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OpenOffice 2.0 vs. MS Office Review
trewornan writes "There's an interesting, if partisan, review of OpenOffice 2.0 in comparison to Microsoft Office over on Real Tech News. Open Office gets a general vote of approval, as you might guess from the title 'Open Office 2.0 Kicks MS Office Around The Block'" From the article: "My primary use for OpenOffice has always been as a word processor and I believe this is an area where it excels (so to speak!). For anyone used to MS Office, the difference in the two interfaces is minimal. In fact, I find it easier to use OpenOffice's interface than MS Office's for various things such as inserting a header and footer. To create or change a header and footer in MS Office XP, you must go to the "view" menu. I'm not sure why something like a header or footer would be placed in the "view" menu before it is actually part of a document."
Why would you compare it to the older version? Office XP is almost 5 years old. Why not be fair and compare it to 2003?
Hey, this is a great review! Totally non-biased! Now that I think about it, I think I'll ignore the fact that Microsoft just plain makes a superior and more intuitive product to say, hey, yeah! I do feel like sucking open source cocks today! Rock on, you guys!
Donald Ferrone, Ph.D.
Professor of computer science
http://www.geocities.com/donald_ferrone/
I'm sure plenty of people don't want beta software on their system if they can help it. The question comes, when should I expect it?
In that case, "I'd hit it."
---- I'll take you in a Hunt deathmatch any day.
OOffice need's a gammar checker
Reviewer says:
I generally wouldn't recommend using them in an environment where it was important to maintain compatibility with Microsoft products.
e.g. in real life. He's a school kid. Yeah, Open Orifice is great for school, where the profs are more open minded than, say a 'client' or a 'boss'.
Then he goes: My school even offers students copies of MS Office for $25 and I never bothered to get one since, for me, it would just be a waste of $25.
There goes all his credibility out the window.
Note: This review was written using OpenOffice.
Wow. What an age we live in. One can actually write a review in something besides MS Office. Wonders never cease.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
He has been a longtime user of the product
Hmm. Sounds to me like the review may be biased a little.
"Another nice thing about OpenOffice is that it is actually a complete office suite."
You know, unlike MS Office.
Just seeing a single line like this in an article should immediately tip you off that it's probably not worth the bandwidth you used to download it.
"Quoting yourself is stupid." -Me
Although I don't have a fancy review to back it up, I can tell you that I've used both extensively, and OpenOffice.org does NOT stack up to MS Office, no matter how badly the author of this article wants it to.
w00t! It's nice to see some good publicity for openoffice. Yet another step in taking over the world with open-source software... ;-)
<offtopic>/me is really starting to enjoy having a (Gentoo) Linux powered computer that has $0 worth but 2.7GB (du -h /usr/portage/distfiles) of software. It's nice having source to everything, so I can, for example, add keyboard shortcuts to Eye of GNOME for things it odesn't have them for. It's also nice to have all the API's and utilities on my system documented in one place (/usr/doc) so I can write software without being tied to the Internet to search for information.</offtopic>
Not to say that I like Office better necessarily, but I have always figured that the header and footer always exist in a document, so you need to request to "View" the header and footer to edit them.
Considering that they gave the presentation piece to MS Powerpoint.
In defense of Microsoft they put in a few neat things in MS Office 2003. The group collaboration is probably better than anything in OpenOffice. Though I admit freely I haven't used any revision tracking or group collaboration features, does it even have either one? I'm using OpenOffice 1.1.4 also and newer things might have popped up in 2.0.
But all the same, for the basics, I'd see no reason to pay the premium for MS Office for basic needs. However for businesses I can see several advantages of MS Office still.
...in bed
I disagree. I tried hard to migrate to OO, and found it okay for a while, but whenever I had to do anything more complex - even changing colors was a learning curve - I found that it wasn't worth it, that Word would do for now.
I mean, props to Open Office, they have a really good product, and their Powerpoint equivalent saved my life when I found out I didn't have powerpoint and needed a PPT presentation. I learned that program on my own quick enough and well enough for the project I needed to get done.
But switching from Word to OpenOffice? No. It's not that easy. It's like...I guess you could compare it to, Photoshop -> Gimp. Perhaps not that bad, but still it's something that will take time to get used to. At least it did for me.
How well does Open Office 2.0 work in Terminal Services?
If it doesn't work flawlessly in Terminal Services it will limit its adoption in the Windows world.
Notepad. Nuff said.
or has the bias of heaps of these "reviews" been shifted from pro-microsoft to anti-microsoft? This is just as bad! We need un-biased "reviews"!
Anyway, I have used the beta 2, though I was basically constrained to do so. The company has a corporate license for Microsoft's garbage, but it's restrictive. Not having Powerpoint on a particular machine, and not wanting to risk any attempt to tiptoe past Microsoft's lawyers (or our own lawyers), I went ahead and installed OO. Unfortunately, I must report that Microsoft is (predictably) still succeeding in protecting their incompatibilities, at least as regards PPT files.
I really dislike having Microsoft products rammed down my throat, and I really would like to switch. Won't happen, however. My employer would have be make a major commitment to support OO. Basically, they'd have to insist on and guarantee that I not be penalized for any impact on my work that came from using OO instead of the Microsoft Office "standard" files.
As it actually worked out in this recent case, the post-OO PPT files were hopelessly mangled, and I wound up working late on several evenings to redo that work on a different machine that has Microsoft Powerpoint on it.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Given how long Open Office has been chasing after MS Office, it's about time it got close enough to give MS Office a kick; but, in my experience, Open Office comes off like Charlie Brown kicking that damn football.
I'm not a Windows apologist. I run a wintel box as a multimedia web box because too many formats are locked into MS apps and I'm not enough of a zealot to forgo information.
I've had MS pro copies of Office for many years and I've had years of experience with Linux. My opion is Open Office doesn't yet touch MS pro office, especially Power Point.
I'll keep MS Office Pro because it's not a big expense in terms of the extended latitude it offers.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Not sure why parent was modded as a troll, but it is kind of important to remember that in the business world, people are not going to want to deal with OO issues such as fucking up Word documents [import and export]
I read the article, and the author doesn't sound completely biased. He gives the pros and cons of Open Office. He does a good job at describing the weaknesses and strengths. However, the article isn't in-depth; the author only touches on the surface of the program and doesn't give details. He also doesn't touch on features Open Office lacks which MS has, and visa-versa. He goes over a few features which Open Office has and can compare to when it comes to Word.
I've found that people want things that "just work" and as an extention to that, programs have to "just work" in the way that they are used to.
So, like most programs, people don't care about quality, security, or amazingly even cost. In the end, all they care about is doing some task in using the fastest assembly line that they know.
(I like the assembly line comparison because it illustrates the desire for speed, but one can still make the point that if an assembly line produces a terrible product, the job is still accomplished)
A semi-offtopic question here. Does anyone think that the "It comes from brandname X, therefore it must be good." mentality of previous decades still exists? Or are cases like OpenOffice/linux/etc. ones where people are worried about compatibility and such concepts?
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
I'm not sure baout 2.0, but 1.1.4 wasn't even worthy to use at school. The document format was completely incompatable with MS Word. Sure, the text would transfer fine, and simple styles would remain if you were lucky (bold, italics... anything HTML 1.0 compatable) but if you tried to do anything even remotely fancy, everything went to pot.
Styles, tables, tabs, borders, etc. All of these things were not compatable between MS Word and OOo.
Further, working in a school environment, you frequently need to collaborate with other people. OOo was terrible for that. If I sent a file to a partner (who would be lucky if they could even open the file and get it to render correctly) who edited it and sent it back, I had about an 80% chance of getting garbage back.
Even if that person used OOo I could get garbage; if they used the linux version, and I used the Windows version, the files got mangled.
And submitting to a prof... no way. If they can't open the file, I don't get marks.
OOo is simply unusable until it plays well with others. Unless of course you only need it for editing documents where you are the sole consumer.
This is a complete hands-on review from someone who has used the product religiously for years. And I think you'll see why OpenOffice 2.0 truly Kicks MS Office around the block.
It was a one page review with some luke-warm analysis of some of the functions of either product. Nothing really in-depth here. Rambles a whole paragraph about PDF exports which is kind of irrelevent. I have a PDF phaser that I use to export to PDF, let the processor do the real word processing.
I have been using Word as a power user writing on average documents up to 300 pages a shot. Sure, Word has some shortfalls - I have seen times when a doc has shit itself in a few rare occasions. I have tried Oo, its quite good but I think it has a few more years to catch up to anything remote to Word. And I love Linux! Its unfortunate that I am stuck with Office in some respects, although no religious war will win me over when you have no choice but to be 100% collaborative with other Word users on very large documents, the slightest change to the formats can screw you big time, no Word importer will do.
I recently moved to a mac with Office 2004 which isnt bad although I'm still trying to get use to less use of shortcuts that arent consistant with the Windows version. I only moved to the platform for the *nix backend and to ability to contine my c++/dev hobbies outside of working hours on a platform built for development.
Saying that I think Oo has a real chance, especially in areas of the free market, small business, students and home users.
This summer I interned at a national lab and part of the requirements of the internship was creation of a scientific research style poster highlighting what I did. The people in charge of the posters were of the belief that there were only two correct tools for creating a poster: MS Powerpoint and Adobe Acrobat.
.ppt. Exporting as pdf worked perfectly though.
Unfortunately the poster people didn't mention such requirements to the IT people who had the interns all set up with Fedora Core 2 systems. Fortunately OpenOffice was installed on these systems. I could only hope Impress was on par with Powerpoint.
I was a little skeptical going in, I knew that the OOo guys had worked fairly hard to make their tools as good or better than the commercial products, but this was a fairly unusual niche requirement. I was creating a single 48x30 inch slide with all graphics being very high quality so they don't look like crap when blown up.
The results were superb! I used Calc to do graphs, and cut-n-paste between Calc and Impress worked flawlessly. I used Draw to do line art graphics, and once again cut-n-paste worked perfectly. Throw in a touch of gimp to clean up some of the graphics being used and the whole thing had a professional look to it on par with any of the Powerpoint posters from years past.
