, mac folks? I love the idea of it but no way I'm going back to a dell laptop.
Seriously, engineering notebook software with some equation solving built into it; a great scrapbook feature, that doesn't have to run on a windows box, and doesn't cost $2k (ruling out maple, mathematica, and Matlab - I know they're good on OS X, but two thousand dollars?)
Anything out there?
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
A lot of corporations have various Excel macro driven internal apps. Would any of them run on OO?
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
So let me get this straight: you're complaining that MS changes the .doc format so that competitors can't use it? Heaven forbid they change the format without first consulting with companies competing for market share!
.doc files from as far back as 95 in Word 2003 without a hitch.
.doc format," what you really mean is a .doc format written by Word *97* or newer.
.doc format 20xx is no longer an obstacle because enough people use .doc format [OOo supported version]. Have I made myself clear now?
Funny. But of course you've nailed it -- MS does it so that competitors have a harder time stealing marketshare, not because it gives benefit to users. Spare me the "MS has a right to do this" -- my question is do we as users have to put up with this, and can we as free software advocates hope that enough people won't put up with it that being incompatibile with the latest MS office version won't be seen as a fatal flaw of free alternatives?
I don't know if you actually use Word, but I can open
Yeah, that's called "backward compatability", and is a completely separate issue. Now try to open a Word 2003 document in '95. Yes you can save in the backward-compatible Word95 format from Word 2003, but how many Word 2003 users do this, even though as you point out very little is actually lost when using the old format?
So when you say the "current, working versions of the
What I really meant when I said that was versions of Word format that OpenOffice supports well enough to obviate the need for Word to work with those versions. That may be Word97, but is probably not Word 2003, and definitely not the next version of Word, unless OOo wants to keep chasing MS compatability forever into the future. That is the point I'm making.
Are you really complaining because they're not making their product completely backwards compatible with products released over nine years ago?
No, I'm not. I am stating that MS makes their products future incompatabile, and this creates an obstacle for broad-based OOo usage. The question is when and if compatability with
OOo is simply emulating MS Office, which is doomed to failure because there's no way that they can ever meet or exceed Microsoft, except by price.
Only as long as OOo has to catch up with recurring versions of Word. When they no longer have to do that, the chance to exceed exists.
The enemies of Democracy are
Disclaimer: I am a Mac OS X OpenOffice.org developer and a founder of the NeoOffice project.
One thing about Neo is that we've never marketed it as a replacement for Office.mac. We've never marketed it really at all. You'll also find that we're very candid about saying that folks who want a great Mac experience should go out and buy Office.mac and that really, for its price, Office.mac is quite a good deal.
I personally enjoy using Neo because I don't have to worry about going to edit a document with Office.mac only to try to launch it and find out all of our licenses are in use on the network. Since I kicked Office.mac off of my machine I've never lost productivity due to someone forgetting to quit Word on another machine. I've also never had to rummage through to find a CD key when installing it on new partitions, portables, etc. and have never caught a Word macro virus from all of the infected files that run around as attachments in my e-mail folder.
Enjoyment is always relative to ones' needs, I guess. Office:mac is quite enjoyable, though, and I highly recommend it. It's nicer than the Windows Office versions, IMHO.
ed
I hear many people complain about OpenOffice.org not opening their MS documents with correct formatting, but these people don't realize that this is not a limitation of OpenOffice, but a result of Microsofts closed and proprietary document formats.
It is a serious limitation of their use of OpenOffice. If someone offers me a product I can't use, I don't care why no matter what. What do you expect them to do, go on as if nothing was wrong? Being compatible with MS Office is required for many people. They're telling you why they can't use it. Then you can either fix it, or if you can't, accept that it is not a MS Office replacement for them. Explaining them why changes nothing.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Isn't this basically what everyone has been saying for the past ten years or so? Sure, OOo opens lots and lots of Words docs, and Excel docs, and plenty of other stuff, but not everything. Face it: until anyone can plop any word doc into OOo, it's not "there" yet. I expect they'll have all the kinks worked out in time to make OOo a nifty easter egg in Duke Nuken Forever.
ry
Are there templates for open office somewhere? I'm no document designer so even the over used ones in MS are welcome. I know I can use the MS Office templates in NeoOffice/j but I obvously have office to use them in in the first place. I think that for a lot of average people those templates make a big deal. So I am wondering where I can get templates for open office. There must be someplace? I checked openoffice.org and couldn't find any. Maybe there needs to be a site that deals with just having OO templates or maybe they need to host them on the openoffice.orghttp://openoffice.org/ website.
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
I hear many people complain about OpenOffice.org not opening their MS documents with correct formatting, but these people don't realize that this is not a limitation of OpenOffice, but a result of Microsofts closed and proprietary document formats.
.doc format, 99.9% of all spreadsheets are in Excel, etc. So for any office suite to even pretend to compete with MS Office, it NEEDS to be able to open those existing documents.
Be that as it may, 99.9% of all (editable) word processing documents on and off the Internet are in some kind of Word
If it can't, there's no real reason for people to replace MS Office with OpenOffice. And why keep two software packages around if you're perfectly happy with the one that does everything you need?
This is a show stopper! You can't display the slide presentation on one monitor and the list of slides with notes, etc. another for the presenter to use. Until this gets fixed, it can't be used in most environments as an alternative to Powerpoint.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. According to Wikipedia, StarOffice began development in 1994. This is 11 years by my math. It's like saying that Windows-NT is old and mature but Linux is brand new.
