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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
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 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.
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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!
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
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.
I think the Metro format would be great, if they can travel back in time about 8 years and release it then. The picture that comes to mind when I think about Metro is a horse race where Adobe is about 50 laps ahead and Microsoft's little dead racing pony is still being pushed into the starting gate.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
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
To get me to completely stop using MSFT Office, FrameMaker, and a few other programs, here's what OO has to add.
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.
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.
... 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
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).
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