The only thing that didn't work was exporting as
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
This process will continue until Microsoft will just be one company, amongs many, who have major holds and controls over various aspects of computer science. Thought this will probably still take quite some time.
This is a complete waste of time and does not merit the front page of slashdot. C'mon - did Zonk even look at TFA?
Just off the top of my head, there is no:
- comparison of file sizes
- analysis version tracking
- comparison of printing/preview capability
- review of scripting capabilities and availability of scripts
- review of the style system
- interoperability of: templates, objects etc
I am underwhelmed.OpenOffice also supports all of the major features of MS Office (and a few of its own) except for the grammar check. I'm personally fine with not having a grammar checker since it has given me the opportunity to actually learn the English language instead of relying on my word processor to make my sentences coherent. Erm... and I trust he's also personally fine without having a spell checker for exactly the same reason? And pocket calculators weaken my mind because I should be able to do it in my head or on paper? What world is this guy living in? I like my computer programs to be smart and do things for me by noticing, say, subtle flaws in the document that my proof reading might not pick up. Word's grammar check can indeed be useful at times, especially with some of the few slightly more obscure grammatical checks it has that we may not pick up from everyday usage but are still good to know.
First few versions sucked in terms of compatibility, ugly UI, and general bugs. Most MsOffice users, including me, played around with it and went back to Office.
The first really usuable version was 1.1. This really rocked in terms of compatibility, and though it still had some bugs, was infinitely better with word docs and general usability.
Upcoming version 2 is slated to be real good. the beta I'm using is nice, with much improved UI, better word compatibility, Database tool etc.
Writer is the best. Calc follows. Impress and Database app need some work, though impress has improved a lot in the recent version.
Office has MUCH better version tracking, sharing and collaborative features. OOo can't touch it here. Writer is catching up with Word in terms of pure Word processor features, in fact has some features that are better than word. (predictive typing)
OOo is suitable for SOHO operations where word processing is major app. Larger corporate users need to stick with Office for many reasons. You know what they are.
The article is more like a comparision of Writer with word, and it totally ignores the advanced features of word..
I love OOo, and use it every day, but that doesn't mean that I can't see where Office kicks OOo's ass...
Here's a longer review I did a while back.The author of this article seemed to judge on very easy to solve problems. He chose Powerpoint because it came with included clipart and backgrounds? He also seemed to like Open Office because of easily accessible buttons? Not a very useful article.
That's what happens when one starts writing a piece from a title.
My other Beowulf cluster is... er...
This is what PDF files are for - it frees the writer from having to use the same document processor as the reader.
Frankly, I'm surpised your prof won't take a PDF file.
-- $G
The author admits "In fact, I felt so comfortable using it [the Lotus suite] that it quickly became my first choice of office applications. I never bought MS Office after Office XP ,and I rarely ever used that."
and goes on to write a comparison between OO and MS Office...
Guess we can wait for better reviews.
Both have HORRIBLE (and nearly identical) user interfaces. Their developers desperately need to read up on HCI.
The site seems to be slowing down.
7 05
Just in case here is the coral cache :
http://www.realtechnews.com.nyud.net:8090/posts/1
Over the years, I've used different versions of MS Office at work and tried several different office suites at home. If all you need is a word processor, even OpenOffice is overkill.
I always recommend http://www.abiword.com/. It handles MS formats fine, it loads faster, the interface feels more polished and like OpenOffice it's available for about every OS. OpenOffice has a great set of features, but it feels slow and bloated, of course that's just my opinion.
A long time ago, before the office suite concept, companies believed in "best of breed" software. You have to hand it to the marketing goons at Microsoft who convinced the corporate world that besides a word processor, every employee needs a spreadsheet and a copy of PowerPoint on their desktop.
"Kittens give Morbo gas!"
The athor recommends users stick with Powerpoint due to the large amount of templates and artwork included in MS Office.
Some points:
- Professionally designed Powerpoint templates work in Impress, and are generally better quality than what MS produces, even more so because your presentation stands out more when you spend some cash on a unique looking template.
- OpenOffice.org really needs to hold a pre-2.0 design competition. . The best presentation templates created with OOo 2 beta should be included in the final, with links to the designers webpage.
Eg, under the bit where you select the template:
ModernFunkyThing v 2.7 by Professional Design Company inc. Visit www.professionaldesign.com for more info.
ProfessionalDesignCompany get good exposure for their other (paid for) designs, OOo gets templates better than MS Office and hence more users, users get better looking documents, everyone wins.
> As far as compatibility goes otherwise, I haven't noticed any difference in the look of my slides as I switch between PowerPoint and Impress. The only thing that is keeping the new 2.0 version of Impress from matching PowerPoint is the lack of slide backgrounds and clip art that really are essential to making a good presentation. Background designs and clip art used to make a PowerPoint slideshow do, however, open in Impress without problems. That said, I still prefer PowerPoint for making professional-looking presentations because of all the predefined design backgrounds and clip art.
Folks, I hope I am not forgetting my English...but can anyone say there is anything compatibility in the above quote? If there is, I do not see it!
OK. Valid point. I probably should have left that part out.
However, the submision aside, I still am unable to work with others, or even myself (if I'm on two different platforms).
FTA:
"I would highly recommend you stick with Excel unless you don't need MS's built-in clip art or their well-made design backgrounds."
This seemed confusing. I think the author meant Powerpoint, not Excel. I doubt anyone used Excel for MS's built-in clip art. The author also said that he primarily used Lotus. Now, this had led me to question how much of this is bias. How is this different from a pure-bred Linux user bashing Microsoft?
"I still am unable to work with others, or even myself"
If you can't work with yourself, play with yourself.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
It is not that OOo 1.9.x isnt good. It is and I use it sometimes. But I have largely decided that I prefer other systems instead.
Gnumeric is, hands down, the best spreadsheet I have ever worked with. There is no competition. It is not an Excel clone, either, as excel compatibility has been largely bolted on rather than an origional design requirement (and yet it is nearly 100% compatible with MS Excel). It is also *really* nice to be able to export a selection as a LaTeX file so that I can incorporate it in a larger LaTeX document.
I some time ago, I switched to OOwriter fro Abiword because of some formatting issues. However, more recently I have looked back and have used it more. I am working with LyX to some extent but prefer to hand-write LaTeX in vim because I am more efficient that way.
So for light-weight things, I use Abiword and for heavyweight things I use vim/LaTeX.
Powerpoint is a program that, as far as I am concerned, brings negative value. It is largely designed to try to control audience distractions during presentations. Yet, I am more comfortable with a lower tech approach and only use similar programs when I am told I am required to.
So I recommend OOo to some users, but these are not the programs I prefer to use myself.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
grammar hints, and it is a major piece in terms of development time. Also, anyone cares to bring Word Perfect. Dell bundles it free with its PCs I used it to write a 5 page article couple of years ago and found it to very smooth and pleasant to use, unlike OO, which felt clumsy and bulky at that time.
Explore your creative side
I've had more success getting people to us Open Office then any of the other 'Open Alternative' products. Given the design philosophies of the MS products it's amazing when any of the alternatives show some compatibility. I wish Thunderbird, for example, worked with my 1gb .pst file representing 3 years of my life. Open Office 1.x.x had a hard time with MS Office. With Open Office 2.0 I've seen some issues importing MS Office files when they were created by MS Office. However, I have never had a problem using MS Office files created by Open Office in either of the two programs, even going back and forth making small changes in the document with others before final printing. Weird, but OO makes it good.
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
I just got a MS PowerPoint in the email, and apt-get install'ed OO.o to view it (with Impress). It totally worked. Which was interesting, not because the PowerPoint was that complicated. To the contrary, it was 10 slides of simple bullet-point lists, no more than 3 levels deep, with no transitions or other fancy stuff - it could have been just as easily "presented" inline in the email to which it was attached. Which means the only role MS Office could have played in the process was to get in the way, locking me into the MS monopoly the way it's got the sender locked in. Which means the role Impress played there was to unlock me, without the sender even needing to know how much more free am I than are they. Which of course I told them - right in the reply email text :).
--
make install -not war
OpenOffice 2.0 vs MS Office Anything on Linux.
... well, we are still waiting.
Under Linux OO2.0 can do .
MSOffice
There you have it folks.
So, what the review is actually saying is:
1) That OOo is cross-platform
2) That it is better designed when it comes to placing headers and footers
3) It's free
4) OOo Writer can be used as a replacement to Word
5) You can actually write articles in it
6) OpenOffice is approaching MS Office in other apps like Impress, Base etc.
Most users don't care whether it's opensourced or cross-platform. However lots of users know about 1% of Word's features and will have trouble learning a new interface.
So OOo is probably making a right move when trying to resemble Office. It even looks like Office 2003.
But until OOo 2.0 is released, OOo is good only for non-Windows people or people who don't want to spend money on Office.
He's the school kid, and yet you are the one juvenile enough to stoop to name-calling. I don't think you are in any place to be questioning his credibility.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Personal hands down its open office, it's linux supported which is great and works on windows as well. Also it's free which is a plus.
Kinda of OT, but how is OpenOffice 2 working around the Java licensing issues that they had originally?
I've seen OpenOffice 2.0 Beta riding around on Knoppix, but how far has compatibility been reached with the Java handling?
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Besides the often mentioned lack of outlook functionality, the feature I really miss in OO is the reading layout (the view where you can read two pages on the screen). Office 2003 has it and it is a very nice feature. Really helps in reading really boring specs docs.
I looked up the OO org forums and people apparently have been requesting a _normal_ view for years!!! The OO people apparently dont think too much of extra views at all!!
So when people say OO has all the functionality of Office, they dont know what they are talking about. Either they dont know what the competition offers or they just dont use an office suite to find out what features are useful.
But I still use OO for my personal docs; the built in PDF exporter is a nice touch.