I'm not trying to get bogged down in the details of the age of MS Office over StarOffice, OO.o, Etc. Sufficed to say that since MS Word, the "core" MS Office app in my opinion, was introduced in the 80's, the office suite is the grandmother to all office suites.
What I was getting at is that regardless of age, MS has poured the resources into MS Office to make it a very mature application. OO.o does not come even close to that maturity, as is evident by it's verison number.
I see a danger in building up OO.o to get people to review it, then underdeliver because it doesn't live up to the expectations that come from years of using a mature office suite.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Dan Rather found this out the hard way, didn't he?
This is not true. Microsoft hasn't upgraded the Word standard since Office 97. The same format can be read and written by all programs since then. I've never upgraded past Office 2000 at work or home, but I can share files flawlessly back and forth between 2000 and 2003 and XP and even 97 on my old laptop.
Microsoft realized that, once they had the dominant market share, changing formats with each release just made their own customers resist upgrades. It cost them more money than it saved by frustrating their out-of-business competitors.
(Yes, I also use OpenOffice, and no, it isn't flawless in its conversions.)
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
I have not seen many issues with people switching from Word to OpenOffice for a word processor. But if you ask anyone in accounting to use the OO Spreadsheed vs. their Excel macros that they had to convert from Lotus a decade ago, the world might end. This battle will be fought with accounting departments the world over.
Not nothing. God is free.
This is a constant problem with MS document format. Word documents look different from version to version if any complex formatting is used.
This is actually one of the main reasons Word really sucks, the file format is complete utter crap.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
I use staroffice, and it's no worse than MS Office ever was or will be for my needs. CTOs would be stupid not to consider just how much money they are dumping into the toilet in Microsoft licensing. That's money that could go to R&D, year-end bonuses, even a new office building for large corps.
With the OSS/free options available, Microsoft really has turned into a parasite, because their products no longer add enough value to justify their prices.
I've given it as much a shot as I can... but in the end it's too slow, still has tons of default features I don't want (I should be turning these on, not finding them to turn them off) and isn't compatible enough with office types. Fair or not it IS industry standard and if you're going to compete you better support .doc properly.
It has potential but I'm just not ready to replace ms office with this yet.
Is anybody else disturbed by what it means for our society that a journalist, of all people, feels comfortable openly suggesting people dishonestly obtain the student version? I don't care how much you hate Microsoft, this kind of thing damages far more than Bill Gates.
You mean enterprise waited for Win 2000?
Huh???
I wholeheartedly agree, CVs/resumes in HTML are an excellent solution.
The other thing you can do (which I have done) with people that seem to think they must have a MS Word document - is rename the file from *.html to *.doc and change the MIME type (on the email attachment) from text/html to application/msword.
Whatever else you can say about Microsoft Word, even version 97 opens up simple HTML files very nicely. The drones receiving the email never notice the difference - it looks like a MS Word icon in Outlook, when they double-click it opens in MS Word - and I suspect they probably re-save it anyway after munging it and adding to their database.
Anyway, as long as you don't need complex formatting, this works very well. HTML is surprisingly good for short and simple documents (ie. exactly what a CV should be). You just have to let go of your obssession with controlling page breaks. :-)
No, actually, you're not making yourself clear. Microsoft is free to do what they want to do with their products. People have a choice - they can buy MS, or they can use OOo for free. You ask whether we as users should put up with this constant revision of the .doc format, but the only real choice we have is to either use Microsoft or not use it and hope that an alternative is good enough to save/load *real* MS Word documents. How can one "put up" with Microsoft without making any decision as to which product they will use? You're not being very clear here.
In fact, it seems to me that all you're doing is wringing your hands and saying "Microsoft isn't playing fair!" Well, of course they're not. This isn't Neowin, this is Slashdot, where we know that MS uses monopolistic tactics to undermine the competition. Will consumers put up with it? Yes, because MS Office, for example, is the best office suite on the market right now. This is strictly in terms of quality and not price, mind you.
Honestly, there's no way out. Competitors need to be able to read/write MS .doc files, but they also need to prove that they can exist independently of MS. Since MS is so prevalent on the market today, the .doc format is standard. The only way that OOo, for example, could break this stranglehold is by establishing a superior product for less money while not only providing perfect translation between OOo and MS Office files, but giving users a compelling reason to use OOo and not MS Office itself. This requires that they get out ahead of MS and stay there, which in my opinion requires a totally different approach. It also requires that Microsoft "plays fair," which is simply never going to happen.
OOo is a fairly good product (I know you'll laugh, but I find OOo to be more bloated than MS Office), but there's simply in an untenable position, given the current state of the market. MS knows that if they create a transparent format, then they will lose to free alternatives such as OOo, so unless I'm missing something, there's absolutely no inspiration for them to do so.
As for benefits to users: Honestly, the gradual evolution from Office 97 to 2003 isn't as pronounced as it was from Office 6 to 95, but 2003 is a solid product, bar none. I know, I know, we all hate M$ here, but you sometimes gotta give credit where credit's due. For OOo to be almost as good as MS Office itself is, in a way, a huge compliment, though slightly back-handed.
