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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."
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.
Office XP = Office 2002. That makes it 3 years old, not 5.
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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
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.
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