In the case I was referring to, the files seemed to open without problem in OO 2b, and I seemed to be able to work on them effectively. OO even said it was saving them in the PPT format, and I was able to open them up again within OO and they still looked normal. It was after returning to Powerpoint that the files were revealed to be hopelessly mangled. I spent a while trying to unmung them, but without success. Microsoft had conquereth.
However, since you've mentioned DRM, I'll note that I recently encountered an example (from a different author) of DRM problems within Powerpoint, and that was broken even beyond the design. Powerpoint at MY end insisted that the files (actually two versions of the same file) contained embedded read-only fonts, and were therefore uneditable. The author of the files at the other end, and one of his colleagues, insisted there was no such problem. The versions of Powerpoint were apparently identical right down to the build number and patch level.
Amusingly enough, I was able to sort of fix that problem by using OO 2b. From OO I was able to save the file under a new name, and that file is now editable using Powerpoint. It was slightly damaged, but the original author confirmed that he could still edit it, and he said he could fix the new version, so I should work from that one. (It's actually a current project, second in the queue...)
Getting off the original topic here, but that's one of the main reasons I'd like to see more competition in all of these products. I think the software without DRM will crush the DRM-crippled versions--as long as there is some real competition that allows people to freely choose their tools.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Exactly! It is obvious the author is comparing OpenOffice to Microsoft's Applications while he does not in fact know these applications well enough to do a comparison. Of course, one would expect, in a "hands on" comparison, that the author would be actually trying both applications in similar sitautions and usage patterns.
But there are other obvious problems with the article: the author mentions oodraw and oomath in a way that makes readers believe it appeared only in version 2.0 - which is, of course, not true. He never even mentions ooweb, the HTML editor, as if it never existed. He mentions (but does not discuss) the database interface, without realizing there was database support in OO version 1. About differences between version 1 and 2 of OpenOffice, there is very little discussion.
In general one has to say the title and Slashdot story is largely misleading - this is not a serious article, not a hands-on comparison, not worth your time. If you are using OpenOffice 1, you probably know more about the new version already.
-Kvorg
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2001/Mar
March 5, 2001 -- Microsoft Corp. today announced that Microsoft® Office XP, the new version of the world's leading office software, has been released to manufacturing and will be available for retail purchase later this spring.
Then came SP1 and SP2 andOne more thing : This is my first post on slashdot! After 4 years of wasting my time just reading
One office program that costs money, which is available for Linux is ThinkFree. It may not be free, but the compatibility of MS Office documents is great! It beats OpenOffice hands down.
http://www.thinkfree.com/
Don't ignore a program because it's not free on Linux.
Another awesome graphics program available for linux is Pixel Image editor. It is a excellent graphics program, I'd say better than the Gimp.
http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/?page_id=12
I've been using OOo for college and now university assignments and whatnot, using 1.0 through to 2.0 beta, didn't have any of the problems you were experiencing?
:D
Heck, it saved me from my "professor" at the college I was attending had PowerPoint presentations infected with macro viruses, and didn't know it. Apparently his web server was infected, and then all his presentations were? OOo wasn't compatible with the macro virus, but I'm not complaining about that incompatibility
Even if that person used OOo I could get garbage; if they used the linux version, and I used the Windows version, the files got mangled.
You had me until this line, which makes it clear you are somewhere out in left field.
What do you most appreciate about the view from your Redomd, WA office window?
The main reaon I've standardized on OpenOffice for my own use is that it works equally well on Windows/Linux. I've had no issues whatsoever copying OO files to/from Windows/Linux machines.
OO reads office files fairly well, well enough that when I need to read/collaborate on tech specs (my primary need) I've not had an issue using my OO for about 2 years.
PS: The specs for OO are open and freely available, but those for MSOffice are subject to incredible (all but nonexistent) licensing. It's not an issue of OO "playing nice" with MSOffice, it's an issue of MSOffice "playing nice" with nobody.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Office 2001 was a Mac release.
Office XP is AKA Office 2002.
When it was actually released is another story.
OpenOffice is perfectly usable in a business environment. Just like with any word processor make and model, you want to have your whole company on the exact same software.
/so/ hate red. And what's that strange office package you use? Sucks too!
We are a ~50 people company, everyone uses OO.org. We exchange documents with clients -- long, complex technical specs, with version control, the works. Every once in a while, there's a glitch in formatting after the document has been edited by both sides a dozen times. But that happens with different versions of Word too!
Of course, those formatting glitches are a problem when you are pitching for new business. Easy: we do have 2 licenses for Windows+MSOffice, which we run under VMWare to proof the documents when it's a document tender that requires MSWord format. Even easier: we send PDFs exported with a single-click from OO.org. Sending PDFs makes us look slick, doesn't have formatting issues, and the files aren't editable (at least for mere mortals).
OO.org is a perfectly viable business tool. Our main clients are government departments and large private companies. The MSWord compatibility is good enough that if you have $0.01 of smarts to negotiate the small glitches _and_ you're good at what you do, you are sorted.
If you are not good at what you do... there'll be all sorts of excuses. Oh! your logo is RED. I
... many people would still be using Office XP still, i am sure. the reason is Office 2003 is bloated. It drains resources. But in any case, OO.org rocks !!!
a review compares and contrasts *important* features or characteristics of two subjects. just by reading the title, i can tell that it's really a steaming load of fanboy gushing about how the latest open source office suite just kicks some MS ass, which it probably doesn't. the author was yammering on about PowerPoint and Impress. who really uses that crap anyhow? definitely not anyone reading office suite reviews on some silly blog. it's not even released yet. ugh, does it still run on java? get real. it's annoying to read the slanted MS propaganda reviews and articles, but it's just as misleading and harmful coming from the other side.
grow up, people...
Everyone here seems to love the OO eye candy, but it runs like a dog.
I'd love to use it but the performance really sucks. Just create a spreadsheet with a few thousand data points and make a chart. Its like watching grass grow.
And why does the Mac's eye candy get slammed here when it really delivers on performance and usability?
Because the review would be exactly the same.
The editor (Alice Hill of RealTechNews) seems to misinterpret -- or overstate -- the reviewers conclusion.
From what I can see, David Johnston actually says that Writer is comparable to or better than Word (this from a reviewer that actually thinks lack of features [Gramamar Checking] is a Good Thing), but notes that PowerPoint wins over Impress. He also seems wary of using Calc due to compatiblity issues with Excel. In other words: It doesn't seem like OpenOffice kicks Microsoft Office's around the block at all.
If anything, it's snapping at Office's heels a litle annoyingly.
As a consultant, whenever I change/upgrade/rebuild laptops (probably once a year on average), I make a point of trying to use OOo. The most recent time was in March, with a 2.0 beta, but I had to swap back to MSO shortly afterwards.
...; after importing to OOo, they'd be numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ...
Although OOo is now really close, and certainly on a par with respect to the UI, feature set and robustness, it still struggles with auto paragraph numbering on documents with a hierarchical structure. In MSO, I'd have a document with paragraphs numbered (e.g.) 1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.2.1, 1.3,
This bug/feature has been logged in OOo for quite a while, and (as of the last time I checked ~ 1 month ago) hadn't been addressed. I'm surprised; this feature is absolutely vital for consulting-type people who write reports in the field, and I suspect lots of us would really like to switch to OOo for a variety of reasons.
Personally, that was the *only* issue that kept me from sticking with OOo, but the need to collaborate with others who are using MSO meant that it was a showstopper.
You ever heard of sustaining innovation, if so then you realize that for the people that utilze the full potential of Office 2003 do not see it as being bloated. As for system resouces if you are still running a 800 mhz computer with all that spyware running, you might say it is slow. As for people that are currently using Office XP they probably do not see a need to upgrade, even though in my opinion Office 2003 runs better, and is more intutive. As for OO, I have not try the new version, but my experience with the previous version is as follows: it still has a lot of work to do, it is unstable, and only serve as a substitute product for cheapies.
e.g. in real life. He's a school kid. Yeah, Open Orifice is great for school, where the profs are more open minded than, say a 'client' or a 'boss'.
Not all businesses rely on exchanging machine-readable documents with their customers. For instance, I still get most of my invoices on paper. Except for invoices from my ISP, and those are PDFs. Probably because they don't want to irritate those customers who don't have MS Office.
C - the footgun of programming languages
I recently tried OO2 and found the inability to insert/create and edit a simple drawing inside a document as a hinderance. Back to MS Office for me until I am informed of a suitable solution. I am almost ready to go Open Source (on Windows) however the lack of a good PIM is also a setback. Cheers.
Typewriter, OCR scanning.
I use iWork. It's not complete(yet), and it's not universally compatible(yet). But it's Good Enough(TM) for me to use in internal documents (I only have a four person company I run). I have Office X and if I have to open a file, I do.
Occasionally I'll accidentally send someone a file back in Pages format and ironically give 'em some of their own medicine.
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame. - Initial
However, I have never had a problem using MS Office files created by Open Office in either of the two programs
I have, once. There was a PPT presentation created in OpenOffice (1.1.4) that crashed PowerPoint. Which tells me that both OpenOffice and PowerPoint have a bug related to that file, because OO very probably (though I guess not certainly) generated an invalid file and PowerPoint shouldn't crash even on an invalid file.
But generally they are pretty good.
OOo is simply unusable until it plays well with others. Yeah, this is what Microsoft Office is great at. I mean, anyone who doesn't know how a closed format works can't work well with others. I've used OOo at three different schools, work and for applying jobs. Works great here.
-- Linux user #369862
Wow, the word processing features are coming along! That's...great...I guess. Word processor features were old last decade, Microsoft's been there and is way past it now. While some people have only glowing reviews of OOo I've always found it to be an "almost there" type of suite. Writer for instance does a decent job with Word files, even when you use styles and themes. It doesn't do such a good job when you use a text watermark or footers. My watermarks never display properly and footers tend to get cut off when they're printed. Basic features tend to work alright so it is indeed good enough for many people.