Now, given all of this, do you have any suggestions as to how OOo can dig itself out from under the thumb of Microsoft and gain its own market share while remaining independent of the .doc format? Honestly, I'd really like to hear it, no sarcasm!
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
I tried that for a while. I had a nice set of macros set up to auto-generate my resume in PDF -- looked really clean, professional, and effective.
I got one interview in about 6 months with it.
I started sending out a crappy-looking Word document shortly thereafter. I then got about 5 interviews, and a part-time job doing web programming -- which I ended up leaving shortly thereafter for a full-time job.
Sorry, but I'll stick with the Word documents, even if it's ugly and a pain in the ass.
Yes, the all powerful version number. We all know that Word 97 is 91 times better than Word 6.0. However, Word 6.0 was only named to compete with WordPerfect 6.0. Where is Word 4.0 and Word 5.0?
Article says: The chief drawback of OpenOffice is that it still lacks an equivalent to Microsoft's excellent Outlook e-mail and calendar program. This need not be a fatal flaw. If you're fine with a simple e-mail program, you can download the free Thunderbird program from www.mozilla.org. If you need more features, just buy Microsoft Outlook for $109
Don't forget about Sunbird. Yes, it's also in beta (and still at version 0.2 as of this writing). But it already has several of the features of Outlook that Tbird lacks (calendars and tasks management).
Never give up the search for an OSS solution!
I quote others only in order the better to express myself. -- Michel de Montaigne
Somebody or other said we should try to imagine at least one impossible thing every day. My mind is still convulsing at the thought that someone might actually like clippy.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
... people complain about the alleged 'incompatibilities' between OOo and Word, but I'd just like to make it absolutely clear that Microsoft Word's single biggest competitor is LAST YEAR's version of *word*, not OOo or WordPerfect. That's why LAST YEAR's version of Word (or other past versions) will exhibit some of the same kinds of formatting errors that OOo does when opening a word document. That's if it doesn't outright refuse to open it ("You need a newer version of Word, or ask your source to save it in an old format").
Thinking outside my Head
I come here for information, not spin and sillyness. When I read "declared it a Microsoft Office killer" I was very intrigued to say the least. Well, not sure what article they were reading, but the one I read didn't even come close to any such claim.
Kinda silly. And degrades the integrity of the whole presentation. I thought this was a refuge of the techie, not the politician.
It has to also OPEN pdf files, not just export to them... then it'll be a real killer app...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
The fact that a 17,000 row spread sheet only takes up about 750K is the best thing I've found so far. Just ignore the fact that it takes at least a minute to initially load Open Office and then an additional 4 to open the document. Now if they can get speed AND file size down....and memory footprint....and overall usability......then it might be worth using. Until then, I'll continue with the necessary evil that is MS Office...
You make it sound like OSX is the key to OO's success, or the success of Open Source completely. It's not.
Linux has been chugging right along happily without any help from OSX. OSX is just a distraction. I mean, it's okay and all, but the entire UI is closed source and that just won't work anymore.
So I'd pipe down and relax. If Apple didn't have this closed source proprietary UI that only Apple uses, OO2 would already be on OSX. Until then, you're stuck in X.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I too hope for such a "revolution". I find the workflow of Office and its clones stifling, unnatural and outdated.
But first, the new product has to take over. Then it can innovate from within, and maybe even cast off its old skin.
I would love nothing more than to see OpenOffice (and NeoOffice/J on the Mac) usurp MS Office and then go off in some really interesting new direction that everyone will invariably at first complain about, but then come to love and praise (as has always^H^H^H mostly been the case with UI workflow innovation).
Nothing is inexplicable; only unexplained -Tom Baker, Doctor Who
I agree that OO.o is not an office killer for those who require a hefty featured suite.
Realize that OO.o is also a suite that many users could comfortably live with. Reviewers typically fail to clearly emphasize how useful OO.o is for most home users or users that do not require the extended features of Office. It may be an "Office killer" to those who normally equip thenselves with a suite overengineered for their needs.
OO.o is perfectly suitable for those who mostly view Office documents and do moderate editing. If the need of the user is basic, there is no reason to pay extra for the full version of Office. OO.o definately outclasses MS Works, a product frequently equiped with many budget PC setups.
AP tested the beta. There will be revisions and more bugs addressed until the full release. OO.o is also a smaller, younger suite, so comparing it 1:1 with Office is silly.
after hearing that AP was favorably reviewing something better than a MSFT product.
[caveat - I own MSFT shares]
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
When sharing a document on a file server only one user can edit the document at a time. For our office this is a killer. We use a number of multi-user documents and whenever we tested using OO we found that only one person could edit these documents at a time. We would have to resort to running around the office and looking at the computers and finding out who had it open.
I don't think that compatability is as big an issue as some people here have made it to be. Compatability is close enough in most cases and for those who don't remember there were the times where there were WordPerfect docs and Lotus documents along with other specific documents. Basically you had to either have the app or ask someone to convert it for you. Considering those days and the solution that OO provides now (tell them to download a free office suite), I don't think compatability is that big an issue or the stumper.
I can tell you right now what my CEO would say and back when it comes time to upgrade everone to the next variant of Office suite. Pay $30,000 for Office licenses or convert everybody over to OO? We would convert to OO right there and then. Except we can't because it were interfere with our business productivity due to the file sharing issues.
