KOffice Developers Reply to Yates

danimo writes "In response to his letter to the Massachusetts administration, the KOffice team has written an open letter to Microsoft manager Alan Yates. It clarifies some false claims that Yates made, such as KOffice, StarOffice and OpenOffice.org being one codebase and that OpenDocument was thus never a real standard. Massachusetts has meanwhile adopted OpenDocument."

Comments

Re:Why even bother with word processors?

[n2rjt]

Well, in addition to the obvious issue about compatibility with .DOC format, it's kind of like the difference between BASIC and C++.
Word Processors are less capable but more immediate, especially in the WYSIWYG area.
Sure, there's LyX, and probably other semi-WYSIWYG editors for LaTeX, but it's not the same.

When it comes to typesetting power, LaTeX wins hands down. It's like having a compiler with a full set of support libraries, compared to a simple interpreter with only the functions that came built in.

Personally, I have never learned LaTeX, although I used to use LyX quite a bit before OpenOffice. It was in many ways better than OpenOffice, but it took me quite a while to learn how to do new things. Also, of course, I could never share documents with others at work.

Office Formats Not That Good

[Comatose51]

The Microsoft Office formats themselves aren't that great. I work at a investment company which relies heavily on Excel. Over the years they've been using a few spreadsheets that has been around since Office 2000 at least. When we upgraded again to Office 2003, we had a few sheets exhibiting really, really strange behavior such the sheets wouldn't update unless you do a cut and paste first. We ended up having to simply rebuild those sheets cell by cell in Excel 2003. Once that was done, everything was many times faster and no more strange behaviors. The resulting file was also many times smaller. If we had access to those formats, at least we could have looked at it and see what was going on.

Some of the traders have become so annoyed by the degree of control Microsoft has over what an user can do that they joke, "Microsoft is trying to protect me from myself again".

Hi. Here. Us, too... :-)

[martin-k]

The upcoming release of TextMaker 2005 -- currently in public beta supports OpenDocument, too. And nobody ever accused us of using any OpenOffice.org or StarOffice code ... :-)

Martin Kotulla
SoftMaker Software GmbH

Re:Word processing != Typesetting

[aussersterne]

Um, except gedit/wordpad don't offer tables, formulas, styles, graphics, or fields pulled from a database. Most geeks on /. work in technical environments where the bulk of work is either code or networks or research.

In the office world (i.e. the other 90% of the globe) the need to work with highly structured documents both visibly and rapidly on an ongoing basis is extreme, and Word/Excel are actually a very good fit indeed.

Re:Why even bother with word processors?

[PeterBrett]

You might want to try the 1.3.6 version (latest stable), or, if you're adventuresome, the 1.4.0 in CVS. LyX is NOT designed for short documents, such as very quick notes or things of that nature. But it's phenomenal for long documents (several page letters, technical notes, books, theses, and, with the beamer class, even presentations which knock the crap -- admittedly not a difficult task -- out of PowerPoint).

I can vouch for the power of Lyx. :) I used it to produce a 105-page technical report a month ago -- it makes section numbering and generating tables of contents & lists of figures/tables effortless, of course, but the best thing is being able to just throw figures and tables at the document and having LaTeX position them in sensible places without having to do anything. It knocks the socks off trying to do the same thing in MS Office/OpenOffice/KOffice/etc.