I don't think OOo is all bad, quite the contrary in fact. I think OOo is an awesome effort that stands a pretty good chance of dislodging Office in a number of environments. The first and possibly largest is the education market. While Office can be had inexpensively at education prices OOo's pricetag of $0 can be really enticing for larger installations. It's also something that can legally be distributed for free to the student body. Outside of education there's the closely related government market. It's related because a large number of government (federal, state, and local) PCs are simply used to type some documents or fill in blanks in forms and then print them. The collaboration, versioning, and protection features don't mean a whole lot to the crowd using said PCs. Having a "good enough" productivity suite is fine for them in many cases.
If the project at large can get over its Microsoft chasing mentality it is poised to do some really interesting things with productivity software. Since the project doesn't have to promote another line of products there's a lot of flexibility. Take for instance the ability to link Base up to a MySQL database and from there hook Writer documents to Base. Microsoft isn't going to make it easy to do that when they're trying to push SQL Server to the sorts of people that would even want to do that sort of thing.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
The document format was completely incompatable with MS Word. Sure, the text would transfer fine, and simple styles would remain if you were lucky (bold, italics... anything HTML 1.0 compatable) but if you tried to do anything even remotely fancy, everything went to pot.
Hello? Is there anybody in there? The OOo document format of course is not compatible with MS Word. Did you just come from Mars or something? SXW is compressed XML, while DOC is proprietary binary.
So MS Word cannot read SXW, big deal. I let you on in a little secret - OOo can write to DOC format. Yes, you read it right. I have no idea which version you used, but the one I am using exports DOC format just fine. About 95% - 99% of formatting is preserved. Yes, it is not 100%, but it has never been 100% between any two MS Word or MS Office version, either. So I can't see anybody complaining here.
I have entirely no clue what parent's author used, it doesn't have anything to do with reality.
1. Press Ctrl+C *twice* to copy to the clipboard for something a little more permanant. 2. You can turn this off. It's under options (View -> Windows In Taskbar). I prefer the old school MDI. I agree though, either go MDI or ditch it, but that half-assed solution is no good.
Firstly, let me say that I use Linux on the desktop at home and I'm very happy using OpenOffice.org (1.x) for the majority of my work.
At work, I use Microsoft Office 2003 and there are a couple of things I like about it:
The task pane in Word allows me to have a WYSIWYG view of the styles I'm using in my document and set them with a single click.
The Document Map is a great way of navigating around the document (although I've found you need to reduce the font size to make it truly useful).
OOo has some similar functions, but isn't quite as polished yet in the UI. Maybe 2.0 will improve things.
Beyond the remit of OOo, but part of MS Office is the new Outlook. Outlook 2003 is a huge improvement over previous versions. The search folders work really well (I know other packages support this), and the ability to unplug from the network and carry on working without a glitch is worth the upgrade.
This is what PDF files are for - it frees the writer from having to use the same document processor as the reader.
.doc, that would have been a must to consider doing it in OO...
Frankly, I'm surpised your prof won't take a PDF file.
For minor projects, that works great. On some of the major projects (notably the final year project and the thesis) the prof would get drafts, and make comments. We used MS Office since my buddy had to use the school computers and figured we'd not chance it (though we ran into compatility issues between my version, and the two versions on campus instead). I know OO can export to
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
A word processor is a word processor I suppose but I find myself feeling more productive while using Writer. I can't put my finger on it but I can say it isn't the same with the other apps. Part of it might be the fact that when I choose a menu the entire menu displays vs the drop down arrow from word. (Is there a way to turn that "feature" off btw?)
I saw a couple of comments about the speed of launching different applications. On an Athlon XP 2500 with 1 gb of Ram. I can barely tell a difference but I think that writer launches more quickly than word. They both load at about the same speed but word spends a bit more time drawing the screen.
I'm using the beta version of 2 for the record.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
We have a saying here at our company (http://www.solms.co.za/ - "MS Word is the black hole of information". The same goes of OOo.
Once you take the time to type meticulously thought-out information into Word, it's no longer accessible to anything or anybody else out there, it's not re-usable, and you are tied to one rendering of said information.
Our approach is to store everything (and I mean *everything*, all documentation information) in a CVS repository of "knowledge components" using our own XML format (with a XML Schema, of course) that's a very strict subset of Docbook XML. Voila! Instant re-use of components (we also present courses, so if we have one set of knowledge on basic Java, that same bit is re-used in all courses, EJB, J2ME, etc). I can, for the life of me, not understand why anybody would want to put so much work into information to which a single rendering is so inextricably tied.
Granted, the XML tools are still pretty raw (and we had to write a lot of our own) but the beauty is, our "knowledge base" evolves like FOSS does, and in a way which a Word Doc can never dream to.
Who else is using XML to store "pure" information, rather than all this "word processor" stuff? And I am surprised that there isn't a stripped-down, standard XML format for this sort of thing out there. DocBook is waaayy too bloated, as HTML 4 is to XHTML strict. Speaking of which, XHTML 2, which may finally introduce containers (i.e. "sections") may be our saving grace.
Firstly, it does not open even simple office 2000 spreadsheets...
See: http://marius.e.co.za/BreakOO.xls
Secondly, there is no native version for OS X... (face it... X11 sucks)
But I am watching expectantly for the day I can just barely use it to interact with other platforms.
Sometimes, with OSS I say why it is good in spite of it being OSS.
When I recommend OpenOffice, it is BECAUSE IT IS JUST SO DAMN BETTER.
Handling styles, not having redraw problems... actualyl handling Microsoft formats (from the deep dark ages of the 90's 'til today) BETTER than Microsoft.
Also, the other suite packages are just that: sweet! Powerpoint can take a running jump, and forget about it when you talk about SVG.
Let it pre-cache for speed, and stop office pre-caching, and see who is faster.
In fact I couldn't be:
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Why the did God make the big bang closed source? Is God afraid someone will make a new universe and everything in it cheaper and faster?
Probably because they don't want their customers to simply edit the freakin invoices! If you have you own corporate design and it has to look the same always (like an invoice) PDF is the only way to go.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
In the future I'll probably try and do most of my essay writing on my Windows machine when .doc files are required, and use vi or emacs on my Linux machine when I can choose my formatting style and file type. I need more practice with LaTeX anyway :)
I can't say much about the difference between Writer and Word or Impress and PowerPoint, as I use LaTeX for writing and presentations. :-(
On the other hand, I use Excel quite a lot, and tried to replace it with Calc - but it just won't do! My main problem (in addition to the load time, obviously) is the charting module in Calc. It lacks the flexibility of Excel's charting, such as non-continuous regions, separate x-axis-data for each series, combining several chart-types in one graph, etc. As a result, almost every time I try I end up going back to Excel
I guess I will have to wait until the "Chart Project" produces some results - but its web page has not been updated for at least a year and still contains only a proposal, so I am rather sceptical.
(And yes, I use GNUPlot for the final versions of the charts, but it is just so much faster to use Excel if one is changing some parameters and observing the effects of the changes.)
I've had that problem between saving a Word document is MS Office and opening up the same document on the same computer with the same version of Word...
Apologies if anyone thinks that blasphemous, but I've seen too many folks who think MS Word is a page-layout, html-authoring, painting, does-all program. The reviewer is wandering perilously close to the same territory: I've personally never used these new programs seriously. New? Draw has been in OOo since 1.0.?
Disclaimer: I'm a Mac weenie, brought up on MS Works 1.0, Claris Works, MacDraw, et al, and I can't live without a vector graphics app on my desktop. Sure there are better apps than those, but they work and demonstrate the point. Why even MS Word 5.0 for Mac inroduced a "Picture" module with rudimentary vector graphics. So I'm delighted with OOo, even if the intermodule integration takes a bit of time to get your head around.
If you've only had 256 color bitmaps all your life, I've got news: the SVG spec is over 20 years old, and OOo brings you a little taste of how easy real drawing can be.
Please, mod parent up!!!
,and I rarely ever used that".
Basing usability comparison on such uninformed statements can only be bad for the credibility of free software.
I'm fed up of "religious" software reviews from writers who write themselves: "I never bought MS Office after Office XP
David Johnson is not to blame. I'm blaming the editor who publishes this. Editors are not just messengers!
One of the more useful features of Microsoft Office is the Research Pane, one that seems to be under-advertised by Microsoft. I am surprised that no one else (in the comments that I already have read) mentioned this feature, since I rely on it heavily.
I used to constantly have an internet browser open navigated to an online dictionary, switching back and forth every few minutes. Now, all I have to do is press Alt and Click on the word/phrase that needs to be defined or researched. It provides one-click access to excellent thesaurus and dictionary databases, as well as Encarta and some other encyclopedia sites.
Personally, I will never move to OpenOffice without better integration such as this. Grammar checking is also mandatory for me, while better start-up times and UI speed (yes, it struggles with 2GB of RAM and a 3.0GHz Pentium!) would be a plus.
What I'd actually like to see are the release criteria--and a realistic system to help OpenOffice move toward it. Thinking along those lines reminds me of a related suggestion I recently submitted to /. (but to absolutely no avail). That part of the suggestion was to basically sell improvements to the interested users. The reply from /. was apparently that they don't think money matters. Or something.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Ouch, you wrote your thesis in Word? I cannot imagine why anyone would do such a thing to themselves. Maybe Word has improved a lot since I last used it, but back then there was no Bibtex support, the reference system didn't work at all, figures and tables had horrible autopositioning, and no automatic numbering and the equation editor sucked big time. Couple that with the fact that it leaves you with a non-documented, extremely fragile file format and it really sucks for thesis work. Much of this goes for OOo as well. Try using a professional document processor instead, like FrameMaker or latex.