As much as I like the idea of OpenOffice giving MS a black eye and some competition, the whole idea of office suites makes me sick. I've always felt that the need for office suites (esp. in MS case) is saying the that the underlying OS is so poorly designed for working with multiple data formats that we've had to develop this virtual OS on top to make the apps work together more seamlessly. I would really like to see a GUI based OS that can allow applications to interact as well as command line apps work in Unix. Do I really have to buy my spreadsheet app from the same company as my word processor in order to make them work together?
Office apps always remind me of how low we aim in the software world to build easy to use system. I always wonder what would have happened if OpenDOC had been managed properly.
Come Abiword-2.2 is small and can handle all your .doc needs. Also free as well.
the document format is simply a zip file of xml and meta files. Just run unzip on your file and you'll see. This opens up all sorts of possibilities, including the ability to compare docs via a simple diff, and perform XSL transformations to convert to HTML.
- - -
clippy advises you not to do anymore illegal operations...like download a competitor's software and stop buying microsoft's
Some people believe 1-1=3 and for the sake of being politically correct, we should respect their differences
I've been using Open Office since I got my last computer. My biggest complaint is that graphics are not embedded into documents by default. I only encountered this problem the other day so I haven't yet figured out how to change it. I was writing a bioinformatics paper and included some graphics. Since my printer is a piece of shit Lexmark (Never buy a Lexmark) and recently developed the inability to feed paper properly, I emailed the document to myself and went to print at the library. When I got to the library the images were not there, only place holders. I've never encountered this using word. This is my biggest complaint about open office. Maybe it's hidden somewhere in the options, but I never saw an option to embed images in the document.
My second biggest complaint is that it keeps pestering me when I try and save in MSOffice format.
Nice Marmot
Disclaimer: I am a Mac OS X OpenOffice.org developer and a founder of the NeoOffice project.
One of the biggest reasons behind the SISSL license is of course StarOffice. When Sun open sourced StarOffice, not all of the code could be opened due to licensing agreements or third party contracts. Two prime examples are the dictionaries and spellcheckers in StarOffice 6 (L&H, I believe...they were replaced in OOo by Kevin H.'s spelling libraries) and the WordPerfect filters of StarOffice 6 (just finishing being replicated in an open source fashion).
So it's slightly different then Mozilla and Netscape...it was more of a solution that allowed them to open source as much of SO as possible without having to cripple their commercial product by removing code that was incompatible with the open soruce license. While all of the development is essentially publicly accessible (unlike Netscape), the SISSL license is still required to allow all of the contracted libraries to be included in the final commercial StarOffice product.
Originally OpenOffice.org was going to be released under the SISSL license only. LGPL was actually thrown in as an afterthought by the now departed former head of StarDiv. I'm glad it was since it let me make the transition to full GPL to avoid all of the closed source proprietary nonsense that SISSL allows :)
ed
MS Office is bloated, awkward and confusing.
MS Office is succesful because of bloat. The market of the early 90's had lots of word processors that were very good, fast, easy to use, pretty powerful and ranged in price from $39-150. People still paid $495 for Word/WordPerfect/AmiPro. They couldn't use the cheaper products because they needed a few of those bloat features.
microsoft longhorn: bad (buggy etc.)
apple tiger: good
linux: good
but at the end of the day if a person had read all these reviews...do you really think they would buy microsoft windows instead of apple or linux. I believe most would simply because "everyone" will use windows. it really is sad who will prevail despite so many good reviews.
Some people believe 1-1=3 and for the sake of being politically correct, we should respect their differences
Oh come on, mods. This is 13.636% off-topic, by my math. The point is that here is an awesome tool, an opensource project being realistically compared to a cornerstone of Microsoft's desktop empire, and we have Sun to thank for that, in large part. My comment was clearly ironic, pointing out that OO.o is significant, praising Sun for helping to make it a reality, and getting a zing in on /.ers for being so rabidly anti-Sun so much of the time.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
(Ironically, I got hired by a company that uses Open Office instead of MS office)
Of course! They were the only ones who could read your resume.
what they really need is to use towelie from south park instead of that stupid goddamn paperclip (i hate that thing so much! goddamnit i hate it i hate it).
:
and it can only ask you one question
"you wanna go get high?"
There was a Word 5.0 for the Mac. It shipped around the same time as Word 2.0 for Windows. Some people still consider it to be the best. Word. Ever.
no dood, use groff
The release times are dfiferent primarily because we have different priorities. It's difficult enough to work out all the bugs in our existing graphics layer. Moving to 2.0 requires significant amounts of re-engineering, yet again. There are also a number of equivalent major tasks that have to be weighed against each other:
All of these tasks are at least as complicated as moving to 2.0. We've decided that higher priorities are getting to our Final release and improving our Mac OS X integration with things like our Spotlight & Aqua control integration. If someone really needs a 2.0 feature, the X11 version will be available for them to use. We'll start using 2.0 in Neo/J eventually, but it's going to require a lot of engineering and, being two people, we don't have the time.
For some more info you can check out this forum thread. There's some more stuff in previous /. comments I've posted as well.
ed
And if the employer says "Please submit your resume in Word format,"
I would much rather die any horrible, painful death that you can think of than even think about working with someone lacking that much basic common sense.
