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MS Thinks OOo is 10 Years Behind
greengrass writes "In a recent interview with IT Wire, general manager of business strategy for the Information Worker Group at Microsoft, Alan Yates expressed the opinion that Open Office is at the same level that MS office was around 10 years ago. Supposedly only suitable for the single desktop, isolated user. After all, it doesn't even have an e-mail client!"
*monocle pops out*
Here I am, still using Office 97 because it does everything I need. Perhaps next year I'll be able to upgrade to OO.o. :)
This is good news, it means that OO will soon be as good as MS Office '97, which contained all the word processor features I've ever needed. Everything added since then has been unnecessary bloat.
He's prolly right. I mean, M$ has pleasing to look at icons, whereas OO has old Windows 3.1 looking icons.
Open source projects need to spend a little cash to get quality artwork that corporations have for all their products. This may seem a shallow analysis, but the truth is the initial appearence of the application does matter.
Better contact OO.org and demand a refund.
liqbase
I think 10 years is about right?
because Microsoft hasn't added much in so long.
When I tell an object to delete this, am I killing it or telling it to kill me?
bob hearn claims that microsoft office is 13 years behind clarisworks.
i didn't want my manifesto as a spreadsheet anyway...
This from the company who equates "Free Software" with "Spyware". Who would expect them to massacre other definitions, like what an office suite is?
"Other computer systems without Microsoft AntiSpyware don't provide the safety that you get with Windows," he explains, in a swipe at the Linux OS. "when you download free software - even a free operating system - you double this effect. You are putting your computer and precious data at risk."
RST
Now i understand why slashdot users tend to promote openoffice.org... :-)
:-)
Interesting that he mentions OOo as suitable for single desktop, isolated users.. Isn't that a huge part of the MS office userbase he's talking about? Email client? Outlook express is for free, isn't it?
Yeah, right about the time of Office 97 is where I thought to myself "Hmm... how much more could I ever use in an office suite?". Since then, MS hasn't been able to introduce a single feature into Office that hasn't made me wonder why I should care. Mind you, I really never used Office 97, since Office 6 was pretty much good enough for me. Now, it's all OOo, since it's easier to find binary installers for OOo than my old Office 6 floppies.
A man who can't pronouce "nuclear arsenal" shouldn't have one -sig ends here.
This article made me want to try MS OFfice over the open office install I have used for ages. 10 minutes in and I have AIDS!
Not cool.
Well,
... if you want the best, you wouldn't use powerpoint anyway. But for alot of people, powerpoint is good enough. Trouble is, OO is getting good enough too
If you want a word processor, then you wouldn't need care alot about the last 9 years of development (Office 97 had a pretty good WP).
If you do presentations, then Office is a few years behind Keynote, at least as far as slick graphics goes (and what is presentation software for if not to look slick?)
Its about getting the base function good enough
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
that this company has around 60,000 employees. no shit some of them are going to say stupid crap, who cares?
All the big changes to MS Office are orientated around collaboration and integration with MS's looming strike at the middleware market. OOo doesn't do this.
Yet.
Dialectician. Archology.
Nor does it come with an embedded flight simulator like Excel does. Sooo 1990s!
OOo doesnt have an email client, I find my email client is an email client and my office suite....well is never used....but would be used for typing etc. OOo to me is just a polished as M$ latest offering, the exception is .doc compatability. Whilst OOo 2 does a very good job in this area its not quite foolproof. Using the open standards offered by OOo generally gives a far higher level of 'user satisfaction' IMHO.
The other area people may think OOo falls down is integration with other system tools, something M$ does well. But this is down to the structure of the software. M$ uses a common base whereas OOo (firefox, thunderbird etc) all stand much more alone.
That said I used office 10 years ago and it was painful, I'd much rather use OOo.
Well I haven't used OpenOffice, but in my view MS Office has been going backwards since Office 2000, its now bloated with numerous useless features and alot of very annoying bugs. Many tech writers I know actually use Office 2000 in preference to Office 2003 or XP, because it's less buggy, quicker and easier to work with.
So if MS Office is ten years ahead, that would make OpenOffice a whole two years better than MS Office already (assuming it hasn't already started to go backwards).
Apple Computer thinks Microsoft is five years behind.
Yes, OOo is certainly missing all the ground-breaking word processing technologies that emerged within the last 10 years. Honestly, both OOo and MSOffice have nothing on notepad, which sadly starts-up and runs faster than both of them.
I think we just slashdotted .au ... :-)
Remember, there are no stupid questions. But there are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
Article is already /.'ed, but I'm not sure I grasp the problem with OO.o being behind Microsoft Office.
Here in the UK, MS has been running ads with people wearing dinosaur heads making comments like:
"I'm either here for the 11:00 meeting on the 12th or the 12:00 meeting on the 11th"
- Microsoft Office has evolved. Have you?
The thing I don't understand is that all the "problems" the ads show haven't actually existed since around Office '97. A simple PDA with Outlook integration (which has existed for... oooh, some time now) would solve the problem above, for instance. The only reason I've heard anyone in business give for upgrading for years is "we're receiving a lot of email attachments in the new format".
I would argue that, this being the case, OpenOffice doesn't need to get "on a par with Office $NEXTVERSION". It just needs Office '97 equivalence and good import/export filters.
This is really just a duplicate of comments posted so far, so feel free to mod it as such, but I can't help thinking if someone said this to me the snarky response is:
"Say, haven't you been having trouble convincing people to upgrade ever sicne Office 97? Does that mean OO is just one year away from being a software package everyone will feel comfortable with and have no need of new features, right about the time you totally change the interface for the newest Office and require offices to retrain workers?"
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A lot of schools and companys use OpenOffice exclusively, including my school! I think it's MS who is behind, the future is portable applications available for everyone, isn't it? ;)
I'm not a heavy office user, but like other people here I recall thinking that Office 97 was meeting my every need. Can some heavy user of Office 2003 tell me what the big wiz-bang features that it has that I'm missing in either Office97 or Open Office?
Honestly, the only thing Office has that I really miss in Open Office is Access. Access is a great program to interact with other databases with via ODBC drivers, and I've yet to see a good open source replacement.
AccountKiller
Ten years ago, hum... I was 12 ~:o just starting to getting get into computers, a few people were getting AOL and (teh) internet.
If openoffice, and office97 came out 10years ago, at the same time, does anyone think that all teh noobies, who went out and brought office, because they knew of nothing better, would do the same if they could download this "OOo" thing?
Plus, they are doing an awesome job of catching up.
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
I'll take a word processor from 10 years ago any day over any new word processors, thank you very much.
Back when I first got to PC world in early 1990s, we had some great word processors that were good for word processing. You wrote stuff. If you wanted it printed, you carried it to that Mac person with who did those "DTP" things. People realized the word processors sucked at typesetting. They were tools you used to produce ASCII files with for someone else to process properly.
While modern word processors try to be the ultimate solutions to all electronic communications. Microsoft wants Office users to be able to do everything - and only succeeds at users being able to do some tasks at some level. Want to write a little bit? Can do. Want to typeset? We suck. Want to add tons of numbers up? Can do. Want to do something a bit more complex with numerical data? Not that easy or flexible, come to think of it.
I'm not saying OpenOffice.org is much closer to Microsoft's utopia though.
My point is, I've written some stuff all of my life. I can sit in front of my Commodore 64 and be productive, dammit, all I need is disk space. I don't care if Microsoft comes up with new features. Word processing was finished 10 years ago. All you stack on top of that is glitter.