Same as with GIMP vs Photoshop. It's a decent substitute. Given choice: Have a raise and use free OOo or have MS Office purchased for your workplace, what would you choose? In my work position an office package is not essential. Write a request to another dept, report something to the boss, open a .doc file sent in by a clueless customer. It's all good for it, and fulfills its task perfectly. Maybe there are tasks where OOo is not sufficient and you need MS Office - I didn't find them yet. .doc file. But once in 1000 emails, attachment of OpenOffice happens (usually from high-paying international customers, so can't be neglected). And then they come to me to have the file opened and printed with OOo, because they can't open it. Open Office's support for .doc files may be poor and buggy, but sorry, MS Office's support for .sxw is nonexistent. So, to whoever claiming you HAVE TO have MS Office instead of OOo if you don't want to lose your customers, you're wrong. You need BOTH.
OTOH, the customer support dept uses MS Office exclusively. In most cases they get emails from the customers as common emails. Sometimes some dumbass customer sends the content of the email as attachment with Word
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Sure it's only an anecdote, but it's one that puts another nail in the 'hard to use" and 'incompatible' rants we hear mostly from MS apologists and astroturfers.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
If there was one feature that I would pick for OO.o over Office it's a simple choice for what I need to do. File-->Export to PDF. (or PS).
For those of us with professors that prefer electronic documents in "universal" formats it's a really nice feature. Installing third party "printers" which half the time don't even work properly are a waste of time and effort. I have never had OO.o crash on either WindowsXP or Linux.
Mak'tal shree lok'tak mek'ta sa'tak Oz! - Daniel Jackson
that the GP was saying that using styles will help you work out your problem. Nothing mentioned about whenther Word had them or not.
He was trying to help out.
Also, when I'm writing something in collaboration with other people usually we choose a better format for interchange, as RTF or Plain Text.
Today, as it is, OpenOffice is good enougth for me. And when I need to exchange files with a friend, I simply offer to install a copy of OpenOffice on his computer.
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
Just this weekend, I needed to plot some coffee roasting profiles that I had taken data on, so I thought I would use OO Calc to enter/plot them.
What a disaster. I ended up fucking around quite a while trying to get the chart I wanted, and when I started trying to copy/paste charts, the whole thing froze up. Repeatably.
I ended up switching to Gnumeric, which has its own quirks, but at least didn't crash. It also has a nice object tree kind of interface for working on chart options.
Based on my attempt to perform a relatively simple task, I'd have to say that OO Calc has some real stability and usability hurdles to overcome before I would choose it over Gnumeric. Gnumeric got the job done, OO Calc didn't.
The versions are the ones on the Knoppix 4.0 DVD, running from the hard disk...
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
out2mdir?
.pst files directly. Am I mistaken? What's the issue with converting your .pst into maildir or whatever anyway?
Emailchemy says to export to PST, then use Outlook Express to import the emails, then use their $25 product to export to any format they support. Not bad for $25, and I'm sure there are other free solutions that can convert OE to Maildir or whatever. http://www.weirdkid.com/products/emailchemy/
However I thought that Thunderbird supported importing from
Early versions of OpenOffice implemented their own fully open and documented XML formats, the 2.0 branch uses the Oasis OpenDocuments specifications, once again fully open XML specifications (with schemas, I guess)...
Blackhole? yeah right
Excuse me? Does this stupid statement mean that you don't even know HTML 4.01 Strict is the same thing as XHTML 1.0 Strict but for the fact that one is a subset of SGML while the other is a subset of XML? Aka if one is bloated the other one is, too, and the other way round?
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
At home I use the 1.1.x word processor to write letters, and some technical documents and it's fine so long as you don't intend to use OO's drawing capability. If you do use it, you discover that drawing is extremely poor to the point of unusable. I spent hours trying to do a simple UML-esque diagram before giving up and drawing it elsewhere and importing it. The 2.x drawing module is a lot better, but I'm so scarred from 1.1.x that I haven't used it extensively.
The spreadsheet in 1.1.x was just fine for my uses. I keep tables of expenses, holiday costs, timesheets in the spreadsheet and it works just fine. I wasn't exactly stretching the thing but it worked and I can't complain.
The word processor in 1.1.x worked but it was like a comittee had sat down to decide how to make things work in as round-about way as possible. I hated using the styles, there is no outline mode, the toolbar buttons were non-obvious, the aforementioned drawing was evil. But it worked and I tended to use it even while I have MS Word on my box.
The word processor in 2.x far more closely resembles MS Word and this is no bad thing. I haven't used it extensively but I like what I see. There's still no outline mode though. The "Navigator" can be used as a poor-man's outline mode but it's not great.
I also like the new database app. It's quite primitive but it's a good start and I've hooked it up as a front-end to postgres so it serves some purpose.
I haven't used slideshow functionality much except for importing some PPT files. It hasn't had any problems and seems to work quite well.
Overall I think OpenOffice 2.x is a worthy successor. I'm glad that it finally looks like a modern application (the old one looked like something from 1995). If the old app was sufficient for most of my home uses I believe the new one will be very pleasant. I don't like how long it takes to load up though and I wish they'd do something about that. I half suspect that the bloody thing is loading every DLL in existence in the background without regard to whether it is used or not. I have no idea of the component architecture but something seems very wrong. I also don't like the way that bits of OO are now Java and other bits are Python - pick one or the other and be done with it. This too adds to the bloat.
For me, the killer feature is not XML, or cross-platform but simply the ability to print straight to PDF (and Flash in the slideshow app). I use it all the time and it's fantastic. And that's as someone who has Adobe Distiller. Distiller adds a similar button to MS Word but it runs very slowly.
Another killer feature that is often overlooked is that OO it costs nothing. The problem is that many PCs (including mine) were "bundled" with MS Word & MS Works and so in effect they cost "nothing" too.
So free is great but it is not enough if it doesn't work properly or if the clueless / MSO indoctrinated perceive it as "hard" compared to what they got bundled with their machine. I think OO 2.x has missed an obvious opportunity to rectify this. During installation it asks if you want to associate .doc, .xls, .ppt files with OO. Why not go the whole hog and offer to make the menus, key bindings and toolbars resemble MS Office at the same time? All of those things are customizable so presumably they could have shipped two sets of menus, toolbars etc. If Microsoft could get away with the same trick to lure Wordperfect users, I think it's quite valid to do the same back to them.
I very much agree with you - when I'm writing in my native language, Swedish, the grammar checker is more or less a PITA - it only objects to stuff that I know is correct (I know my grammar). Same thing, more or less, in English.
Where it really shines though, is when I'm writing in German or Spanish. Yeah, I should learn the grammar of those languages properly too, I know, but it takes loads of work to really do it and especially in German, with three different articles for the nouns you have to learn more or less by heart, you're still going to do some mistakes (even native Germans do once in a while)...
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
I use OO in my business and have never had a problem opening an MS document or sending one to a customer or coworker. Open a doc on one of the Linux boxes or open it on the Windows XP box, no difference.
I'm not doubting what you're saying, just trying to rationalize your experience with a product I use daily with very few problems and none of those that you mention.
My associates using Word don't get their work done any faster and it doesn't look any better going to the customer. Maybe there are differences in how people are using the product that account for the differences. It's interesting that people could use the exact same product and have such a wildly different user experience.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
But more to the point: In real life, you're not going to use Office XP in 2010, and at that point, you'll find loads of incompatibilities between you old Office XP docs and your new MS Office MMX, just like Office 2003 for Windows is incompatible with docs written in Office 2004 for Mac (and vice versa), if the docs contain unicode characters. This makes it impossible to achieve perfect compatibility for other apps as well. MS Office might be far better than OOo, but standardising on it is very short-sighted. That's why governments demand open document formats these days.
However, it's an uphill battle. I recall reading that non-MS programs are swapped out ASAP while the MS ones are kept in RAM as long as possible. It would be useful to know more on the topic, though I myself neither use nor condone the use of MS-Windows.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Why I'm dumping OpenOffice
OpenOffice Writer has one killer feature: Export as PDF.
It lacks grammar check, which I have found useful in the past. I've filed a half-dozen usability bugs related to Thesaurus and Spell Check, but they are serviceable. The implementation of Ctrl-Up and Ctrl-Down is insane. I've filed a bug on that, but it has gotten thrown into the 'feature' pile.
I am dumping OpenOffice because it is so slow. I have Word 2000 on my quickstart list so that I can open up documents and quickly check the spelling of comments before I post them to the web. When I downloaded OpenOffice, I tried the same. I've had to go back to Word. It just takes too long to open a new document or to switch to an already open one. I then made the mistake of leaving a few OpenOffice documents open for about three days--responsiveness plummeted.
Let this be a warning to programmers: don't believe what they tell you about Java. It is that slow.
Crimson Editor
There are two programs that I make dance. One is (on topic) Excel (which takes hours). The other is Cedt. Just fantastic.
i'm sticking with emacs, thank you.
and to think it was once labeled "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping". good times...
I don't feel like it...
Does OOo have an option yet to do default white text on a blue background in it's document editor program?
MS Word does.
... or double click on the header or footer to edit it. No need to use the view menu. It's not as hard as the article makes it out to be.
-everphilski-
OO _is_ bloated hell. Even 2.0. Don't even compare it to Office XP / 2003 yet. If people think MS did use some undocumented tricks and hidden startup programs to make Office load ultra fast - take my word for it - Office XP installed on CodeWeavers Crossover / Wine on Linux loads equally fast.
Ever tried opening a real big Excel sheet with Excel in Office XP / 2003 and then try the same thing in OO 2.0? Ever tried drawing a semi-complex diagram with OO Draw and same thing with Visio? Ever tried running OO 2.0 on computer with 256Mb RAM ? Office XP / 2003 run just fine.
Thanks, but I will pay to use a quality program and not waste my time on OpenOffice problems.
but damn, it's a resource hog. At least the last version I tried was. I have enough crap running doing my daily work on a WinXP system or a Win98 system that running OO instead of Excel + Word is problematic.
Granted, I know my MS OS is hogging more resources than it should, so perhaps running OO on a linux box would be great.
But as of this moment, I can't switch our company platforms to linux without ok from corp IT. I can experiement with OO but it simply wasn't "better enough" to make a difference, esp with the resource issue.
"FREE" is a motivator, but I'm willing to stick with MS for now (until they cram some more BS "license for limited duration" crap down our throats again...).