Everyone is born right-handed; only the greatest overcome it
OpenOffice.Org's codebase is over 16 years old. It is quite mature, and for a while it implemented its own toolkit simply because the many platforms it ran on didn't have any standard toolkits. It became a dying piece of software until Sun revived it in 1999 and gave it to the community (similar to how Netscape kept the browser alive by giving it to the community). Everyone thinks that OO.o copied alot of its look and feel from MS (and recently they have been trying to do that more and more, not that that is necessarily bad), but go back 5 or 10 years and you'll see that OO.o had many features before MS and MS (surprisingly) copied all of its biggest features from already existing office suites. MS became the market leader by copying off the likes of OO.o, hopefully OO.o can take the lead and finish the job by getting a few ideas back from MS (although in all honesty, the only big thing implemented in MS Office in the past couple of years has been digital signing and other permission based things, which imho OpenOffice.org implements way better and easier already. Also I think MS requires you to be running Server 2003 or something to use the key store which sucks).
Regards,
Steve
The program requires at least 128 megabytes of computer memory -- we ran it with far more.
I'm not one to critique other's writings, but it would seem that you would like to end a review with a one line summary of your satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) of the product. But instead he states the obvious? The quote is very strange, with a hyphen no less to emphasize the second part. Does the author see the fact that OpenOffice will run with MORE than 128 MB or RAM as a selling point?
This is the problem with too many software projects. They feel that it is ok to overlook the kinks while complaining about Microsoft and other proprietary products. I feel the reason that MS is still able to get people to run out and buy their software is they do a great job of polishing it so at least it looks good enough to buy.
Now if more Open Source projects could learn to do that polish we would really get somewhere. The guys over at Panic (http://www.panic.com/) do a great job of polishing up their stuff before they push it out.
When Mozilla decided to polish up their product and enhance their branding and release Firefox there was an amazing increase in interest in their project. The software did not change a whole lot in the core functionality but it certainly felt like a better web browser.
I have to try Open Office again sometime. The last I tried it was clunky and slow. It would be nice to see that has changed.
Brennan Stehling - http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/
PS- Why would you have virus concerns about a document that YOU are producing and sending to someone else?
I won't go to the lengths of comparing MS Office and OpenOffice (since I don't have a copy of MS Office to compare with), but on my Debian box, an installation of OOo is upwards of 100M to download, and when it's finally installed (nearly two hours later, due to my relatively slow DSL connection), it takes about a minute to load even *with* prelinking. After trying a few other distros, I have concluded that OOo is just plain slow on linux. Granted, in my previous life as a windozer, I don't recall OOo being particularly slow.
OOo is bloated, slow, unresponsive. It is cumbersome. On screen font display (with X11) is embarrassingly ugly, no matter what antialiasing autohinting is being used. It is the sole reason I started using LaTeX: I was tired of documents looking ugly on screen, and printing differently than I expected. Since migrating, I have learned how much I dislike Windows, but I've also learned to respect some of their software for its quality--namely their office suite.
Now that I'm using Macintoshes more frequently, and am stuck with G3's, OOo is even more irrelevant. AbiWord finally doesn't suck royally on a Mac, but it still doesn't do smart quotes properly--or at all. Perhaps MS Office is still the most viable solution specifically because it doesn't suck as badly as the competition, bloat or not.
Some places like to add their own information to the resumes, which makes pdf a poor choice.
And if they try to open it and it comes up in Acrobat, an HR worker (who probably can't understand the idea of a computer not having MS software on it) might just decide that if you can't follow simple instructions you're not worth a follow up, rather than asking you to resend it.
I submit mine in Rich Text Format. OO.o can write it correctly, without format errors, it still supports all the pretty formatting I use, and an HR drone who gets it on an email will just see the blue "W" and not know the difference.
Only on slashdot could a review of an office suite turn into an excuse to bash Bush.
Why do I never have mod points when I need them!?
While it may look better to you, a lot of companies won't even be able to open it (most wouldn't even know what it is).
...) Best thing to do is to ask what format they prefer.
Sadly, the actual format it's submitted in does matter, and not so much for the look. The format they use is the format one should submit into so it doesn't go thru multiple conversions or even OCR. If you use another format, it may come out looking VERY crappy after conversion (all formatting and basic layout may be lost, words split across columns,
Besides, unless you're applying as a graphics designer job or something like that, experience, knowledge and interview skills will matter a lot more than some fancy looking resume. I doubt it'll really help landing a job. I've used the word format most of the time as I was told to, and I never had much problem finding employment (haven't been unemployed over the last 10 years).
///<sig
I'm having to deal with that now too. One of the jobs I've applied for recently wanted me to upload my resume in .doc format. I don't have MS Office, so I had to have one of my roommates view my resume on his computer so we could fix the embarrassing formatting errors in the translation.
I don't blame OpenOffice for this, since the problem is Microsoft's crappy file formats and the pathological eagerness of many organizations to depend on them. However, it was still a rather irritating barrier I had to fight through to apply for a job. And most people, unfortunately, would perceive it as a problem with OpenOffice, and stick with MS instead of dealing with the hassle.
Because I cannot ceritify the mail servers my email might pass through, including the receiving machine itself, where if any machine along the way contained a virus, it could in theory detect a .doc attachment and append the virus to it before being placed into the recipients inbox. If I supply my resume in a format that cannot usefully have a virus attached to it, I prevent this from occurring.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
My brother has the same problem, smart, very technical, decent looking resume, but then turns everyone off in the face to face meeting and can't get hired.
