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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.
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
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
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!