-Styopa
A couple of months back I attempted to migrate a small business from MS Office XP to OpenOffice during a entire system replacement. Here's what I found out: "I don't understand this program. It doesn't do what it's supposed to." and "I can find... Where did it go?" and "This used to open up this way..." and "I used to have templates, what happened to them". As someone who is fairly technically proficient, I have had NO trouble switching to OO/NeoOffice. But it seems that whoever I try to switch that is 1.used to MS and 2. Knows one or two programs that they use all day, cannot wrap their mind(s) around a new interface that accomplishes the same tasks (with everything in a different place, name and modus operandi). This is not the only place I've tried this, but is the most recent example. The funny thing is people have had no problems in many cases switching form Office 97 to Office 2003 - which has enormous differences in UI and functionality. Maybe it's brand recognition? I dunno. I just wish I could have ONE success at conversion. A lot of places can't really afford the cost of MS Office and are stuck w/ it because of the laymen at the desks. Blah Blah Blah...
Without a native port of OpenOffice.org to Mac OS X, it's still completely unusable by my standards. And yes, I'm aware of NeoOffice/J (too slow to use) and OO.org for X11 (the interface is just too ... odd for everyday use under Mac OS X).
So I'm still "stuck" with MS Office 2004.
Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce
this kind of openess is NOT like them. they have to have something up thier sleave. xml + zip is a blatant copy of open office. there will probably be a no GPL clause or first born to be sacrificed to bill clause in there somewhere.
also, i couldnt find this supposedly open specification...
If you need to do anything but the most basic playing around with a database component, OO is still unusable. I'd love to implement a DB frontend for a client in OpenOffice, but as it looks it won't be worth the trouble anytime soon.
I really would like to see full VBA support in OOffice. I'm currently developing an accounting worksheet for a spreadsheed program -- one of the demands was that (obviously) it has to work in Excel.
As I'm not very fond of Microsoft's products, I fired up my OO just to find out it uses a different scripting language for macros. So here I am, locked in Windows until the end of the project.
I haven't actually sought out any information why it isn't implemented in OO but I guess VBA has MS licence on it, making sure it stays out of OSS
"Open Orifice". How brilliant of you to come up with a name that describes the product better than its actual name, just by replacing a few letters. No, wait, you didn't
What a douche.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
How many other mandatory formatting bugs exist and are unfixed, or unreported? Yes, I know that openoffice is free. But if you don't fix bugs that users tell you about, don't ever complain that they aren't using the software.
My first and only brush with MS-Office was back in late 2000 (IIRC Office 2k on Win2k). I had to co-author a paper, and this particular conference only wanted MS-Word documents. Why should a word processor re-paginate when the only difference in 2 machines is the print driver.
Since early 2001, I have been a LaTeX user and I refuse to touch WYSIWYG (nay WYSI What you don't want) word processors with a 10 foot long pole. I have worked in engineering department of a Fortune 20 company, and stuck to LaTeX. My presentations are done with the LaTeX + beamer package (beamer.sourceforge.net), and all documents are done using LaTeX. I use gnuplot for plotting/graphing and people are regularly wowed by my documents.
I have seen WYSIWYG word processors in general and MS-Word in particular reduce grown up men to sobbing heaps.
Having said that OOo seems to be less bug-prine than the comparable MS offerings. Recent example: co-worker has Office XP and Acrobat (the full package), and he wanted to convert a complex 128 slide ppt to pdf. The pdf always came out with (a few) garbled alphabets on his workstation. I imported the ppt into OOo, and pdf export worked a flawless document (6 Meg OOo pdf vs 12 Meg Acrobat pdf). I had to download and install OOo first though. And this was OOo 1.1.4, not OOo 2.0.
So to summarize, WYSIWYG word processors are a huge waste of productivity. Try + LaTeX, the initial learning curve is steep, but the productivity gains are nothing short of phenomenal.
What garlic is to food, insanity is to art.
Don't forget that OpenOffice.org has another advantage over Microsoft office... it's portable. Due to it's open source nature, I was able to create a portable version of it (without having to worry about licensing fees, etc). It runs from any removable drive (USB thumbdrive, CDRW, iPod, etc) and is fully functional (though the Java-based stuff won't work if Java isn't installed on the host PC).
e noffice/
http://johnhaller.com/jh/useful_stuff/portable_op
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
MS-DOS stagnated and MS-DOS 4 sucked, until DR-DOS put the fear of god into MS and they came out with MS-DOS 5.
MSIE sucked, and still rather sucks, once they killed off Netscape. Only since Firefox has there been indications of change.
MS Office stagnated once WordPerfect and Quattro were out of the race.
That's just how it goes. That company perhaps more that others, slacks off once they get a market lead. Usually they try to buy out or shut down their competitors (e.g. Borland, Intuit), but OOo is resistant to that.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
To create or change a header and footer in MS Office XP, you must go to the "view" menu. I'm not sure why something like a header or footer would be placed in the "view" menu before it is actually part of a document.
The answer to this is obvious, you are just ignoring it for the sake of argument. In MS Office, the header and footer are always part of the document, that is why you 'view' them instead of 'insert'ing them.
Pre SP6 NTs tended to be very quirky with video drivers. It would not bomb out right away, but always waited for an application (Netmeeting in my case) to start out for the BSOD to show up.
If you are not running SP6a, then I strongy advise for you to upgrade. Otherwise you might always consider changing the video card or even better, getting a decent computer =).
My other OS is the MCP!
Part of it might be the fact that when I choose a menu the entire menu displays vs the drop down arrow from word. (Is there a way to turn that "feature" off btw?)
Hmm. Let's see now. I've never done this before, but I'll try the Tools menu. Customize makes more sense than Options because I'm changing the way the client feels, not the actual behavior of the software. Its not a Toolbar, not really Commands (although I did check there), so under Options... Aha! "Personalized Menus and Toolbars." Seems simple enough.
Typing "expanding menu dropdowns" into the help bar brought up a couple of entries that referred to "Help > Toolbars and Commands" as well, which pointed me to the same place; but that was after using a little common sense got me the answer. I can see not knowing about it if (like me) you liked it, or didn't care, but if its a big enough peeve that its worth mentioning it, wouldn't 20 seconds of exploration been a reasonable productivity investment?
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
1.1.4 - very messy, my sentence really should have read, and I thought it was implied,:
However, I have never had a problem using MS Office Files created by Open Office (2.0) in either of the two programs.
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
Oh god, this is wrong on so many levels...
First of all, let's do a fact check:
And HTML 4.01 is just as meaningful as XHTML 1.0 strict, exactly my point, thank you, drive through
Whoopsie... wrong sir, an XML document is not valid as an SGML one but by relying on SGML parsing quirks. For example a strictly conforming SGML parser allows both "/" and ">" to end a tag (you can write either <img> or <img/ for example), the facts that browsers grok the "/>" tag closure is only because of a quirk (which only works when you put a space before said closure, <img /> will be ok but <img/> will make an SGML parser rip your head off your shoulders), <tag/> does, in fact, render as "<tag>>" in SGML.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Hmm, so which is it? If I ever bring up usability when it comes to Linux apss, I get lambasted (probably by people that weren't even born when I got into the computer game). So next time you tell someone to RTFM, ask yourself if there is a way to make that app a little better so they don't have to RTFM.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
It don't, err or it didn't last I looked, and if it does now, it's likely messy. The .PST file has a lot of crap in it, attachments, calender, and other stuff. This is a PST from Outlook (the real one, not express). I imagine if I would spend money there may be a solution (that's why I still have the backup .PST file), however the best I've managed so far is about 60% of the text from my email messages imported into thunderbird, through the use of various pieces of software. The attachments, wacky html, and other stuff from just don't make it.
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
Okay, sorry. I don't know if I just didn't read carefully enough (3:18am, cut me some slack ;-) ) or decided the 2.0 didn't apply to there.
I wish I had that file so I could open it in Impress 2.0, resave it, and see if PPT still crashes...
I've come to depend upon MS Office 2003's tight (TIGHT) integration with SPS2003 and WSS (free if you do it right).
Until the competitors come out with an alternative killer app, I'm not even wasting my time. OO compared to MSO2003 is like comparing notepad to WordPerfect.
From the article:
OOo kicks MS Office butt
OOo Write good!...but no grammer checker...
OOo Calc...kinda works...use Excel...
OOo Impress...much better...but lack of clip art/backgrounds makes it a bad choice for business...use powerpoint...
OOo Base...don't know...couldn't say...
OOo Draw...why does this exist?!?!?
Okay...so how does the article content in any way align with the article title?!?! He only gave thumbs up to one program in the suite...Now we don't use MS Office in my house (my daughter loves impress and creates her own graphics) and use Ms Office 2000 at work when I know that the doc will be viewed by uncontrollable masses...
OOo kicks, but the authors/editors over at RealTechNews may want to try decaf.
Dave
It was my bad sentence, don't worry about me cutting you slack, it was my bad at 3 am, my timezone, that I wasn't clear in my post. I imagine with enough work it would be possible to show where OOo (any version) and MS Office aren't compatible, but I maintain that happens between versions of MS office itself. OOo 2.0 certainly isn't perfect but it's a heck of an improvement in compatibility. Cheers.
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
Since OpenOffice tied itself in so closely with Java, I really don't want to use it. I hate Java, and I shouldnt have to have it running and wasting memory just to type shit up.
My 2 cents.
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling a pig in mud. Soon, you realize the pig is dirty, and he likes it.
yup, I feel absolutely peachy every time I use software that is doesn't cost me anything and is kept up to date for free.
And it still works just fine. When the computer is replaced (it's a 700MHz Athlon running Win98), we'll either reinstall Word 97 (if that's allowed and works) or install OOo. Why would a home user buy MS office stuff anymore?
The debate over OpenOffice 2 vs MS Office 200X shouldn't even be taking place. Why? Because OO 2 isn't even out yet.
