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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!"
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
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.
Most likely. I asked my wife to try it out as an alternative to PowerPoint, but it didn't work well for her because she had to keep saving things in PP format (because OO isn't on the computers she uses for presentations) and was especially freaked the first few times when OO complained that if she converted things to PP format then she might lose stuff.
If you can work in an OO-only environment, it's probably OK, but the OO-PP interoperability was not good. Some of the slides it made (and she started editing presentations made with PP originally) weren't showing up in PP. Ah well...
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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.
In other words, the prerelease beta has a few rough edges but costs $334.95 less.
Yeah, that actually does sound like an Office killer for 99% of potential users. Basically, if you still fork over serious money for an only slightly better office suite without any substantial reasons (like you require VBA support for legacy reasons), you're an idiot and deserve what you get. OpenOffice.org is what pretty much every home or small office should be using, and it looks like people are starting to realize that.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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.
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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.
I my experience OpenOffice is superior to MS Office in stability and in particular, tables and graphics that keep their format during editing. I have found Word unusable for anything but the simplest one page memo or letter. For larger documents, I always create and edit them in OpenOffice. Then I save them as a Word document when I am finished. This has saved me many days worth of editing headaches in Word as I aviod the incessant crashes and tables that go completely wonky without appearant reason.
For an alternative to PowerPoint *and* OO (for presentations), give S5 a try: http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/
It's free, and it runs in your browser...no need to have anything installed on the machine to be used for slideshows. I put the presentations on a USB thumb drive, then run them on whatever machine is available...
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.
This is something I really like, because it helps show users the correct way to format their documents.
I haven't used MS Word for years, and I never really have done serious word processing with it, but I never knew about styles, or stylesheets or whatever they're called in Word. I always formatted each paragraph that needed to conform to some style on it's own by setting paragraph settings, etc.
With OpenOffice it is much clearer how to do proper formatting. Choose the appropriate type for each part of a document (header, title, main body), and just modify the style for that type once through the stylist dialog. I'm guessing that this is basically how it should be done in Word as well, but I never delved deeply into it enough to figure it out. With OpenOffice they point you in the right direction. Learning to use the stylist is a great time and effort saver in the medium to long term, so I think it's great that it's made obvious to new users.
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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