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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!"
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.
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
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'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.
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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?
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 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.
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?!
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 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 was purposedly designed to be a minefield), but lamenting about it.
.DOC format, people won't ditch Word for OOo. Period.
.DOC format, and keep working on the import filter until it's near-perfect. Then OOo will really take over Word, and they can resume their normal development cicle...
I am one of these people who complain about exactly that. Well, not exactly complain, because what you say is true (it's not OOo's fault that the
However, the result is the same: as long as OOo doesn't reach 99.999% compatibility with some version of the
My opinion is that the OOo guys should drop whatever they're doing for a while, choose one version of the
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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
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
Formatting Microsoft Word Documents
The only way to get a document to appear the same way on different computers is to use the PDF format (which is one of the export formats for OpenOffice).
In a world that is Free and Open, who needs Windows and Gates?
Have you tried making a bug report?
Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
Although there are still areas where Open Office still needs some help. I just TA'd a class at the university (intro to computer applications - basic computer couse with lectures on basic computer theory and labs on software and web development). One of the assignment was done in word, using some of their nice pretty features (hey, it's an applications course...). The assignment included a section where they were to write a few paragraphs comparing open office to word. Overall, the comparions found them to be fairly equal, with OO having the added bonus of being free. However, I did get a few comments on how hard it was to apply styles correctly in OO and also to use some of their auto generated content functions. On the bright side, their approach to figure and table captaions is fantastic, and IMHO is vastly superior to the microsoft approach.
Overall though, the biggest complaint was that when you boot up OO all you get is a big blank grey screen with no instructions on where to go from there. For a beginner computer user, this is a big stumbling block. Very little problem technically, but it does seem to create a bit of a barier to learning how to use the software, particularily for new computer users. I find this is a fairly common problem with open source software in particular (although I can mention a few pieces of commercial software that have this problem in spades).
...no two people are not on fire.
I know you are being sarcastic, but the fact is that Microsoft Office is destined to be a niche product like WordPerfect. In the case of WordPerfect it's law firms, for example. In the case of Word, it'll be the businesses who got sucked into Microsoft's "business automation" lock-in strategy too deep to bail out.
In a way, this reminds me of all the proprietary TCP/IP-work-alikes back in the day. There were lots of proprietary networks, and some companies even invested millions into their infrastructures. Now, those proprietary networks still exist, but in very limited numbers and the companies using them pay rediculous sums of money to maintain them. This is the future for Microsoft Office.
For everyone else, such as myself, my family, university students, huge numbers of small businesses, large corps looking to save a few million dollars, and governments looking to control their own data, OO.org really is an Office killer.
Yes, soon, we can break out the champagne!
Oh, wait...the battle's not quite over.
My biggest problem with applications like Open Office and Microsoft Word is that the general way they're put together sucks. It seems everybody thinks that applications always have to be built based off of what people are familiar with. Certainly there are strong arguments for that.
But wouldn't it be cool if one of these "Microsoft Killing Apps" would strike out in a truly new, really interesting direction, rather than focusing on reimplementing everything Microsoft has done? If price is the only selling point for this software, I don't think much of its future. At some point, it's going to have something substantially better than what MS has.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
... 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
Only people who have never worked in tech support make comments like this. If you've ever had to support a product that had a major UI change, you would understand that it really pisses people off.
If the point is to get everyone to move off of Office, then you *MUST* emulate Office to a large degree, and yes this includes look and feel.
I'm not saying that innovative new ways to handle the UI are bad, I am saying that the average joe needs them in moderation in order to be able to cope with the least amount of frustration.
To say "tough" people will get used to it, is bad way to look at it.. because people won't.. they will go back to using whatever they felt most comfortable with. Don't think for a second that Microsoft doesn't spend millions of dollars on researching the UI and interactivity of it's Office Suite.. They most likely realize that they are tied to some bad UI decisions are have slowly worked on phasing them out over the course of time. (since existing users are used to said features)
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. -
However, the result is the same: as long as OOo doesn't reach 99.999% compatibility with some version of the .DOC format, people won't ditch Word for OOo. Period
I hear people say this all the time but I don't buy it. The fact is people have shown a willingness to do painful conversions when there is substantial benefit. That's how PCs replaced minis and mainframes in corporate America on desktops (and yes that was a very difficult transition). That's how Word replaced WordPerfect. That's how Excel replaced Lotus 1-2-3. That's how WWW replaced dialup boards. etc...
A free office suite will replace MSOffice in corporate America when it becomes substantially better. We are a long way off from that. 90% is an impossible goal given how closely tied Word is to Microsoft technologies.
Both are very bloated. Truth be told, most software nowadays is much bigger than whatever was their equivalent back in the 1990s. That's why I like Write and Calc, by Mariner Software for Macintosh.
.... $ 229 .... $ 229 .... $ 399
.... $ 59.95 .... 59.95 .... $ 89.95
They are fast, lean, powerful, ellegant, and really damn rock-solid alternatives to those, uh, slightly overweight programs of debatable reliability. And much cheaper than Microsoft's stuff too. Not as cheap as OpenOffice, sure, but this much quality deserves a reward. So, say to to bloatware, try Mariner's stuff! But first, compare these:
Microsoft:
Word 2004
PPoint 2004
Office 2004
Mariner:
Write
Calc
MarinerPak (Write + Calc)
Circumcision is child abuse.
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
.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..."
Well, at least for me the OpenOffice menus configuration have more sense, here an example:
In MS Office to change the format of a page (width, length, orientation, etc) you must acces the FILE/PAGE CONFIGURATION (or something similar, I use the Spanish version); while in OpenOffice you use FORMAT/PAGE.
For me, the MS way is nonsense, the FILE menu must be for everything related to the SYSTEM file tools, open, save, save as, etc; and the FORMAT menu is the right place to put the option to modify the FORMAT of the page.
Another menu I think is kind of stupid is the VIEW menu, View??? I think you could put everything in that menu View/Page properties, View/Windows List, View/Language Options, etc. So it is another stupid menu.
Because of that, I agree with you, btw, have you seen that all the menu bars have at MOST 9 or 10 menus?? usually they have like 5 (File, Edit, Options, Tools, Help). And then those menus have like 20 options and more submenus!!! (just look at the View menu in OO or in Firefox). Now that really pisses me off.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Right...and exactly how does that fact make it any more logical...?