There should be an unwritten rule that you cannot review an application until it is actually released (It would be a preview otherwise). That would hopefully discourage FOOS companies from using these incredibly long beta periods. Thus have smaller yet shorter improvement cycles.
OO 2 has been in beta longer than Office XP had shelf-life and its starting to get a little stale. Are they trying to take a page from Google and have everything listed as beta forever?What the folks at http://openoffice.org/ need to do is get a workable product out the door. Don't get me wrong, I rate the latest beta, but they need to stop swinging for the fences and just get a hit.
There used to be this Lipton ice tea add that said, "Save it for the sequel..." That is what the fine people at OO need to do. Let the battle on Office 2003 take place with v3 of OpenOffice and get a working product out right now.
I was personally hoping to deploy OO 2 to 8,000+ workstations in a K-12 environment, thus giving our stakeholders a better product and save our district $500,000 USD in MS subscriptions. However, with the delay of a "totally supported product" from OO our tech committee decided to stick with Office XP or 2003 (woo is me, right). As they say in NASCAR country, "Get er' done!"
PC Mag's verdict:
"If you can remember the name of OpenOffice.org, you can remember where to download it for no charge. If you tried the previous 1.1.4 version, the 2.0 beta version currently available will be a pleasant surprise. Unlike the slow, ugly, and underpowered earlier version, 2.0 is swift, smooth, and highly compatible with Office documents. Even better, it has plenty of features that you can't find in MS Office itself.
"Anyone who doesn't want to pay Microsoft's premium prices for rarely used features may prefer this free suite. It does most everything that typical users need it to do, and does some things better than MS Office."
Essentially what that 'school kid' wrote.
This is odd since I've used open office to -fix- mangled word documents so that word could read them again since OOO writes exactly to spec. Perhaps you are mixing an older version of OOO with a newer version of Office?
Mangling from linux to windows sounds unlikely unless you were transferring the file incorrectly and mangling the actual data.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Have you ever tried to make the cell size *exactly* 4x2 inches (i needed it to print thousands of labels with increasing numbers). It turned out that the size is measured in "points", and one "point" depends on a *FONT SIZE* and *FONT STYLE*. How retarted is that.
1 1517241033.aspx)
1 0346241033.aspx)
But it gets more confusing. From microsoft's website:
72 points = 96 pixels = 1 inch
(http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HP0
And then
"The default height of a row in Excel depends on the font and maximum font size used in that row. "
(http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA0
Hmmm...
But then it gets even more confusing. Try printing aligned excel document on different printers, and your beautifully aligned doc prints all incorrectly. This NEVER happens to MS Word (it always prints exactly right, no matter which printer you use). We have FOUR different printers, so i have to create FOUR different versions of excel documents if i want them to be printed correctly. How nice is that.
For me, a comparison of openOffice, and the Microsoft Office products would look like the XML below. Presonally, I would not try to persuade a reader on the slight variations of some color and then pass judgement on the reaction of the reader.
{office}
{wordProcessor}
{menuBarFunctions}
{New File}
{Mirosoft}alt-fn{/Mirosoft}
{openOffice}alt-fn{/openOffice}
{/New File}
expanded out...
{/menuBarFunctions}
expanded out...
{/wordProcessor}
{spreadSheet}
expanded out...
{/spreadSheet}
{presentation}
expanded out...
{/presentation}
{/office}
It would be nice to see this comparision documented further.
yeah, because two mouse clicks for something many users don't use or only setup once per document is so time consuming*.......
and comparing it to a 3 year old version is all the rage.......
*is aware that is is just an example, but a better one should have been used.
I have a feeling that the windows/linux mangling that was happening was a result of not using the same version of the application.
Also, the linux/Windows mangling happened in early 2004. In fact, all of the mangling that I refer to happened in early 2004. I believe the version of the application installed on the linux machine was V 1.0 (possibly 1.1), and the version on the windows machine was 1.1. The version of Office would have been Office X for the mac, and Office XP for the Windows machine.
I'm sure that a lot has changed since I used the application. However, every time I read a review of OOo, I look for 'compatability with MS Office' and the reviewer always says 'OOo is great for writing up simple documents. Some of the more advanced features get mangled when you move between versions/platforms/to word.' Typically this is followed by 'But no one uses those features anyways, so it doesn't matter.'
Honestly, I'm not willing to invest the time to try out OOo until I hear that it can work with word for all layout issues. If a document will not display exactly the same in OOo as it does in word; and if a document cannot be edited in Word, then OOo and then Word again and retain all of the layout that I've done, I'm not interested. I
m not talking about monolithic documents, just technical papers in the neighborhood of 5,000 - 10,000 words.
I realize that I'm being picky, but it really does make a difference if you care about the layout of the doc, rather than just the information.
Note that I use OOo almost exclusively. I use Linux mostly, and I don't want to spend the money for MSOffice for my one Windows machine. But I use OOo for the same reason so many others use MSOffice: I am a captive audience. If I want to use a word processor and not spend money on both MSOffice and Crossover Office, OOo is what I have to use.
When I started using Excel back in, what, 1992, I used it to make a LOT of presentations. They were financial with lots of numbers and computations that the customer would like to tweak, so Excel was appropriate. Nevertheless, despite being for a spreasheet, I was required to make the documents look VERY ATTRACTIVE. (Not to say that my lowly artistic skill accomplished the goal, but the boss thought I did okay.) I would do things like color-code cells, add borders, fiddle with fonts, etc. And one FREQUENT thing I would do was ctrl-click to select a disjoint set of cells and then apply formats to all of them at once.
OOo cannot do this.
This very basic feature that I and the people I learned from have been using for a VERY LONG TIME is something that OOo cannot do. When I first started using OOo at version 1.0.0, I immediately noticed this oversight and reported it in their bug database. The bug report disappeared. I've since posted it a couple more times, and this bug report seems to consistently disappear.
Sure, it's possible that that (a) I'm a niche user who is unusual in his need for this feature, and (b) I don't know how to use their bug database to retrieve old bug reports. But the fact of the matter is, they have consistently left out this feature. I don't know if they've added it to 2.0, but I doubt it.
Why does such a relatively small oversight bother me so much? Because I need it, and I cannot imagine that it could be THAT hard to fix. (But I wouldn't know, because the size of the OOo source is a bit overwhelming for me.)
e.g. in real life. He's a school kid. Yeah, Open Orifice is great for school, where the profs are more open minded than, say a 'client' or a 'boss'.
Where do you get the idea that professors are more open minded then 'clients' or 'bosses'?
Just because you are more liberal it doesn't mean you are more open minded then someone who is more consertive. I have seen many (more often then not) college professors who are extreamly closed minded, the study of getting the PHD is getting yourself more closed minded. They get more and more specialized in one area to a point they get very closed minded, and once their mind is made they are always right and anything that is different is wrong.
Conversly many (More often then not) Bosses and Clients are fairly open minded you bring up an Idea and Explain it they will actually listen to you and the merits of your arguments. Just because they may say no to the idea doesn't mean they didn't think about it. They made the decision the pros vs. the cons wernt worth the effert or it is out of their control.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
> I recall reading that non-MS programs
> are swapped out ASAP while the MS ones
> are kept in RAM as long as possible.
This is simply FALSE.
Slashdot - free anti-Microsoft propaganda 24/7
I use OO.o now and then, and my one reason not to use it all the time is: there is no "Normal View" option.
What most people dont' recognize is that text editing and document formatting are two separate functions (notwithstanding that M$Office, OOo, and many other 'word procesors' merge the two). I want to fill my screen with the text I'm editing, not stupid repeated headers and blank space between pseudopages.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
I'm a PhD student, and I wouldn't write in anything other than Word for one reason and one reason only: EndNote and its cite-while-you-write functionality. If you are doing a lot of citation work, there's no comparison.
EndNote has some limited support for OpenOffice, but it doesn't support cite-while-you-write. Bibtex doesn't even come close.
That's funny, I've had few problems using OOo for undergraduate work. This includes collaborating with other students and submitting work created in Calc and Writer (using MS formats, much as I would prefer native formats).
I agree with you. I have a few personal documents with extremely complicated lay out that won't load/display correctly yet. I load them with each release and bug report them. I'm happy to say there has been enormous improvement since 1.1.1 but unhappy to say that my largest one still won't load.
The failing one is about 9 megabytes with 40-50 pictures, lots of tables, section breaks, etc.
The smaller one (about 7 megabytes with about 150 pictures) loads now and is 99% correct.
All my other documents seem to load, display, and edit correctly now.
I don't have problems with native documents that got that big and I don't have problems if I save them to word format and then load them in word. The problems come from those two huge word documents that I import into OO. I can definately understand how reformatting a document that size isn't worth it.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
There are very few ideas that need to be expressed graphically
This may be true for you but there are some who prefer graphical or visual guides. Jus tnow I did a search on Amazon using "visual guide" and came up with more than 300 results. Using just "visual" results in more than 15,000 however because some of are for VB or Visual Studio without going through all of them I don't think it's a very good indictator. But adding "quickstart" results in more than 400 results. Publishers like Peachpit Press publish a number of visual guides and they wouldn't if there weren't a market for them. Fact is is that different person best learn using different methods, some learn by reading, some by watching, and others by practicing.
Access should not exist. Period. Leave it to the experts to work with DBs and your data will be fine.
Many not only need access to a db but also need to add records to one. Should a user be required to be an expert to do so? All they need is how to do it.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Saying winamp 3 was superior but didn't feel good to use is like saying the Pinto was a fine automobile.
Except for it's habit of exploding when you touched the rear fender.
Are you just talking about 2.0? I use version 1.1.3 and I find the numbering always gets messed up. Even when I create a fresh document in openoffice, the numbering for the headings will be completely off in Word. I just export everything as PDF, but that's not always practical. If they can fix this, then I'd be a lot more enthusiastic about it. I am amazed that I've opened up the most complex word docs without much incident. However, I've also had very simple docs crash it. It's good enough that I can get away with using Linux at work.