The only reason I'm not going back to WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS are that I think OpenOffice.org's style-definition stuff is niftier, OpenDocument rocks when you think of the future, and thirdly, I don't think I can find an easy way to get a proper license with the means available. Plus WP's file manager UI is kind of crappy.
If both upped things up a notch we could be in a position by the end of the year of having not one but two enterprise level cross platform email clients, both of which would work pretty well from Open Office.
Anyway, I reckon that Microsoft have realised that Outlook is pretty superfluous for most people. Windows Vista (finally) comes with a calendar app which would be sufficient for most people. Or perhaps they haven't - Vista does seem to be lifting a lot of features from Mac OS X.
It doesn't matter! Cause I only use 10% of the fundamental features of every office suite.
Can't RTFA, 'cos problem loading. anyway, probably he's right. It goes to show that OSS needs a solid (or at least a pleasant, workable) collaboration client to counter Exchange/Outlook/Office. Too many corporate users are stuck with this combination (except those on Lotus Domino/Notes).
Brutal, honest, truth. I'm not fond of OpenOffice.org
It's ok. It's not as great as people say it is. Organizations that have the money for MS Office and want it, honestly, have a bit better product.
I do most of my writing in LaTeX if it requires any formatting, and coding in gedit. I use Kile, though it's buggy as it gets, just for the completion feature.
If I need a presentation, I use PowerPoint. I find the OOo presentation software to be a bit clunky. It'll open a PowerPoint presentation, but it doesn't look very good on the other side (this is stock Gentoo Linux... perhaps there are other bells and whistles).
OOo seems to run slow and with a lot of overhead. The interface is a little clunky too.
Now, I don't do much in MS office, but if I'm not using LaTeX, and have a Windows box with it installed handy, I'll usually use MS Office prior to using OOo. Usually, I'll use KWord if I need to open or write a doc. Honestly, the KDE presentation tool seems better than the OOo one, but PowerPoint still smokes those two.
ThunderBird smokes Outlook, honestly... if it's compatible with your installation (I'm thinking university Kerberos auth still doesn't work). The guy is right about the lack of email integration, but, honestly, all that ever did was irritate me. It facilitates group writing... lovely.
Most of my writing with multiple authors is handled via CVS, in LaTeX.
For spreadsheets I use gnumeric.
Plots and charts, gnuplot, which I think everyone on the planet uses.
Did I miss some crucial thing that OOo does? It's a nice product and all, but, the truth is, it doesn't match the hype. Firefox probably made a big ripple for open source apps under windows, but Firefox is an awesome browser. Firefox offers a real improvement over IE.
My Linux solution barely involves OOo. I think that I uninstalled it it a while ago so I wouldn't have to wait for Gentoo to emerge the update. I don't really think that the hype is justified, and I used StarOffice back in the day and everything. There's just, simply put, better stuff available.
MS Office is ahead of OOo in alot of feilds. Modular design is one that comes to mind. But they fail to answer this:
While MS Office is '10 years' ahead of OOo, why are you afraid to compete with it head on through Open Formats? I'm betting MS has the resources to still stay ahead for a long time in the future and pave new ways of thinking.
The real answer I guess is that they find this to big a risk for their likings...
we ought to say that MS Office is ~10 years behind Emacs?
:-)
That has an email client, media player, gaming platform....
So looking from a Microsoft perspective open office is not as good as MS office because we do not have a e-mail client embedded, meaning that the entire open office is crap because of this?
I still have the opinion you should not embed a e-mail application in open office as this is a mail application and has nothing to do with the things you do in a office application. The beauty of opensource projects is that the final application is build upon users input, not only code but also expectation. If, please read IF, there was a need for a e-mail application within open office the community would have made sure this was a building option.
In my opinion is the fact nobody has implemented this evidence that there is no need for this in the open office user community. The moment it will be embedded it will be done because of users requesting this and start building this. Maybe Microsoft should pay some more attention on opensource to look what people are building if they have the freedom to do this themselves... and maybe Microsoft should find out that some of there products do not "completely" satisfy the needs of there users...
Regards,
Johan Louwers.
Regards, Johan Louwers.
Server seems to be slashdotted, so i havent read FTA, but... I can't see any reason to bundle everything including kitchen sink or email client to office suite, that just makes software more unsecure and slow.
While I can appreciate your gushing review of office you didn't really address his main point. His point was that he really didn't see any reason to upgrade from office 97 and that if OO offered the same functionality then it was good enough for him
So perhaps you can tell us exactly how ms office is leaps and bounds ahead and is a compelling upgrade from 97.
evil is as evil does
But for me, Writer does what I need to produce detailed technical documents. Calc does all I need for a spreadsheet (which isn't that much, but then I imagine it's more than most people need).
I'd like to know where it is "leaps and bounds" ahead of OOo.
Multi-lingual support is better, especially Chinese and such using Unicode fonts. That may well not be a critical feature for many readers here though.
With MS Office you have at least evolved to the stage of dinosaurs. OO.o doesn't even consider you to be a lifeform, does it? Show me an advertising campaign that proves otherwise.
-clueless
Chat with other atheists http://secularchat.org
....of Desktop users does need more than an single user text processor? Three percent? Perhaps one?
MS WORD is like MS Outlook, it might have very useful features, but 95 % of the users do not need them. They buy a PC and Word is included, whether they need it or not. And office solutions developed for huge enterprises are probably not the best choice for private desktops.
So it's all ok.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
OO is about the same as MS Office. I had it installed on my IBM Thinkpad X31 before I sold it, and it did the same job as Microsoft's bloatware. (I used my Mac 90 percent of the time. I figured money is better than a piece of black plastic, so I got rid of it.) I have Office 2004 installed on my Mac, but the only really useful part is Excel. That's all I ever use of it. For writing, I simply use TextEdit. Muchg faster and more reliable, and saves the documents in RTF format.
Hmmm. And nearly everybody I personally know who uses Apple does so because he/she doesn't want a windows-based computer, but has bought into the same headspace of the belief that they "have" to run MSOrifice to exist in the world. So much for thinking differently.
Ok so my subject will probably get me flamed but I love Office 2003. Why? InfoPath and SharePoint.
SharePoint is an amazing product that does so much. The main reason it is so great though is that it replaces horrible network drives with 10,000 folders and impossible to organize folder structures. With SharePoint everything is online, automatically version'd and instant to search (including file contents) on custom filters. WinFS will supposedly bring some of these features to the desktop however SharePoint has it now and I am living now. SharePoint is part of the reason that I don't care much for desktop search, network based search is much important to me as I don't work on my own, I work with hundreds of people all over the world. Having a web based solution (with AD intergration) makes working with people in different companies and countries much easier (can't really be done with network shares, unless you VPN).
I realise not everybody uses Office like I do though and I am sure a lot of the new features are not used and the only reason companies update is because support for the older version has stopped. I believe for small to mid sized organizations can benefit from OOo whereas larger corporations probably won't so much. However I would also argue that a lot of small to mid sized companies lose a lot of money from not organizing correctly and SharePoint could help them a lot in that are.
Just my 2c. Not bashing OOo, they did a great job.
Access seems to be a real selling point for Office to a lot of people. To a certain amount I understand why; it's incredibly easy to set up a "database-application" within hours.
From a practical, DBA perspective Access is the devil though. It's absolutely horrid as a database engine and I'd bet you that umpteen companies curse Access on a daily basis, since that "clever hack" somebody implemented 10 years ago is unreliable, crashes, is virtually impossible to maintain, corrupts the data and for some unfortunate reason it's "business critical" nowadays.
