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!"

Comments

Doesn't look like that in-depth a review...

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

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.

Re:Doesn't look like that in-depth a review...

[brontus3927]

*disclaimer -- I haven't tried the OO.o 2.0 beta (technically 1.9) yet, I've only used 1.1.4 and whatever version was current in 2002.*

In my office, we use Word and Excel, a lot. I regularly use 5 spreadsheets totaling 15MB in size (one is 10MB). Fear of loosing something (and not noticing it) has kept us from trying other office suites or even upgrading from Office 97.

That's the minor of the two issues however. IIRC, OpenOffice doesn't even have any OLE Automation, so I can't call Calc from Writer to grab a value in a spreadsheet and paste it into my document.
Further, MS Office uses VBA for it's macros. I do a lot of macro work, and some of my macros are relatively complex--I semi-automate form genration. One is about 6 pages of code and has 5 UserForms.
OpenOffice uses a non-visual BASIC for it's macros. I don't have anyway to port my more advanced macros even if I wanted to try. I don't really fault OO.o for this, I doubt MS is going to just hand over VBA for OpenOffice to implement. But for these reasons, OpenOffice isn't an option for me.

Then there's the issue of people who used earlier versions and didn't like it so they won't try newer versions, even if they are better. I have a friend who tried OpenOffice in 2002, and for some reason, SpellCheck wouldn't work for him. He returned to MS Office, and has never looked back.

Re:if only it were SLIGHTLY more ms word compatibl

[mark-t]

That's what "export to PDF' is for.

Or heck, you can even save it in MS Office doc format.

Re:if only it were SLIGHTLY more ms word compatibl

[DavidTC]

Don't worry about word compatible. Just make it a PDF.

Not quite there yet

[Mori Chu]

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.

Re:Not quite there yet

[BroadwayBlue]

In my experience, moving files between OO.o and Office is about the same experience as moving between different versions of Office. Even in Office 97, sending a document created in Word 97 did not appear the same on another computer with Word 97 if the same print driver was not installed. There's a lot to be desired (i.e., there a lot of buggy things) in Office. But perhaps b/c so many people are familiar with them and accept them they are hardly noticed. And I think that is the biggest problem with moving to OO.o; different bugs.

At least with OO.o you can control your version and not have a forced upgrade (license dependent) that breaks your workflow or compatability with existing files. How many time has MS done that now?

Re:Not quite there yet

[jmrSudbury]

If you prepare a lot of Word docs for printing by others and are not 100% sure what version of Word or open office they are using, perhaps you should try getting open office to export them to pdf.

Re:Not quite there yet

[magus_melchior]

There are workarounds for a couple of the things you mentioned: the Styles and Formatting box can be torn off by dragging the (admittedly puny) space, or hidden away (just hit F11). If you don't want it to be there when you open up Writer, just hide it with F11.

And unless colors/images are a big deal, you can use the PDF export capability of OpenOffice.org.

Re:Nice review

[Anonymous Coward]

Neo office

NeoOffice/J uses a combination of Carbon and Java and features Aqua menus.

Re:When the kinks get....

[jpardey]

More like, "You are typing keys, see non-existant help topic 54321 once Java Run Time decides to load the help browser." If only it was written in portable C++... or COBOL.

Re:if only it were SLIGHTLY more ms word compatibl

[Phu5ion]

unfortunately, for some god-awful reason a lot of companies like getting resumes in MS Word format.

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.

OO is STILL lacking some features

[Tsu Dho Nimh]

To get me to completely stop using MSFT Office, FrameMaker, and a few other programs, here's what OO has to add.

1. Import SVG and edit it ... at least a simple subset of the language. It can export its drawings as SVG, so what's the problem with importing and editing?
2. Have the ability to put an overbar on text, which is the common way to indicate a negative signal on chip pins.
3. Have an outlining mode that works like MSFT Word's outline, where you can selectively see or hide levels, drag levels into position, etc. Right now, OO has an "outline", but you can't do much with it. I use outlines as an editing tool, to reorganize material in a document.
4. Stop mucking with my HTML: I would like it to be able to open, edit, and save an HTML file without changing the existing code. OK, Word is far worse in this regard, but OO still messes up HTML.

Re:OO is STILL lacking some features

[the_2nd_coming]

solution to number 4.....

Use An F***ing TEXT EDITOR!!!

Re:Plain text resume

[tepples]

You'd send a plain text resume to someone? Good luck with that. Not to say it's impossible to get a job like that, but I wouldn't say you have good odds.

I'd guess that the keyword scanners seem to process ISO Latin 1 plain text files more quickly and more reliably than Microsoft's under-.documented format. But then I can't get a job no matter how I submit my resume, be it txt, sxw, html, rtf, doc, or pdf. The purpose of a resume is to get interviews, and I do get interviews, but then I get "Sorry, we went with another candidate" even for a cashier job at a home improvement chain.

A lot of times opening MS Powerpoint and Word documents [in OOo] also results in (sometimes really bad) formatting errors.

They're often not much worse than the formatting errors you get when you take a document from one version of Microsoft Office to another, from one version of Microsoft Windows to another or to or from Mac OS X, or from geographic region to another. Different geographic regions often have different paper sizes (US Letter vs. A4); different operating systems and versions thereof often have slightly different fonts with slightly different metrics that throw off formatting. If you want to preserve line and page breaks, PDF is most reliable.

Re:When the kinks get worked out?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can save your PPT from OO.o in HTML that will go through as a slideshow and viewable in any HTML viewer feasible for the purpose.

Re:better marketing is really what's required

[Nasarius]

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.

For OpenOffice.org to succeed, they need to improve the product to the point where it can actually compete with MS Office. It's good, and adequate for most people who just need to do simple word processing and spreadsheets, but it's also ugly, slow, and lacking in features (compare Excel's graphing abilities to OO Calc's). It may seem petty, but they really need to drop the Win95-esque look. It's ugly on Windows, and it's even uglier on KDE.

One cool thing about OpenOffice..

[sucati]

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.

Yes for OS X native here:

[bach37]

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.