Given that I have Asperger syndrome, a brain disorder that impairs my face-to-face skills with strangers, what can I do about it other than what I'm already doing, going through Indiana's vocational rehabilitation system? Should I collect fifty rejection letters and submit them to the SSA as evidence that I am unemployable?
The advantage [of formatting your resume in HTML] over plain text, of course, is you can use some fancy formatting.
However, HTML has the additional handicap that font sizes and margins vary even more than they do for plain text and .doc, so a resume designed for one page might overflow to a second page on the recipient's browser.
I'm not sure what need the average home user has for Word, or why employers would assume everyone has it. Of course, we all have it at the office. But if you're working on your resume, chances are you're not in the office.
Don't most public libraries have licenses for Microsoft Word software?
As long as this doesn't change, Openoffice won't make a bigger impact against MS Office than the old Mozilla suite made against MS IE. Given the messy, bloated, underdocumented and arcane codebase of OOo (which even includes its own homemade cross-platform GUI toolkit and component architecture), and, as a result, minimum community involvement in the development process, I'm afraid this situation won't change any time soon. Perhaps the Openoffice project should have done the same with Staroffice that Mozilla did with Netscape - throw away the old codebase and start from scratch. I'm afraid it's too late for that now. After all, it took Mozilla seven years to get from its beginnings to Firefox 1.0. Sun would hardly support such a massive development effort anyway.
Openoffice 2.0 looks like no genuine improvement, but just cosmetics and superficial hacks [such as the GTK or Qt widgets on top of the built-in GUI toolkit] of a rotten codebase.
Unfortunately, AbiWord fails as a lean Firefox-ish alternative to monolithic OOo - the program is so buggy and unreliable that it's barely usable.
-F
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
Everyone does their resumes in Word
Not exactly ... 2 years back I did my resume in OOo 1.0 for a couple of reasons:
Judging by the significant salary increase I made shortly afterwards, I guess that OOo is "enterprise ready" ;-)
Coincidentally, I am currently rewriting my resume in OOo 2.0 (using the RPMs from the developer builds). I must say that Writer has really become rock solid in terms of features and stability.
you have people like...radio-based "computer shows"...spouting idiotic bullshit like "If a program is free, you can be sure it has adware, spyware and maybe viruses".
Ah. "The Computer & Technology Show with Marc and Mark"--except that they don't know Linux (or Mac), or cameras, or television, or open source, or much of anything outside of Windoze.
Of courxe, that doesn't stop them from bad-mouthing Linux or open source.
gewg_
.DOC is NOT a standard. It's not even a format that's 100% interchangable between different versions of Word/Works. And let's not go there about the foreign (mainly Asian) troubles with compatibility.
MS thrives on changing it just enough to force people into buying the newest versions.
Go OOo!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
"(Of course, the Office edition for students and teachers costs $149, and no one's checking IDs)."
OK, so like I point out frequently, it is not piracy and theft, although it is illegal. (Assuming the license is valid.) Still, how do they get away promoting it, violating the license, that is? Do you think there is a wink, wink, nudge, nudge, with MS? Even in such an article?
all the best,
drew
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
my GOD what an ass.
Don't mention that it's free - that's the LAST thing you should mention. Let it stand and compare on it's own BEFORE you mention price.
Demontrate it's ability to work WITH MS Office - not necessarily replace it. Believe me, they'll come to that conclusion on their own.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I still have my doubts if it'll ever come out for OS X (and yes, I know it'll run in X11, and no, that doesn't count).
I beg your pardon:
NeoOffice/J
for OS X is rock solid. No X11 needed. Two grad papers I recently turned in were written using this, with advanced charts and tables, headers, footers, etc. Works fine in 10.4 Tiger also.
Actually, I was speaking of some radio show they had on Saturdays on Max910 (formerly HotTalk 1080 - and now an oldies music station called KISN) in Portland, OR. It was "Computer Time" or something of that sort. I think one guy's name was Ken and another was "Techenstein". And there was one more.
The guys were fairly knowledgable as far as general small-business home-user stuff goes, but they tended to offer a lot of really stupid advice. Besides the comment about "if a program is free, it's because it has spyware, adware or viruses", one of the guys was constantly saying that pop-up blockers were pointless. He insisted that, if you are getting popups while you're on the internet, it's because your computer is infected and you should take better precautions to avoid that in the first place. He said this almost every single weekend on the show.
It was absurd! So there have to be plenty of people out there who think the reason they get advertising popups when they visit drudgereport.com, is because their computer is infected rather than the website simply loads popups for revenue!
Of course, I suspect every big city has guys like this. And the unfortunate thing is that they know just enough to appear credible and "do good" in most cases, but that bankroll of credit allows them to be incredibly stupid at times, "doing harm" and be taken just as seriously by those who know no better.
But don't take my words for a condemnation of computer radio shows entirely. Some are actually very good. Probably the best that I've heard so far is Leo Laporte's show which I can pick up on KFI's streaming broadcast (I'm now living in Colorado, so it's the only way I can pick it up). He's one of the few guys from TechTV/G4 that actually really knew his stuff - even if it was almost entirely just Windows oriented.
And in other venues, I still like Kevin Rose who is still on G4, with his girlfriend/wife Sarah Lane. He's a big linux and open source proponant. He stands out as the real deal on a station full of so many "I'd rather be a VJ on MTV" personalities.