Thank you for your explanation. It wasn't that I couldn't have figured out how to turn it off, it was more of an after thought as I was comparing them side by side and noticed that difference.
I apologize for asking a question before thoroughly researching the answer. I can only hope your infinite knowledge helps billions of other people around the globe.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
BTW, my version (2003) is different...
Customize -> Tools -> Options -> Always show full menus
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
For what I use Excel for, which is mainly fiddling around with formulas for RPGs, I found OO Calc to be a little nicer than Excel. It did everything I needed it to do, and was nicer in some areas.
For instance, when lines of text don't fit, you see part of the text instead of hash marks.
The OO word processor still needs work. Though, since Word has gotten progressively worse with each version since Word 95, (first numbering broke, then cross-references...) they should be on equal footing soon.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
...once GoBeProductive is released under the GPL. Any day now....
from the previous week http://www.xminc.com/mt/archives/000275.html.
gewg_
Oh, my belowed Formater Painter! Where art thou oh Format Painter in Open Office?
Word Perfect
MS Office 95
MS Office 97
MS Office 2000
MS Office XP
MS Office 2003
Star Office
Open Office (stable)
Open Office (development)
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Just a disclaimer. I actually use OO.o pretty much exclusively. The one HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE problem I have with it is its seemingly lack of hotkeys for stuff.
In MS Office Excel, if I want to say change say the formatting of a cell or bunch of selected cells/rows/columns/etc I just hit alt-1, and a nice dialogue comes up with the formatting stuffs.
In OO.o, there doesn't seem to be any as of the 1.9.100 build. Which is billed as 2.x on the site, by the way.
Just a helpful hint to convert MSO users to OO.o:
Hotkeys.
Elshar
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
I can promise you that if you're expecting a cool background and some clip art to push your presentation into "good" territory, you're doomed. An eloquent speaker presenting interesting information can present a great talk with minimal or no slides. But if you're not a good speaker (you can learn) or the information you're presenting isn't interesting (depressingly common for business talks), no amount of clip arts, backgrounds, or even animations will rescue you from giving a crappy presentation. Indeed, that's Tufte's point when he rails against PowerPoint: people have the confused idea that PowerPoint is the key to a good talk. They emphasis is entirely on the wrong part of the presentation development process and the result is a seemingly endless stream of bad presentations. Gah.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
That's the checkbox on my copy of 2003 too. In the "Personalized Menus and Toolbars" section, along with a couple of other settings.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
EndNote.
I would include MathType, but the OOo formula editor is so far ahead of both the MS equation editor and MathType that it's not funny. It just doesn't always import MathType content 100% accurately.
In fact I suspect 90% of OpenOffice's shortcomings involve importing MS Office documents.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Regarding the traditional features of an Office Productivity Suite, with version 2.0 OpenOffice.org has, for the most part, reached parity with MS Office XP and MS Office System 12. Where they definitely part ways though is with how they are positioning to implement next generation Open Internet collaborative computing features and services.
...."
.NET framework is present. On hearing this, the crowd of about fifteen people who had gathered to watch this showdown spontaneously broke out in laughter. The MS guys quickly thanked Charles and wished his company good luck, as they unceremoniously walked away.
The most important difference is that OOo faithfully implements open interfaces, protocols, and methods based on Open Standards and Open XML technologies. As a community, OOo is just as determined to keep the Internet open as Microsoft is to close it off by making assertions of ownership over key Internet protocols and methods. The favored business practice of "embrace, extend, and extinguish" is alive and well in Redmond. Chairman Bill has figured out that XML is the next generation API for the Internet. And while he can't "own" XML, he is trying to patent every possible way of using XML. Embrace and extend.
IMHO, the first battleground where OOo and MS Office Systems split concerns the use of Open Internet XML forms. Forms are the most basic unit of business information, and while electronic forms have been around a long time, there is nothing in the previous decades of electronic forms participation that approaches the collaborative explosion cooking with shared business process XML schemas and XForms.
XForms is of course the W3C Open XML standard. OOo v2.0 faithfully implements the XForms model, providing users with an interactive forms interface enabling the binding of any object on the form to such things as web services, XML data and content streams, Jabber XML router and P2P connections, data sources, content sources, DOM hierarchy elements, scripting and workflow routing controls, graphics and multi media, etc.
MS Office Systems "Professional" ships with InfoPath, which enables users to do pretty much the same thing as OOo XForms. Where they part ways is that the Microsoft forms model not only does not conform with the W3C Open XForms standard, but MS has bound all variations of MSXML with platform specific binary dependencies and the restrictive, patent encumbered MS XML Reference License. This license was designed to prevent file format interoperability with Open Source - Open Standards based efforts.
And then there is the troublesome issue of platform complexity, where all MS Office Systems initiatives get bound up in the transition from WinForms to the WinFS-XAML-MSXML model. Recently while at the JavaONE Conference, the vastness of this complexity of platform hardened integrated dependencies hit me.
I was watching another one of those very slick Ajax IDE demonstrations, and two MS guys come by, boldly announcing themselves, claiming credit for having invented Ajax, and of course demanding to see how this particular peon rich client implementation worked. As the young developer, "Charles" went through his demo, patiently breaking his routine wherever and answering all the MS questions, beads of sweat began to drip from his forehead. He kept his cool though, even as the condescension heated up. Finally he got to the really good stuff, dragging widgets onto the forms canvas, easily building real world interfaces and bindings, with perfect XML popping line after line in a second window.
The MS guys were increasingly conversing to each other, "Can we do that? Yeah, we can do that but..." When Charles knew he had them, he hit them with his coup de grace, "And this code will run in all the major browsers without any
When one of the MS guys responded that they can do that too, Charles asked him how? The answer was a qualified one, saying MS could do this as long as the entire
Earlier this year IBM
I have been using OOo2 beta under Linux and Windows and it works fine for me. I also don't understand why you don't want beta software on your system; it doesn't bite--the worst that can happen is that you don't like it.
You know, the GP might not be a MS troll.
I like OOo and use it on several different Linux boxes, but have run into problems of this nature. Often a document created on my Fedora box looks NOTICEABLY DIFFERENT when loaded on my Debian box. Often the line spacing has changed, or a font has been incorrectly substituted somewhere.
Try fixing a 200-page thesis with sporadic errors like that and you soon get sick of it. And that's using OOo's internal SXC/SXW/SXD formats, not the MS kludges.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I never bought MS Office after Office XP ,and I rarely ever used that. [sic]
Therefore my entire review is speculative and based on nothing more than my memory of a previous generation of software. But don't let that stop me from drawing broad comparisons such as, "In fact, I find it easier to use OpenOffice's interface than MS Office's for various things."
Of course you're going to find it easier to use the interface you use regularly, unless one of the products offers some revolutionary new concept, such as reading your mind, or automatically parsing e-mails from your boss and creating the appropriate responses. (Come to think of it, Outlook already does that for me with the Delete rule).
OpenOffice also supports all of the major features of MS Office.
I'm not sure what a major feature would be. Opening/Saving? Changing fonts? WSYIWYG? WordPad contains all the major features of Word, and it's also free.
I'm personally fine with not having a grammar checker since it has given me the opportunity to actually learn the English language instead of relying on my word processor to make my sentences coherent.
That's like saying spellcheck is pointless because you already know how to spell. Sometimes you just make mistakes which can be hard to detect, such as transposing two letters which still form a valid word, or writing a preposition twice. That said, I'd never rely on Word's grammar checking as an authoritative judge of whether or not my writing is correct.
But I guess it's a lot more fun to write things like "wipes the floor with," than it is to make a direct comparison of features which readers could actually use to make an informed decision.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I have to say that I don't share your experience last year I was corresponding with various people on a community project. There were a lot of different versions of office being used. I was the only person who was able to read all of the correspondence in doc format. Sure the formating wasn't always 100% but it was at least readable. OOo 1.1 won't format documents with nested tables. AFAIK 2.0 does... All the documents I have had difficulty with are because of this. Usually people distributing this type of document are using Word as a DTP program... I have had to try and fix formatting errors (in word) with people doing this sort of formatting - it is just painful. Still people persist with it - sigh...
XHTML means either XHTML 1.0 or 1.1, for XHTML 2 is a mere working draft and nowhere near complete in anyway (on top of not being understood by any user agent). When talking about XHTML 2, one does explicitely state the version, for versionless acronyms are for currently stable standards.
This is exactly the same as if when talking about Firefox you were talking about the upcomming 1.5 beta instead of the currently stable and distributed 1.0.6, if "Visual Studio" meant "Visual Studio 2005 beta" (it does not). Versionless names are for stable releases, not for preversions.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
BTW, going back to the first post, my comment was about
Which puts a clear split between "XHTML Strict" (XHTML 1.0 Strict, since there is no "strict" doctype of either XHTML1.1 or 2.0) and "XHTML 2", and since I was referring to the former and not the later you are, once again, wrong.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Think of it as pro-Free Market instead.
Wow! I'm sold!
He also says how he's mostly stayed away from the Excel and Powerpoint replacements because of their unreliability when working with other OOo and MS files.
Then he apologizes for OOo's lack of a grammar engine by saying it helps him learn the English language. I think a grammar engine might help with that too.
OOo hardly kicks MS Office around the block in this review. I doubt MS Office will even feel the kicking. A light tapping perhaps.
Not to mention, No Entourage clone. Which if you're a Mac user is a big deal.
lack of features, poor workability with other apps. when are people going to stop apoligizing for OSS's shortcomings?
how is the software ever going to get better if people use it and tout it even when it is substandard?
I think a lot of the crappy features of the Windows version of Office are corrected in the Mac version. I find the Mac version to be easier to use than Open Office, but I should probably try 2.0 before I comment any further. Of course, if you don't have a Mac, this is not an option. ;-)
Paul... Need Hosting? www.keyserv.net
and where is OpenOneNote?? untill they cover that part of MSOffice functionality i won't even consider switching--how else am i supposed to record lectures and have the audio linked up to each line of typed OR handwritten notes? *thank you MS*