Another horror is the Access front end when it's abused by end users to connect to a real database. The queries submitted are just dreadful and I've seen numerous times ghost locks on pages, or even tables by such applications, which only could be released by rebooting the database server and that's pretty bad news in a production environment.
While MS SQL Server is a pretty fine product, Access really, really sucks shit from a database perspective.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
I'd normally let this go, but I've just finished doing project documentation for a MS only company, and I have to ask you, ARE YOU ON CRACK?
MS Office clean, polished and reliable? It's a fucking dog's bollocks of an interface! Excel has that wierd implimentation of MDI that's inconsistent with everthing else out there. It's cut/copy/paste is borked and wierd as well. Word has crap all over the place. There's bugger-all consistency of purpose. Tools like the org chart designer are almost satanic in their ability to do exactly what you don't want them to do, while Powerpoint manages to hide virtually every funcionality that might allow you to make an interactive presentation.
And reliable? We were trying to paste client-supplied Word tables into Excel to get some total figures. It crashed every time. We ended up sneaking portable OOo in on a thumb drive and pasting them into Calc. Word would choke on some of the documents too - they were table heavy, and word would get stuck in some repagination cycle. It'd be unusable except in "Normal" mode, but then you couldn't see what your output would look like. An Access database would randomly change date formats (US or Aus) depending on which computer it was run on. It wouldn't be so bad if it was consistent, but half the dates would be in US, while the rest were Aus.
I'm not saying OOo is that much better, but christ, the only thing MS Office has going for it is that every man and his dog already has a copy and knows how to work around the freakish bits.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
The problem with (most) applications in an office suite is that most people don't ever really bother to learn it, or look into the feature set.
I'd be rich if I received a penny every time I notice someone trying to align text by just typing enough spaces to get the text where they want it to go instead of using properly aligned tabs, or selecting text over and over to change a font while they should be using formatted styles, the list goes on to infinity.
It's not that everyone only uses 10% of the feature set because that's all they need, it's because 10% of the feature set gets the job done decently enough to not want to bother learning about the other 90%.
It's only when someone thinks "a word processor should be able to do X or Y" and they go looking how to accomplish it that they stumble across a new feature and then use it consistently whenever it's appropriate.
Most of the comments I've seen so far indicate that all office application are just becoming too bloated and they stopped looking into them at version so and so but at the same time they show their ignorance about future versions. There has indeed been very little innovation for a long time, but if a new version can accomplish something in half the time it used to take you than that's a significant improvement by itself; the fact that people are set in their ways and will continue to use the wrong tools (eg features) for the job is a problem of education.
But... why ;)
# emerge msoffice
doesn't work?
I don't post any links
In retrospect, "leaps and bounds" was probably too strong an assertion. I also have to apologize to the other child poster, because I did indeed miss the original point of the post I replied to. I've been using Office XP since 2002, and just recently upgraded to Office 2003 only because a relative had an extra license. I do think upgrading from Office 97 to XP is a good idea. I've used 97, and I've had problems with documents getting corrupted and other similar problems. However, I was very happy with XP and wouldn't have upgraded to 2003 unless somebody gave me a copy.
I still would select Microsoft Office over OpenOffice.org on a machine that had both installed, purely for stability and speed reasons. Office is better optimized and rarely crashes. With the preloaders off, it takes 2 seconds to start Microsoft Word and 14 seconds to start OpenOffice Writer on my machine. (I've timed it.) I'm really not that fast a typist - I do about 60 WPM on average - yet OOo doesn't keep up with my typing. I can usually get through 3/4 of a line before the letters appear on screen. Menus are equally slow - it takes about two seconds from the time I hit Alt+Letter to when the menu is done drawing. I've also noticed fairly significant display corruption - parts of the screen that don't update until I resize the window, or random lines being drawn across the toolbar. Office (Office 2003, at least) doesn't have these glitches.
I acknowledge that these delays aren't that significant, especially considering that Microsoft is probably using undocumented stuff to speed up Office, but they're just annoying enough to make me uncomfortable using OpenOffice.org on a regular basis.
OOo is a good product, and I've recommended it to people who couldn't afford Office. They've all been fairly happy with it, though they do complain about some of the same glitches.
With a bit of polish, OOo can be a serious competitor to Office someday. I look forward to it.
(I do apologize for my incoherent posts - it's late for me.)
One thing I hope doesn't happen is that the OOo folk (or KDE, Gnome for that matter) fixate on replicating the entire MS product set.
E.g. one area where things always seem to get bogged down is in the area of office/groupware integration. It amazes me when talk of groupware on slashdot turns into an exchange-copy-fest. Instead, I reckon integrating OOo, XForms and Wiki technology would create something really powerful - more akin maybe to Notes than Exchange or Sharepoint.
In short - use OOo to pull together existing, strong, open source technologies that we know work.
OOo may be 10 years behind MSO, but MSO is 10 years ahead of whatever would most sophisticated users need.
:)
The answer is simple:
Private users, small firms, medium-sized firms: OOo. Cost of ownership, fulfilling all needs.
Big firms: MSO. OOo doesn't fulfill their needs, cost of custom solutions too big.
Huge firms: Custom-modified OOo tailored to their needs. (after all, it's open source. You can't modify MSO because you don't have the sources.)
So if OOo grabs 90% of the market and MSO retains the remaining 10%, I'm perfectly fine with it
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Do you know how that compares to OOo's multilingual support?
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Hmm: large company hypes one of its core revenue generating products over the competition. Slow news day?
As for being ahead I had an Acorn BBC Model B - 2Mhz and 32k of computing power - with an additional 32k ROM that contained a dictionary with software that identified spelling errors in real-time. I think this was 1988ish. When did Office get check as you type spelling?
Firefox is even more years behind. Because he doesn't come with it's own Operating System like IE does.
Ehm...and another one. What about the fact that MS Office not running on any other platform than MS Windows? Well some older versions run on Mac OS X but they are incompatible with the versions running on MS Windows?
What does it say about MS's development process if the difference between Office and OOO is all they could manage in ten years?
It is not open unlike ODF. It has binary keys, is pantent-encumbered, and can't interoperate with FOSS projects.
A CC-licensed illustrated horror novel
Well, some 15 years ago my phone number was 5933. By now it would be 0146268933 (after morphing through 215933, 265933, 6268933 and needing to notify everyone of the change.) 4 years ago I dumped the landline and got a cellphone, amongst all advantages (bills including) it has a shorter number.
If the progress goes in wrong direction, time to change the baseline of the "progress" and move on to alternatives.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
I hate to ask this, but I guess my front-line tech support reflex will never really go away. When you did these tests, was MSOffice still taking up a metric assload of resources in the background? I've never had any of those problems with OOo (save the pre-loader related ones, as I hate and never use pre-loaders).
A man who can't pronouce "nuclear arsenal" shouldn't have one -sig ends here.
Well, this will probably be unpopular in this crowd, but I totally agree.
/. only use office for assignments at college, and mostly because they're forced to. For folks like you, sure OO.o and O97 are more than sufficient. For the "Information Worker" that MS is targetting, they're no longer sufficient.
I work for a large (85,000 people) multinational company, and we simply couldn't get by without the integrated features of Office. I spend all day editing Word docs, Excel spreadsheets and occasionally Powerpoint, and without the tight integration I'd be in a mess.
I know how much of a mess, because 10 years ago O97 didn't have the Outlook integration, and I was forced to keep multiple copies of things on disk, and the review/formatting/comments stuff was really poor.
