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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?
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 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!"
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
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...
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.
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.