By the way - fuck you Entercom. Bring back Rick Emerson and Clyde Lewis!
We can't address startup time too much as a significant portion of it is taken up by both the Java 1.3.1 VM overhead and the parsing of all of the Mac font info. This is one of multiple reasons we need to consider moving to Java 1.5 (no small task given the amount of 1.3.1 VM specific Carbon workarounds in the code).
In the meantime all we can do is recommend to users that they leave Neo/J running. Patrick recently made this a bit more common since closing the last document using the red close button in the window no longer exits the application; the user has to explicitly use Quit from the menus to exit.
ed
correction: -standard +format
MS Word uses proprietary format files, which are not standardized in any way that matters (open documented format or even ISO).
Does anyone know if there is any add-on "library" type software for OpenOffice?
For example, say I'm part of a team maintaining technical documentation. I log in using this phantom software and it shows me a list of documents in the library or archive. I can then check out a document to edit. The software now lists that document as checked out by me so that no one else can edit it until I return the doc.
For some real icing on the cake, if it even keeps track of changes between each revision a la ViewCVS.
I remember coming across some software that did part of this but it was a real hack. It involved getting each user to log into the document server using VNC and edit run several copies of OpenOffice directly on the server!
"Microsoft properly asserts that OpenOffice.org is not 100% compatible with their product. Microsoft, however, has apparently decided not to support the OpenOffice.org formats either, for which they have no excuse: the standards for OpenOffice.org documents are publicly available, whereas Microsoft makes it a habit to sue people for reverse engineering their own formats."
Just save it as a PDF. That's 100% enterprise compatible, and for the lamers that aren't (they don't officially count anyway), bundle free Adobe reader with your resume.
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
If I supply my resume in a format that cannot usefully have a virus attached to it, I prevent this from occurring.
Actually, you're wrong. I once submitted a resume in PDF format; an intermiediate gateway rendered the PDF to text, converted it to DOC and inserted a virus. Nightmare.
While OpenOffice is a really good effort it has yet to become a true Office killer. There was a time in the past when Microsoft was not the big name in productivity applications. Take for instance Excel for Windows. It was up against Lotus 123 which was pretty much the speadsheet application.
Companies being presented with Excel had several barriers of entry that Microsoft had to overcome. They had existing 123 spreadsheets that they needed to keep using, Excel required Windows, Excel cost money, and they had people that had been trained on 123. Microsoft responded by giving Excel the capability to read 123 spreadsheets, shipped runtime versions of Windows for free with Excel, gave Lotus switchers discounts, and made Excel friendly to 123 macros and keyboard shortcuts. With every one of these issues Microsoft tackled they got more and more Lotus adherents to switch to Excel. When they added the capability in Excel 4.0 to write 123 files, they eliminated the last thing standing in the way of most switchers. When Excel people could existing transparently in 123 environments organizations could switch to Excel which was packaged with Microsoft's other productivity app, Word.
OpenOffice is slowly following a similar path as Microsoft did in the late 80s. They're doing what they can to make OO.o capable of handling existing Office documents, making sure it runs on Windows, giving it away for free, and presenting users with apps that look and behave similarly to their Microsoft counterparts. As each of these offerings gets better and the whole package becomes "like Office, but better" people will switch from Microsoft Office to OO.o. You can't hit only some of the marks and have everyone switch over just because the package is free. There's a lot more to cost than the initial price of things.
OpenOffice.org is no more an Office killer than Excel 2.0 was a Lotus 123 killer. It took the ability to do everything 123 did and then some for the scales to really tip in Excel's favor. However as Excel's topping of 123 or Word's topping of WordPerfect has shown, just because a product is immensely popular (for whatever reason) it isn't impossible to dethrone it by offering something better.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Anger problem.
Simple HTML.
I keep mine in this format. When people -- inevitably -- specifically request a Word-formatted resume, I rename the file from resume.html to resume.doc and send. Works like a charm.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
You're lucky. Trust me on this, I used to work tech support for a large financial institution, just as they made the switch from NT4/Office 97 to XP Pro/Office XP. I got plenty of calls:
I must agree with other posters here, even a Word-to-Word migration isn't flawless, and certainly the problems getting all Word docs loaded in OOo can be replicated getting old Word docs loaded in a newer Word version.
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
I did my resume up in LaTex a few years ago when I was a graduating Senior. I handed it out at the career fair, though I had no intentions of taking employment anywhere; gradschool was a'callin'.
The point here being, it did LOOK different, and in my opinion better, than most everyone else's resume. It caught interviewer's eyes immediately.
My homepage had four file types for them, as above, LaTeX, DVI, PS, and PDF. All print out the same exact way - always. For any corp. I thought would want to OCR the thing, I made a "scannable" version using a plain ascii text file. Different keywords, no formatting, etc.
So I disagree. The LOOK does in fact matter when dealing face to face with people. The file formats (PS and PDF) should be printable by 99.9999 percent of possible employers, and guarantee that the resume will always print the same. OCR? Feed the robot the text file.
The whole reason I did this was BECAUSE MS-Word was printing the thing differently on different systems. So surely your solution of "use their format" to save the style from changing was, to me, useless.
Plus, it was a kick-ass resume, content wise.
Only on slashdot could a review of an office suite turn into an excuse to bash Dan Rather.