I suspect that 90% of the folks here on
Oh, and if you are at college writing your thesis, then I highly recommend using LaTeX instead like I did. In terms of typesetting and formatting Word doesn't even come close.
And does that come as a surprise that M$ thinks so?
Ive gone through nearly all the damn upgrades and I havent gotten any smarter at writing. Damn promises! "Work smarter", "Work faster", "Make work simpler", "The information you need", "Create with confidence", "Improve your skils"; Bollocks! Im still as dumb as I was with Word 95 - but on the other hand, now I got all those fancy buttons and nifty animated helpers.
It does everything you want, makes Wonderful(TM) papers, all absolutely without any effort. I'm using it for almost everything those days.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
OOo can open ten year old .doc documents. Of course MS Office isn't stuck in the past like that.
OO has gone a long way, and is closing in on Word/Office very fast. The main problem with the suite today, is performance and a few UI issues. Adding every obscure Office feature, will just make it more bloated.
To be able to take over the world, it does however need to be better than Office. It already has one, the open docuent format, but I guess the world isnt quite ready to understand that yet.
The following feature, would be a killer- though I have no idea about how to technically solve it: I would like to call it "Live cooperative editing". A document could be saved in a way that multiple persons could open it simulatanously. You would then lock it on paragraph level. Ie the paragraph where my cursor is, is locked to me - and everybody else viewing this paragraph would clearly see that I am working on it. Multiple persons could then work on different parts of a document at the same time. This would be fantastic for working on large report/articles.
Todays features for tracking changes in documents fail terrible when multiple persons are involved, and their changes overlap.
You probably know this...
You can get Wordperfect here http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=Co rel3/Products/Display&pid=1047025942277.
As far as I can tell they no longer make a linux version. I bought WP8/Linux and still have it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
So... only one more stage before total victory:
Then they fight you, then you win.
You're absolutely right about the startup time being slow for Openoffice compared to MS Office, but the display corruption and the speed when openoffice is loaded is not normal. Yes, it's probably a bug in openoffice, but don't think that every install is like that. After it's loaded, Openoffice is quite snappy for me and there are no display artifacts. I've read that it depends quite heavily on the display drivers, as in bad drivers producing display artifacts. It's not an excuse though. Openoffice needs to clean up its act in many ways. (speed, 64 bit support, interface)
Bill, is that you? OpenOffice.org supports custom tab stops, Bill. You should really give it a more thorough try, I think you'd like it. Maybe someone can arrange a private demo for you and Ballmer. I'm sure you'll see that bullet point sizing is about the only thing it is missing that your last decent MS Word (that's 97, Bill) had.
ClarisWorks isn't that good, if AppleWorks is any indication. For example, for the spreadsheet, "Fill Down" is in the "Calculate" menu, and "Delete cells..." is in the "Format" menu. "Print" prints row and column headers by default. Apple completely abandoned the suite and are working on a new one.
You shouldn't really have to call in a programming team every time someone needs a trivial database. People are fairly capable at defining up tables, fields, connect them together in a visual SQL editor and produce simple forms and reports.
I agree Access has its quirks but why isn't there a good tool for doing the same that does this properly? The answer isn't to have to submit an IT project every time, instead of Access hacks you get Excel hacks. What you need is an easy migration path from "click-and-point" development to an IT supported "real" DB application, for those that need it. Most of them you won't ever need to migrate, the trouble is the business critical ones you do.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"Windows/Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD/Macintosh: MS Thinks OOo is 10 Years Behind"
./. substring is really asking for it...
The
I think they mean "internet years".
Sure Word has more features etc. But I don't find it an issue since I never ever ever use them.
10 years behind? The last time I used Word very intensively was when I wrote up my end of degree project in 1996. I thought Word was wonderful, successive versions have seemed less wonderful (read: crap). By that metric that means OOo is equal to Word at its peak. I personally think it is better than that.
Bitter and proud of it.
first, it is free. second, it therefore cannot suck, never.
And, as to the non-integrated email / calendaring application, I for my part am using
the Mozilla Suite, soon to be replaced by the SeaMonkey Suite. Both, Mozilla and OOo
perfectly fit together and furthermore, security holes in OOo (not really holes as OOo
is actually not made fit for distributed computing, but it will be in the near future)
do not interfere with my Email correspondence and vice versa. And, we all know what
kind of steep curve learning process Microsoft has had when bundling email/internet and
their Office Suite. And we all paid for that and this sucks.
Quality takes time, I heard once someone saying, and it is true. Whilst MS Office gets
less and less comfortable and suitable for more than the average Joe's daily email-writing/
letter writing task, OOo becomes more and more suitable for replacing everything with more
stable and better implementations, implementations that are highly reusable and therefore
create a wealth of its own. I do not see that in the MS Office Suite.
Prediction: as soon as the rich client facilities of the OOo are made stable and a suitable
profile or multiple suitable profiles for the individiual solutions based on those rich clients
have been found out and defined, MS Office will lack as it had 10 years ago.
Perhaps then, MS Office will be enabled to stable manage documents that include more than the
average Joe's 10 pages at max, with lots of embedded documents and other objects etc.
Best wishes to you, MS, who lacked all the time.
Cheers
Carsten
The speed advantage MS Office has, I would guess, is mostly due to it being single-platform. Making OO.o cross-platform probably had a lot of costs in efficiency of code. Also, MS Office can take advantage of windows-specific libraries and functions and so forth more easily.
And that advantage is something OO.o will never have; it has to make up in other ways. It's possible that, taking that into account, OO.o is actually faster in comparison.
No idea, haven't used OOo much (by "better" I was referring to earlier versions of MS Office, not OOo). However, much of this should be part of the OS, not just the app. Also the newer format OpenType fonts aren't supported properly by anything except the latest Adobe apps (in others they just act like Truetype).
need to mention this at least once on this thread [given the OP], appologies in adv if its a dup.
"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."
- yummy rootbeer.
OpenOffice.org is suffering precisely because it is attempting to play catch-up to Microsoft Office. The dogged insistence upon keeping the UI similar basically means duplicating one-for-one the same mistakes that Microsoft has already made.
....." Part of the problem is the ruler. In WordPerfect, you indicated tab stops and margins by typing a line of punctuation marks which represented the margins and left-, right- and fractional point-aligned tabs. The "ruler" metaphor was retained in the graphical word processors, but the ruler was moved to the top of the editing window. This avoids cluttering up the text with unprintables {basically good} but now each paragraph has its own tab settings {as it always had, since a ruler could be inserted anywhere} and it is not obvious how to apply tab and margin changes globally to a document {bad}. {I would suggest that a paragraph's own, private ruler should appear in the blank line which precedes the paragraph, with the global ruler above the editing window. But IANAUID.} In the WP days, it was relatively easy to deal with this once you had grasped the concept of the ruler: just block-select the "old" ruler {which behaved exactly as text in the "editing" ways, if not in the "printing" ways} and then block-insert it below the paragraph with the private ruler.
MS Office is a great lumbering beast. It has too many features that ordinary users -- the ones who do document layout using rows of spaces, type out tables of contents by hand and use spreadsheets as a substitute for databases -- are almost never going to use. It needs these features, because it is closed-source software sold for profit and every new version must have something that was absent from previous versions. {Software doesn't naturally wear out like cars or VCRs or steam irons, so alternative and possibly underhand methods are required to force users to replace old software with new versions.} The proliferation of "wizards" should already be sounding an alarm bell: if a task needs a "wizard" at all, then maybe, just maybe, some part of the user interface was badly designed in the first place. But the MS Office user interface is sacrosanct: if MS change it even slightly, then the alternatives will automatically become less unattractive {learning a new UI, vs learning a new UI and paying for the experience to boot}.
