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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.
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
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.
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!
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...
EricMake Easy Money with Google -- out on June 17!
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?
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/
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.
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.
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
>No decent corporation can afford not to have it.
Novell has converted to OpenOffice internally and is well on the way to converting to Linux on the desktop for internal use.
If 'the people' in Amendment 2 are 'the state' then Amendments 1, 2, 4, 9, and 10 benefit the state, not you.
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 OpenOffice ships with Solaris 10, Aix 5.4, all linux distros, Mac OS... then it's a matter of time before it becomes the standard.
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
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.
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
To get me to completely stop using MSFT Office, FrameMaker, and a few other programs, here's what OO has to add.
Have you tried making a bug report?
Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
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.
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.
Dan Rather found this out the hard way, didn't he?
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.
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.
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
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. -
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.
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..."
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.
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