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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?
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?
OOffice need's a gammar checker
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
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"!
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
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 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 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.
I tried OO (including the newest release version) and keep going back to MS. It's just too crashy. Yes, it's amazing it works at all, but everytime I try to do a serious project in it, I spend too much time trying to recover from bugs.
Best Buy can have you arrested
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
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.
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
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.