If OOo is ever to do anything other than play second fiddle, then it needs to innovate -- do something Microsoft Office cannot do. If the devs are canny, they will introduce a really useful new feature which would be very difficult to implement in Microsoft Office. {Note, I am not above a little "exercise of reasonable force" in the course of achieving this}.
I also think that my abovementioned pet peeves such as spaces-based layout are holding people back in ways they will never realise -- precisely because one of the things they are holding themselves back from, is understanding what they could be achieving. There needs to be a way to tell users "there is a better way to do this" -- and to figure out what they were trying to do, and do it properly. Preferably not by Clippit saying "It looks like you are trying to
It should also be borne in mind that OOo is no longer the only alternative to MS Office. KOffice is maturing rapidly, and has the advantage of having been Free Software from Day One -- there is no legacy closed-source codebase lurking in there to spoil things. As a part of the popular KDE desktop environment, it can easily find its way into many distributions. I have high hopes and great expectations for KOffice. Gnumeric and Abiword should not be discounted either -- they really fly on modern hardware, and Abiword can still hold its own on a Pentium 133.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I'm moving back to LaTeX and couldn't be happier. I'm only using OO.o in order to deal with those pesky Word documents.
I have far less hassle in dealing with bibliographies in papers once I set them up. I don't need to do this mad formating stuff in Word. I just use \cite{}. I could do very nicely formatted math, while I struggled to do this tolerably in Word.
Sometimes the oldies are the goodies.
Actually, I love these ads.
Sure, I personally dont have a huge need to upgrade to the newest Office.
But the dinosaurs are cute, and that is all that most people really see in the ad.
Also, Open Office has inferior branding, IMHO. And if a product has inferior branding, you wont have as much confidence in using it, thus reducing your capabilities, and your general levels of creativity.
So strong branding is a HUGE thing that MS has built up since Office 97, and if that is going to make my employees feel better about the stuff they are using, and make them more productive, GREAT!
Of course with these ads, MS are negatively branding Office 97, which means that the whole thing is a bit of an artificial push to buy the new Office... but the dinosaurs are still really cute.
...and its been downhill from there. The determination to integrate MS Word with Excel, Powerpoint, Access and Outlook is the reason why MS Office 2003 is so incredibly slow and buggy.
And it's also the reason why OO is similarly slow and buggy as well. Open Office 3.0 should break away from the fat monster eating up my disk space and memory and become modular and properly programmable.
It strikes me that OO is facing a similar crisis of quality that caused MS to re-engineer Vista - beyond a certain size, programming it in bits without a narrow gateway of quality code and a stable, secure foundation is producing Open Source's version of bloatware.
Somebody further up suggested that OO become modular and the user decide what's needed and what isn't. What a revelation! The user in control of his/her environment! Isn't that the point of Linux and Open Source?
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Ha! MS Office is in fact 17 years behind my preffered user friendly office suite!
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
...does MS also think it will take them 10 years to catch up?
I'm doing my thesis this year on FOSS, using OOo to create some "carrot" migration files (mini functional bookkeeping database and so on). I've used M$ Office mostly previous (couppled with HTML kit, notepad, and whatnot for programming/scripting futures) nd there seems to be some things you're all missing here. First of all, OpenDocument format, or in this case the ODT, OpenDocumentText file format is an encrypted XML. This means that M$ Office can't open it. I've tried, you get only a few long lines of encrypted data. THis adds an extra dimention to all this. Your files are safe in odt format form the lower educated members that have access to your files. Idon't know about the rest of you, but in the places where I've been employed I'm sad to say I usually knew more of PC's, formats and the whole shabang then anyone around me, especially my superiors. I've been looking into the major reasons why OOo hsn't taken over everywhere allready. Let's be honest it offers VASTLY superior things then M$. The XML based fileformat provides adequate, pretty much verlasting access to a wealth of informtion. All of that in XML format takes a vastly smaller space then in any fileformat M$ has producced. Also because OOo is FOSS it's free, reliable, and OPEN. You get to adapt ANYTHING you like to suit ANY need you can think of. That flexibility will be the deathblow to M$. Not yet, but in 5 to 10 years, mark my words, FOSS office suits will grind M$ market share into a minority, a SMALL minority.
On worst case he is motivating openoffice and Koffice developers.
Who would have thought that LaTex and CVS would have solved this problem since 1984. Versioning and changes is something MS Office still hasnt got close to right. And because of its closed binary file structure, you cant use external versioning tools to version control your documents. You are stuck with the internal MS Office utils, which suck.
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
...apparantly. See dog's bollocks (meaning). Coincidentally similar meaning to the nuts in poker.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
..is a sign of quality?
I am in charge of the desktop software installs on a large corporate network. I must say that the MSI technology, administrative installation points and ease of updating makes MS a real winner.
System policies allow us to for example, to force one file format along the whole corporation, saving the day of not-so-clever users and the help desk guys,too. OpenOffice is way behind MS on these features.
The same applies to Firefox. although I am a die-hard Firefox user for my own purposes, I resist deploying FF on the corporate network because it misses the configurability of IE wrt policies, etc.
access also offers a self contained mdb file containing a complete relational database. no need to ship arround a whole directory full of files or hope people have the network setup to connect to your database server. This is especially true if someone wants to carry the DB with them on say a flash stick (assuming its a single user db here) or wants to e-mail off a copy for someone to read and comment on. Easy to back up (just burn one file to CD) etc
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
"Don't give me the excuse "it's free, so stop complaining"; Garbage is free but you don't jump in a landfill do ya" -- Some Slashdot Poster
I actually consider that Office 97 has every feature I needed, the next versions were actually full of worthless stuff, and Office XP has features that I can actually consider as hazards. I think making things on Office 97 is far more efficient that doing so in Office XP. So I am gonna take this MS announcement as an advertising for open office
I have installed OO2.01 Win32 in a few peoples machines, that don't want to buy an office suite, whilst largly happy, I can see it's horrendously slow compares to Office 2k3. 10 years is a bit harsh, I would say 5-7, it OO2.01 makes a good upgrade for Office 97 users, that about it... Under non-windows OS, it's a different story however...
The UI is clean and polished, it operates quickly on a decent machine, and it's reliable.
Just to add a bit of more wood to the fire, I have always wondered why the hell does MS Office products have "Page Config" under the File menu? that is not design wise!!! When I want to modify the format of my documents I expect to whoops, i just said it, FORMAT the page or pages I am at.
In that way, OpenOffice has it right, Format/Page, as simple as that.
Aside of that I still believe Microsoft Office 2000 is better than OpenOffice 2.0 at thesaurus, dictionary, macros, multilanguage suport [I use Español], change tracking, notes, overal confort 'feeling', versatility[Excel], Formula support[excel], speed, memory (I hate having to load a spreadsheet+drawing program+presentation creator+word processor when trying to write a letter).
And I preffer OpenOffice Draw to draw diagrams (it is very straightforward and has EPS export which I use in Latex). Although this one needs some work as a file I lost some information from one file that in some way OOo 2.0 could not open "right" after I saved it.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
If you don't already know, chances are pretty high newer versions of Office *aren't* a compelling upgrade for you.
well, i am an oo.org user for quite some time. currently i can remember two features that i still miss in oo.org ;)
;)
1. vertical selection of text;
2. ability to display information about changes and comments permanently besides text
these are in oo.org issuezilla for a very long time and they both would help me a lot.
of course, then there's million things that are a lot better in oo.org than in msoffice, but that wasn't the question
Rich
I guess OOo is getting the paperclip next year, then.
