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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."
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
What's the real difference between the versions? I mean, M$ doesn't really change too much between versions, nor does any software for that matter. If the guy has XP, why pay $200+ for 2003 or whatever, when the only real improvements are in the GUI's looks! Maybe when XP starts using truely open document format specifications, then I might support them....
OTOH,
He kept saying how, while word processor is mature, that the other elements of the suite aren't there yet - not because of it's own features as much as 100% compatibility with MS's products (instead of it's own merits).
While the review had a positive spin - it was hardly glowing as the summary made it out to be - regardless of its title.
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?
Office XP = Office 2002. That makes it 3 years old, not 5.
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why not image the office cd and use a virtual cd program to mount it?
not only do you never have to worry about finding the cd, but the accesses will be much faster from the hd.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
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.
You'll probably enjoy knowing that without the preloader (which I never use) OpenOffice Writer from the 1.9m122 does indeed load in under 3 seconds on an A64/3000+ (with 2Gb RAM, but I'm well under 1Gb load right now so that ain't an issue).
Loading time seems around 2 seconds on this setup without any software hogging the processing ressources, and the processor barely peaks
You should give it a try again, 2.0 has been a huge step from 1.0.x from the beginning, but with each new beta release it gets stabler AND faster.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
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
Don't know about Terminal Services at all. But what I can strongly state is that OpenOffice has always behaved ultra-fast at X11 remote displaying, even under ssh intranet links. The opposite to Acrobat reader, for instance. My guess is that it caches what it has to cache.
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.
2. Excel operates in what I call a fake-non-MDI mode. In that it pretends it's not an MDI application, but it actually is. Each document you open shows up in a separate taskbar icon. And yet there's only one window. And if you close that window it closes all your documents. Congratulations MS, you found a way to make MDI even more frustrating. (In fact, I *never* found MDI frustrating before Excel. And yet I can't tell you how many times I've closed all my documents by mistake.)
You only have yourself to blame for not finding the setting for this. It's on the top of the first tab in the user options.
Tools | Options | View | Windows in Taskbar.
clear that check box.
Yeah, that was real tough, wasn't it?
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.
"The difference, really is, you have to think for yourself, when using OOo, whereas MS Office as usual does that job for you."
Why do I have to waste my time "thinking for myself" about things that can be automated? My goal is to spend as much time as possible writing the actual document and as little time as possible figuring out the quirks of the program.
http://www.openclipart.org/ ?
BSOD is an OS problem, not an application problem.
Applications crashing themselves is one thing, applications crashing the OS is another.
I believe the video drivers were moved from user to kernel space in NT4. A buggy video driver can therefore easily crash the OS.
One could also simply double click the header in Office to edit it. I would think this is what 99% of people do.
/View/Header and Footer.
That only works if you have an existing header/footer. If you are creating a new document, you still need to click
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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.
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.
unless ms has silently changed something lately, this is all marketing speech. yes, you can get schemas, but nothing stops you from integrating binary streams in xml - and that's what ms are doing. it's the same format, just in a new box that is tailored to please those buyers who have been swayed by open formats - so ms figured out "let's make it look like open format, maybe slightly change the definition of 'open'... now, done".
actually, ms initially participated in oasis workgroup that developed standard now known as opendocument - but they dropped out.
Rich
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.
The only feature that I really miss, though, is Track Changes
... Edit -> Changes -> Record ?? It has change highlighting, accept/reject and the ability to show or hide the recorded changes. Available in 1.1 as well as 2.
...
Um
From TFA: I've personally never used these new programs seriously, but from the looks of it they could all be useful except for Draw. I haven't yet been able to discern what exactly you're supposed to be able to do with it that warrants its existence.
You're supposed to be able to draw with it? It's a generic vector drawing app with some really cool features, and it's great for creating small diagrams or illustrations.
I suppose in a comparison with MS Office it is a bit out of place because MS Office has NO drawing capabilities worth speaking of, but just because MS Office can't do it doesn't make it worthless
Thanks for the tip. I had never heard of Atlantis Nova before, It appears to offer a good basic feature set and wow that is small! Too bad it is only available as a Win32 program at this time.
I agree that for some users even AbiWord can be overkill (most Windows home users rarely need anything more powerful than WordPad, it's just crippled enough that they think they do). My real point is that there are several excellent word processors available both OSS and commercial besides MS Word.
I promote AbiWord because it is OSS, it works on every major OS (even QNX), the hardware requirements are minor, even an old 486 will work for a Windows box. The UI remains mostly the same regardless of the platform (MS can't seem to do that with Word (I guess they really do believe Apple users "think different"). The UI looks and feels finished. With it's plug-in architecture it can work with most any file format you can think of and it's under 5MB which is amazing when you compare what it competes with feature per feature!
Sorry about this is turning into a fan boy rant. That was not my intention, like I said originally said there are better alternatives to MS Word. We just need to keep reminding people of that.
"Kittens give Morbo gas!"