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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."
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?
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>
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.
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.
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 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)
Yes, there are some improvements in Word XP, but collaborative editing is not one of them.
I haven't used OO enough to assess whether or not there are any comparable features there. I'm basically constrained to use what my customers use, and so far none of my customers has sent me any OO files. I'd be delighted, but...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I dunno. I kinda sympathize with the guy.
I'm totally sick of reading pro-OpenOffice.org articles on Slashdot. The community is far too biased.
The product is really not of the same calibre, I'm sorry. However, every time there is an article about OOo, the only comments that get modded past +1 are pro-OOo. Anything that speaks ill of the product gets demoted to 0 or -1.
It's unfortunate that the product can't receive even remotely objective coverage.
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.
I still use my copy of office 2000 I got with a computer way back when. None of that activation rubbish and it does *everything* that I would ever want it to do.
Which is why incidently, I don't use open office either.
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!"
I think his point was we should learn the grammar of our language. Not depend upon a computer to catch "errors". Am I the only one that just gets annoyed when word thinks my sentence is wrong when it cannot determine the context?
/. :)
Spell check is more of a grey area, but less of a crutch in my opinion. Almost all of the things it catches are errors in typing since I typed too fast.
As always, proof it before you send it. Read it aloud if you need to. Or at the worst have a co-worker/classmate look your writing over.
And no my grammar isn't perfect, this is
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
Such as using the Simple Standard based SlideShow System (S5)?
(ps: this is not a joke, I'm usually doing my presentations with it, it's slick and fast and doesn't care about the presentation box' setup)
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
I use OOo exclusively when I need a word processor. I rarely need anything else in the "office" department, so Writer pretty much settles me down.
IMO, the main difficulty from "migrating" from one to the other is getting used to all the default behaviors and context menu stylings.
I don't use a word processor much these days. However, I used to use one profusely - back in 1996 - 1999. For the most part I was using Windows, and I started off with Office '95. I liked its default actions. I stuck with it for as long as I could, and moved to '97 around 1999. The change was marginal, but I was still used to the (fairly minimalist) Word95 setup. It let me get work done.
I couldn't stand all the nag effects in W97 (to some deggree) and to even greater degree in MSO2k, and that's when I went to OOo (or close to it). However, there are still some things which bug me about OOo - one of which is the inability to simply have a "word processor" view, and not a "printed page" view without going into the "Online Layout" option which changes the document type. There are other small things, but for the most part I've adapted to OOo for when I need a Word Processor.
I'm sure this doesn't apply to everyone, but I need fairly minimalistic word processor features. I think this does apply to most people, though. All I really need is:
- Spell check
- formatting like page margins, line formating, indentation, font selection, and the like
- Sub and super scripts
- Occasionally a table mid-page or something of that sort.
AFAIK, these features were met as far back as Word on Windows 3.11. I know I've seen older Macs that were from that era and had that facility.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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
Maybe when XP starts using truely open document format specifications, then I might support them....
i ew.mspx
Office 2003 XML is an open and royalty-free format. That's just one of the reasons comparing to Office 2003 would've made more sense too.
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/fileoverv
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Neither are spelling checkers.
And yet I think almost anyone agree that they are very useful.
The idea is not that Word will proofread your document, no matter how much some people think it will. The idea is that if you make a typo, there's a fair chance that it will catch it for you.
And if someone uses it as if it were a proofreader, all I can do is hope that someday their ineptitude will catch up with them.
On several occasions, it has made incorrect 'suggestions'.
I've had it make cyclic suggestions. (Saying sentence form A is wrong and suggesting sentence form B, but also saying sentence form B is wrong for which it suggests a change to sentence form A.)
For those who write at and above a truly professional level, grammar checking should be disabled
I disagree unless it's reporting a particularily high percentage AND number of false errors. I still maintain it's useful for typo catching.
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.
That is the question isn't it!
I mean, naturally, the reason to upgrade to Office 2003 is because it is better... so sure, say my employer has 200 users x $300 per upgrade license, that's $60,000.
Of course I can explain in my budget how when we upgraded 3 years ago to XP, assume again for the same reason... "it was better..." that it in 2000 it was just a temporary $60,000 expense, leading up to and preparing us for this EVEN better version in 2003.