I use it to write a lot of stuff in Portuguese, and the only complain I have is that the clipboard is a little "schizophrenic" WRT utf8 :-) As I don't use the clipboard a lot, I cope with it.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I wonder if MS Office is where Emacs was ten years ago....
Unfortunately for him, it also doesn't matter. Many people are still using Office 97 or earlier, and it works just fine for the them. All the stuff they've added since (UI tweaks aside, which nobody cares about - some people downright hate them) I've yet to ever use. I don't doubt there are organizations out there that use every last of the collaboration/groupware features they've added, but I think that is a very very small minority of their user-base.
So in other words, Open Office is doing just fine with its feature set. It actually the one feature Office hasn't yet offered, and that's PDF conversion. That is a feature Microsoft has puposefully chosen to ignore even though the demand for that is HUGE. I hear they will have it in the next version. It's about time.
Although it's true that OOo is at least 10 years behind on features like product activation. ;)
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They want their idea for "single monolithic software suite covering every possible activity" back.
I mean, really, modern operating systems know how to launch programs when you click contextually, via icon or URL or filename extension. The whole point is to let people create the best solutions to individual types of tasks, not one hulking thing that tries to do everything.
Get off my launchpad!
Aside of that I still believe Microsoft Office 2000 is better than OpenOffice 2.0 at thesaurus, dictionary,
;)
:) isn't that just because you have used one more than another ?
:)
;)
that probably depends on language used, as oo.org has made quite a lot of progress in this area (and in a lot of languages) - see
http://native-lang.openoffice.org/ and http://l10n.openoffice.org/
macros,
what exactly ? i'm not a programmer, but from what i have heard, oo.org supposedly has a much better model overall (though it is not so easy to use) and much broader access to internals. and that is not counting the ability to use basic/java/javascript/python and, i think, ruby and whatnot for macros.
multilanguage suport [I use Español],
this is probably in the same cathegory as dict and other native language components. i believe es community was pretty active in oo.org, wasn't it ?
change tracking, notes,
agreed
overal confort 'feeling',
um, what ?
versatility[Excel],
my requirements for a spreadshet are very, very minimalistic, so i can not comment much on this, though i have heard that excel still has more functionality. i also have heard that gnumeric beats them both
Formula support[excel],
hmm. care to elaborate ? i have heard exactly the opposite, meaning that oo.org formula is much better both in functionality and compatibility
speed, memory (I hate having to load a spreadsheet+drawing program+presentation creator+word processor when trying to write a letter).
this has been a problem for quite some time, and has gotten much better lately. and work on making oo.org faster continues by modularizing it even further.
btw, you do not load everything to write a letter - only components that are needed are loaded (though it still is not modularized as much as maybe is possible), meaning there are basic components and then writer part is loaded only if you write text document, calc part only if you edit a spreadsheet and so on.
and btw, draw and impress share a lot of internals, impress is based on draw
Rich
Yes, Microsoft has been busy integrating Windows, Exchange, Outlook, Office, SharePoint and IIS into a big system. Is that the right way to go? I don't think so. I think the future is with web-based applications: rich in-page HTML editing, AJAX, Web 2.0. The office suite of the future will be the browser. And if you don't want to store your documents on a server, you'll just run the same web-based applications locally. Both Microsoft Office and OpenOffice are transitional technologies; they were never designed for broad, open, web-based systems, and they will never be really good at it. FWIW, OpenOffice's support for collaboration isn't actually all that bad: between WebDav support, XML file formats, and versioning support, you can, in fact, use it as part of a system that's very much like Microsoft's collaborative systems built around office. But, again, I don't think you'd want to.
If the Microsoft Office and OpenOffice codebases weren't such awful messes, then pieces of those suites might have found their way into the browsers, as rich text editors, diagram editors, etc. But here, too, the legacy of those applications weighs them down. The rich text controls, grid controls, diagramming controls, and graphics controls that will be built into Firefox, Mozilla, and Safari will be built on their built-in support for HTML, XML, CSS, and SVG.
I'm really not that fast a typist - I do about 60 WPM on average - yet OOo doesn't keep up with my typing. I can usually get through 3/4 of a line before the letters appear on screen. Menus are equally slow - it takes about two seconds from the time I hit Alt+Letter to when the menu is done drawing.
:)
ugh. that should not be happening. do you have problems with other applications ? any spyware or whatever is the trendy thing to have nowadays ?
which oo.org version ? have you tried to reproduce this in a fresh user account ?
if you can relieably reproduce this, submit a bugreport. once loaded, oo.org is faster than most humans
Rich
The best version of Word *ever* was Word 5.1a for the Mac. Simple. Stable. Unbloated.
I remember thinking that WordPerfect 5.1 with a GUI could have been all the word processor I would have ever needed. Thank goodness, I was taught the error of my ways.
Who cares what MS thinks of OpenOffice? The more important concern is what Sun and Google think of it. I'm hoping that at some point soon, OO.o gets its own foundation and becomes more like Firefox. I remember, way back when the idea for Mozilla came around that the idea was to remake the Netscape Navigator suite. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, came what would eventually be named Firefox. Seems to have caught on fairly well. That's what I want from OO.o, a product that responds to the desires and needs of the community.
My first vote is for something smaller and faster. Of course, I don't code and just leach of the kindness of others, so don't take this as complaining.
Hey, I just thought of one other thing: Isn't Microsoft's pricing model right about what StarOffice's was ten years ago? Or is it much more?
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
Bender: "I don't think you realize just how rich Frye is... In fact, I better put on a monocle."
Who did what now?
But what's this 'email' thing I keep hearing about?
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
I note that you have totally failed to identify a single feature that OpenOffice.org lacks. All the features you name exist in OpenOffice.org, so presumably you're referring to problems with their implementation?
Sorry, but we can't actually read your mind. Simply waving your hands vaguely and saying "my needs are too complex, I can't use it" does not an argument make. Would you care to reveal precisely what it is you have in mind that Word 4 for Mac can do but OpenOffice.org cannot?
To create fine presentations with LaTeX, try the "beamer" class. The package comes with great documentation. See http://latex-beamer.sourceforge.net/
Both Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org have their advantages and disadvantages. From an educational standpoint, however, OpenOffice.org has one key advantage that makes up for the lack of some features: its licensing.
As a former educator, OpenOffice org was (and still is) a valuable learning tool. Because of its licensing, I have been able to distribute copies of the software to students who can't afford to buy a copy of Microsoft Office, even at Microsoft's educational pricing. This especially made a big difference to those who needed to complete assignments at home, but lived too far from school to return to the computer lab or whose jobs required them to work irregular hours. Because I was teaching the concepts of creating documents rather than learning a specific application by rote memory, the students were able to take what I taught them with OpenOffice.org and apply it to Microsoft Office or any other application they choose to use at home or at work.
Those interested in reviewing the lessons I developed for use with OpenOffice.org 2.0 in an educational environment can download a free evaluation copy of my new book "A Conceptual Guide to OpenOffice.org 2.0" at http://www.conciseconceptsinc.com/
OOo is not. Therefore it is not designed for muli-user collaboration, therefore it is only suitable for isolated single user desktops. The age of the isolated single user came to an end with the Internet boom, somewhere around ten years ago, so clearly OpenOffice.org is ten years behind the times.