The article is reviewing the beta of OO 2. You are talking about OO 1. The article claims that file format compatibility has improved in 2. (Actually the article claims it is now "flawless" - that I don't believe, although I don't doubt it has improved.)
The problem you are referring to btw is precisely the whole "industry lock-in" problem (that allows Microsoft to "extort" it's customers and have such high profit margins) that keeps MS entrenched and what the article pitches OO as a possible solution to. Ref. "network effects" and "critical mass" in economics terms. In my opinion, much of industry is dying to get out of it ... even if it's seldom explicitly stated, we can "feel" this sentiment in every new client of our software, they are ALL afraid of lock-in to proprietary formats and the extortion that they feel would inevitably result. They all demand that we support XML, so that they can never be totally locked in. The way I see it, there is one primary reason why everyone is so aware and afraid of the effects of lock-in to closed formats - they've all been burned, and are being burned, by MS.
I would imagine that occurence would be highly suspcious if the text of the message mentioned which particular format the attachment was allegedly in. "Please find attached my resume in machine-readable PDF..." and the attachment is actually .DOC?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
In Billy's system, what is the value of 458 + YF?
Mu.
I suspect every big city has guys like this.
Yup. In SoCal we've got 'em coming out our ears.
Besides M&M, there's Jeff Levy who (outside his stock 15 answers) mostly gets it wrong.
Leo got the slot that this bozo kept for years and years. (Tenure is an amazing thing.)
Comparing Levy's show (he got a slot on another station) to Leo's show is the embodyment of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar".
the best...is Leo Laporte's show...on KFI
No question there.
TechTV/G4...was almost entirely just Windows oriented
Leo's radio show is VERY broad, however.
gewg_
Here's a practical way (IMHO of course) for end-users and corporations alike to embrace OO, while maintaining MS Office compatibility, staying on MS' good side by not pirating their Office Suite and saving money in the process.
Note: Read MS' EULA just to make sure, but I don't think corporations would have any licensing issues using these viewers.
Use OpenOffice with its default formats and export to DOC/XLS/PPS-PPT when necessary.
Download the following MS viewers for testing exported versions of OO documents/spreadsheets/presentations before distributing them, or simply viewing a DOC/PPS/XLS file that is not importing correctly in OO:
MS Word Viewer 2003
MS Excel Viewer 2003
MS PowerPoint Viewer 2003
Idea for the OpenOffice programming community
Return the favor by creating OO viewers for those using MS Office.
Comments/Suggestions welcomed!
Shouldn't be too hard. If you do, please add a "cut the crap" checkbox to strip out all of the manual tweaking. Kind of like Plain Text for LaTex but maybe leave in things like bold, italic, lists. I'd love to have a way to suck up an MS-Word document, smash it through a strainer and return it relatively pure and holy without the zillion little overlapping and often conflicting little manual tweaks that tend to make getting it to look right so difficult.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...and see how much fun it is when you can't get rid of that ^%$#$^# dog because the constant animations are chewing up all of your bandwidth.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Two things are happening in that area. First off, the 51st buyers are starting to pile up to the point where they're a significant market of their own. Second off, the main FOSS apps these days are well and truly into IJW territory.
Perhaps more importantly when competing against Win32 rather than OS X, they're firmly in IJKW territory. Yes, a Minesweeper Consultant and Solitaire Expert is half the price of a decent Linux tech, but they do need to be there at least 3 times as often.
It's worth avoiding Win32 for the savings in downtime alone. Until the Mac Mini, the cost decisions were easy. Now if Apple (or anyone) will release a reliable PowerPC box of any size for 2/3 the price of a Mac Mini, I will cheerfully sell them in place of x86 white boxes. Won't run Win32, won't run x86 cracks (which represent at least 95% of the, cough, market), where's the catch?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I think it's well over 12% now and accelerating.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...specifically, when Microsoft implodes, if not before.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...that the page breaks are a well-known flaw in MS-Office. You can often demo it using the very same copy of MS-Word... just format up a document with one printer set as the default, then print it to another printer (same sized paper and all). Any seriously sized document without a lot of manual page breaks in it is going to break in different places.
OpenOffice doesn't do that.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
StarOffice 5.2 morphed into OpenOffice. The new StarOffice is but OpenOffice plus seasoning (additional file I/O formats, more bugfixes etc) and pricetag.
If you want a truly different office suite, try KOffice.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
One of the things OOo 2 brings us is lower barriers to entry to their developer pool. Someone with great ideas like yours has the power to actually make those changes with their very own two hands. Starting now.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...opens Word files of his flawless ass.
Hey, maybe it's the goatse.cx guy?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
That describes MS-Word's autosave quite well. "I'll just vanish from your screen without warning, but don't worry, I'll completely rape your document during autosave recovery - but only the bits you didn't think to check carefully when you hastily scrolled through all 400-odd pages, what with the deadline and all.
OOo's autosave works perfectly (once you've named your document, that is) every time. Across a power outage, you might lose a few hundred keystrokes (on Linux, this is, Win32 is likely to cost you more), but across a crash (rare) you lose none. And this is OOo 1.1.4, not the shiny-new we-also-walk-dogs version.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
All it needs is a matching nice text editor. Integrating vim would be a way to solve that. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Personally, OOo has almost everything I need, other than a "Solver" (multivariate optimisation) function. (There are steps towards this, but no full implementation.)
The niftiest thing of OOo - F2 in "Writer".
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.