OH, but wait, I forgot, just 2 years prior to that we spend maybe $50,000 to upgrade to the 2000 version from the '97 version. And two years prior to that we spent maybe $40,000 upgrading from '95 to '97.
In case you don't have Excel handy, that's...
$40,000 in '97, $50,000 in 2000, $60,000 in 2001/2, $60,000 in 2003 equaling $210,000 in 6 years just on licenses...
THEN there was the amount of time and labor necessary for my IT department to upgrade each of these 200 computers...
And the training time, to make the most of each new version, and teach my company's employees how to work together in the "even better" way that Microsoft has so carefully designed for us.
Plus the memory, and computer upgrades necessary to run the newer versions...
AND with 2003, to MAKE THE MOST OF IT, we needed to add a new server to run SHAREPOINT Server for our 200 people.
Yes, that is what Microsoft and Mr. "Who uses Office XP anymore?"' would have you do.
Fortunately, up until but not including the last sentence, my upgrade story is fiction. We're still using Office 2000. A few are using Office XP. Some of us even use the old Wordperfect and Quattro suite from Corel. And when the Engineering department told us they wanted 2003, I told them NO. (Unless of course they can tell me what features from 2003 it is that they NEED. And I gave them a link to Microsoft's webpage showing the differences between 2003 and XP.)
Now when time permits, we're going to find out just what features our company REALLY needs, and the suite that provides those features best, will be what we will convert the whole company to.
If that is Office 2006, (which of course will be EVEN BETTER, so you ought to go get it NOW if you can!), then so be it, but until then this IT Department is trying the OpenOffice 2.0 beta, and thus far, except for "Convert Text To Columns" in Excel, there has been no need for Microsoft Office.
OpenOffice 2.0 beta works great, has most of the USED features of MS Office, and removes most of the need having Acrobat (full version).
We've already switched most people from IE to Firefox, which most everyone had no problem with, they hated IE's "many" popups and like Firefox's tabs. AND we have MUCH less Virus/Spyware problems now.
And as Outlook keeps chewing up people's PST files, they are being moved to Thunderbird.
Hmm... before you know it, I may be able to CHOOSE which OS we're going to run too...
Grammar checkers are also there to catch spelling errors/typos that a spelling checker would not. .. now that could be caused by a lack of understanding or a simple typo . .Though when you have a something that is 30,000 words or so to check then any help is gladly accepted.
for example "its" when you mean "it's"
Proof reading important documents is always a good plan
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Or you could customize your menu or your toolbars if it really annoyed you. Good luck to the next person who wants to use your PC and wonders where the option has gone.
I have fairly basic needs so I am using OpenOffice (although I could get MS Office through work fairly cheap) and am fairly happy with the suite itself.
However, I am distinctly *not* telling anybody around me I'm using it, until it gets (re)named like an app instead of a frigging website. "OpenOffice.org" -- it's just too embarrasing.
They want visitors to the website, they should put a nice notice on a splash screen (or something). They want to emphasise they are a voluntary organisation, ditto. But they should not have broken the conventions and mungled up the name of the suite.
I suspect just "OpenOffice" would have more mindshare for this very reason. From talking to other users, I know I'm not the only one embarrassed by the current confusing/confused naming.
Okay, end of rant. I greatly appreciate the project and the result that benefits so many -- and am thankful to the StarOffice guys and Sun for seeing a win-win back then.
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...
It was called Open Office before, then there were trademark issues, now it has to be called *.org: http://www.openoffice.org/about_us/summary.html
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
You don't know what you're talking about. The only things which are binary in the W2K3 XML format are graphics objects, spell check data, and OLE control initialization data.
I find the exact opposite problem. MS Office will hang and die on large doccuments, oo has no problem with.
I concur. Word is terribly crash-prone when documents get big and complex. I have a terrible time with anything over 50 pages or so. My understanding is that the legal industry primarily uses WordPerfect for exactly that reason. I use OOo 1.1.4 Writer for big documents whenever possible. When it's not possible (because I have to exchange documents with Word users), I use Word and save constantly, with a shell script running the background that notices file changes and copies off backups, just in case a crash actually corrupts the working file (rare, but it has happened to me).
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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.
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.)