It's like the tale of the blind men with the Elephant. As long as you look at only certain aspects of a limited feature set you can support any conclusions you want.
Outlook not so good.
Same thing with office suites. Some historical perspective.
After a year of DisplayWrite 2 in the amber screen dark ages, virtually all my office work has been with WordPerfect. Over 10 years ago I was creating quick-and-dirty laser printed trifolds with WordPerfect containing stuff like complex, rotated clip-off forms. Virtually everything was a frame. Essentially DTP. And maintaining merges for mailing lists and formatted committee listings and the like via macros. 20 years ago, we were using delimited dbase output to WordPerfect template merges to run a summer school of over 2000 students.
To me, Word has _always_ been crap. It shows it roots as a text editor. You can say "doh" but my conception, spoiled as I was with WordPerfect, was that the program should be a swiss army knife capable of everything from DTP to a rich macro programming language.
As a clone of crap, I didn't expect much from OpenOffice.org -- and 1.0.0 would crash out fairly regularly on my linux so it fit my prejudices. But now I see my attitude was shaped by WordPerfect. Since Scribus is coming along nicely, I can use that for anything cool. Text is text. They are all good now. And Abiword usually does most of what I want if I know I'm just putting some text/columns/tables/graphics on paper.
In a sense it is karma coming back on Microsoft. I once had a guy argue with me that having fewer features was Word's strength. However, by defining word processing as something simple and distinct from DTP they lowered the bar to where open source projects could reasonably hope to compete.
Let me start by saying that since 2005 I've been using OO.o exclusively at home and at work (I convinced my boss that OO is good enough for what we need).
To write a quick one-page document, Open Office is adequate. However, installing dictionaries is a pain; it replaces MS Word's quircks with its own. The interface is not as efficient (I'm not saying MS Office is perfect, but this is definitely worse); last but nost least, Calc is a joke compared to Excel... sorry, but I had to say it. I needed to do some statistical stuff in Calc and I found it pain.
And what about the equation editor? Yes, you can get used to it, but it's still crude.
Yes, it's free. Yes, I can do with it about 90% of the things I need. But the other 10% are infuriating.
Wrapping text around tables was what got me to upgrade to office 2000. Yeah, in office 97 you could insert a textbox, place the table in the text box and then wrap to that, but talk about a PIA.
I have yet to find a reason to upgrade to office 2003.
Yea. Must be 10 years behind. .doc file.
One can't even add 2 GB of mp3 files (notes or whatever) to enrich a single
After all, it supports neither PostScript nor PDF.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
You mean Open Office is like MS Office was, back before MS Office became a bloated mess of unwanted and unused features?
That's about the best advertisement for Open Office that anyone could have come up with!
- Apple P.I.E. (Programmers' Interactive Editor). This actually was a real word processor, not a code writing editor. It had a jump to last positions function (keypad 0) and lots of wonderful mindjarring but beloved control sequences. Had a great manual too. This was for the Apple ][. If anyone has a copy please send it to me - I don't know how to read my old floppy disks!
- The other was a dedicated word processor I think by WANG which we used in our school newspaper around 1982 or so. 8" disks, green phosphor portrait display showed a page at a time. Some other mysterious master disks did other things too but this was basically a word processor only. It felt like you were typing on the page which was shown completely at all times, and you could use arrow keys to move and start typing at any cursor position on the page. This was a wonderful, wonderful word processor, simple and quick and sweet.
If anybody knows where I can get for linux emulators and software files please let me know, thank you. Compared to these, I am sorry but neither of the Offices makes me happy. At least I demand the same performance as in 1982 and these days it should at least be easy to make up a simple two column brochure or document that looks somewhat readable, not the big block o' text that Word usually outputs as its final output of a page. Yeesh. There is something to be said for just typing the stuff up and throwing every last one of those menus and dialogs into the garbage can. With the Wang we balled up printouts (which came out instantaneously too) and tossed them into the trash with glee! We used pencil on the printouts and then editted on the screen. Instead when I spend a day in front of word (black on white, not green on black either!) I get de-energized, glazed eyes, even nauseated (Word on XP too). I may be "processing" but it is definitely NOT the last word in word processing. Someone should put some working versions of the old machines into a library or museum so you can actually try them. You'd be F*ing amazed.I found references here which says it was made by Robert (aka Rupert) Lissner in 1984 and was the basis for AppleWorks. But here mentions the late David Gordon of Programma International which sounds more correct to me, and capitalizes the PIE. Lissner's was written in Assembler apparently, though Gordon's was too probably. Anyway I always think about how quick and easy it was when I use OpenOffice.org which (not a troll) brings my 128MB Dell Inspiron 7.5K/RH9 to its knees. If anyone has a copy on the net somewhere let me know - can't convert my floppies easily.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
So does this mean they fixed the performance issues?
I guess that makes office 10 years Behind emacs, since emacs not only had e-mail support but html 1.0 and newsfeed support... all way before clippy was even a figment of some horrible software developers imagination...
So what he is saying is that Microsoft made a lot of money off of what, 10 years ago, was a substandard and way over-priced product.
Even if what Yates said is 100% true, considering that OpenOffice is free, I think that puts it *way* ahead of MS office.
Heck, over the years, I have paid hard earned cash for software that wasn't nearly as advanced as OpenOffice.
You win some and you lose some. But hopefully from here on out, OpenOffice will win a lot, and MS will lose a lot.
Usurper_ii
Ron Paul
Open Office is 10 years behind? So what if it is? In my present day word processing I use features that were available in 1984 through MacWrite 1.0. Open Office could be 20 years behind and still be a great product.
Do you know how that compares to OOo's multilingual support?
OOo certainly works fine to mix Cyrillic and Western (Latin-based) languages in Unicode. I use it for that all the time.
No interest or reason for post except to disect an opinion of which I have no care.
Cetus is smaller, faster, and much more functional than wordpad. Includes a spell checker.
Correct me if I am wrong but didnt Microsoft Word user to have a cool save feature about 10 years ago. If it was running low on memory and you tried to save you document the save function would fail.
I seem to remember having to deal with a rather frantic support call from someone who was then unable to save about 5 hours typing and the autosave was not switched on by default.
If Open Office ever behaved like this it would be a laughing stock, yet Microsoft actually charged people for their buggy load of crap even 10 years ago.
The other question would be what decent new features have microsoft added in 10 years. From my memory all they seem to have done is bug fixes (also known as undocumented feature removal) and visual overhauls to make it match their latest incarnation of Windows.
I dont read
no text
No kidding. Over the weekend I needed to get started on a new writing project. The thought of using Word was very unappealing. I was thinking about how I was always MORE PRODUCTIVE on the Macintosh than the PC. I even thought wistfully about my first word processing system on the Apple II+, Apple P.I.E.. What made all of those more productive was the fact that one did not worry a whole bunch about formatting. You were taught to get the content in, then to come back and make it pretty later. Now, you could do this with Word, but somehow one does not. There is something about all the buttons, the self corrections, and the bars across the top of the screen that just get in the way of "getting content in." I even thought about writing the book I was thinking about in by blog, but that text editor is worse as HTML embedded in something you paste in becomes very unwieldy if you don't remember to paste into notepad first, then copy from Notepad into the blogspot editor. WordStar, once you knew the speed keys, had a feature where you could make all the menus leave the screen and just type on a blank screen. Word use to have speed keys. Maybe they still do. On the Macintosh and in early versions of Word, they made sense. But then they started changing them and it no longer paid to pay attention to what they were. Developers had an interest in my learning to use the features that they thought were cool competitive advantages. The weakness in Open Source is user support, however. If you're not a technical expert and post a question on the newsgroups, even after you've done half a day of research, you are apt to get the glib RTFM answer from some self-appointed expert whose self-esteem depends upon impugning those less technical or less clued in.
JB Fields jbfields3@gmail.com http://jaysmotorcycle.blogspot.com "Crossing the Canadian border, the customs guy asks
If you google around, there are a lot of Ajax solutions trying to break into that market. After a while, one of them should end up falling out as the winner. Really, all that needs to happen is for Google to buy or develop one of their own and integrate it into Gmail.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
"Supposedly only suitable for the single desktop..."
Doesn't that then mean they are saying that Microsoft Office is no longer suitable for the single desktop? If so, then what about all of those SOHO computers out there?
because MicroSoft is 10 years behind when it comes to security and stability of the OS
There's a single feature in MS Word that makes me like it more than OOo Write: tables.
Table support in Write is 30 years behind Word. I can't mouse select a line and change arbitrarily its cells' sizes. I can't madly mix and merge cells. I can't draw a table by mouse the exact way (layout) I wish it to have. I can't enter a cell properties and change them the way I need. And so on. Of course, I can't import complex table layouts (and I have tons of them, which allow me to print information to pre-printed papers) from Word into Write without everything getting corrupted.
Each time a new OOo versions is launched I download it, install it, go straight to the tables menu, create one and try messing around with it as I do in Word. Each time I see I can't do it, so I uninstall OOo and keep using Word. The day I download it and see its table support reached MS Office level is the day I'm switching office apps for good. Until then, there's no way I'd do that.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
The best spreadsheet I ever used was Excel for the Mac way back in the day. That was in 1989!
That would make OOo calc over 17 years behind.
Gotta love no e-mail client. We ALL know what microsoft did with their 'eeee-male c-lie-ent' from word 97 on up. Every doc you open up in word97 on up automatically phones home just like E.T.. All you folks that passionately desire being spyed on and/or harrassed just keep using 'office#$%$&*#$'! I'm just like some others though and used to use Notepad in win98. Now I use Kedit or Kate in linux KDE kernel 2.4. Do not use kernel 2.6 because they took the shred funtion out of the KDE Explorer so I consider kernel 2.6 insecure, especially since Linux started talking about using DRM in his new kernels. But that is another story.
I love OOo, but just try installing a spanish dictionary and spellchecking a document. It is not user-friendly and I haven't gotten it to work yet.
Frankly I like Open Office for what it is, not what it isn't doing compared to other word processors.
It is:
1. Free - I don't have the $300 to shell out every time MS releases it's latest offering
2. Easy to use - I can find every function I use in a word processor/spreadsheet/presentation software
3. Full featured - I'm not doing anything esoteric in my writing, I just need something that can outline, can format, can check my horrific spelling, and can automatically add page numbers at the bottom. I'm an amateur short story writer, I don't NEED more.
4. Small - The download is 74 megs and installs into a much smaller footprint than MS office.
5. Downloadable - I'm never worried about losing the CD the next time I have to reinstall my system. If you lose or damage a MS Office CD you have to jump through so many hoops to get a new one
The fact that it lacks an email client is not an issue for me either since my client of choice is Thunderbird. Open Office is perfect for the average user since it is easy get, install and to use. Granted that MS Office has more features, but what good are they to me if I don't use them. Why shell out $300 for a product that I can find a suitable replacement for free?
The one with more features isn't "better" unless you need them. MS Office is probably 'better' in a professional environment just the same way that OO is 'better' for me.
It's all perspective and need.
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
I'm happily running MS Office 95 and 97 at home, that sounds about right as a complete replacement. :-)
Microsoft Office? Yeah and I assume the next announcement from M$ will be that Linux is 10 years behind Vista. You know lacking the built in DRM and security holes. Not to mention that it carries a retail price that Windows was at 10 years ago if you were to buy a commercial distro. Yup seems like the F/OSS crowd is 10 years behind.
Is there something that new versions of Word have that 5.1 on the Mac didn't? I always thought it was the pinnacle of GUI-based word processors. :(
Cause my company's intranet webmail is open two tabs over in Firefox...
>> After all, it doesn't even have an e-mail client!"
Good! I just want a word processor with no bloatware.
If I want another email client I'll install the one I want, not the one MS thinks I need.
One of the few things I can think of that I like about MS Word over OpenOffice Writer is that MS Word's word count feature understands the difference between space-separated, word-counted Western languages and non-spaced, character-counted CJK languages. In a mixed-language document, MS Word's word count function will tell you how many Western words there are and how many Eastern characters there are, whereas OpenOffice Writer will return what are effectively garbage values, a total count of all characters (Western and Eastern together) and total count of all "words" as it tries to count blocks of CJK text as single words.
1 7964
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=
This is the sort of thing that one could write a macro to accomplish, though.
Excel has that wierd implimentation of MDI that's inconsistent with everthing else out there.
Get a new version of Excel.
If you're going to flame Office, that's fine. But at least qualify that you are stuck on a 5 year old copy that's soon going to be three major versions behind the curve. People like you are the reason they use Dinosaurs in their adverts -- you aren't even aware how behind you are unless someone tells you.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
"After all, it doesn't even have an e-mail client!"
... and the Linux kernel is so far behind the Windows Kernel it doesn't even have a web browser!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Yes, you missed a few things. OO is in general more consistent than Office and OO2 has much better layout than any version of Office. The differences are often small and something someone who's got bad habits from Office use might overlook. Other differences are huge and obvious. Like you, I use other software for most of my work because Office is heavy. Unlike you, I can appreciate where Sun is kicking M$'s ass. It might be because I use Mepis, which comes with great fonts and all the bells and whistles, or it might be because I have used OO instead of Office for four years now.
A glaring difference is the slide show generator. OO2's interface is MUCH better than M$'s, which has remained the same for years. OO gives you three tabbed panels for navigation and manipulation of slides. That might sound confusing, but manipulation is more intuitive than Office ever was. Everything is visible and shallow, right clicks do what you would expect them to do, and there are no hidden gottchas where content is irrationally tied to presentation. You can change slide type without erasing everything you typed.
A small difference is the summation behavior in the spreadsheet. In Office, you grab cells and press the sum button and Office guesses where you want the sum. In OO, you select the location of the sum, press the button and OO guesses what you want summed. OO usually gets what you want summed correctly, but it's easy to include more by dragging around. Office knows what you want, but can be crazy about where to put it. Moving the sum then changes the result, Argh, time to pull your hair! If you do your sums the M$ way, OO is frustrating even though it's better, and your bad habit has defeated you. If you do your sums by typing in "=sum(" and dragging what you want, you won't notice the difference.
I'm sure there are countless other differences where Sun and the free software community does it right and M$ makes you pull your hair. Reading about it has been amusing this morning.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
What happened to Windows 2004? ...Oh, "Vista"...interesting...
I know we are all OOo fanboys around here, I certainly am.... But the statement seems legitimate, OOo functionality is comparable to Office 97 and previous editions.
I don't of course see a problem with this though. OOo is free, and 10 years ago office had effectively implemented all the important editing features I was looking for. So to have OOo do that, while being a bit more stable, is good by me.
It is true OOo does not contain any of these new 'group-centric' features or frameworks. I must say though that i'm not convinced as of yet that this direction is one that will hold. And I'm very certain that it is not being used by the majority of Office users, and mostly only in large corporations. I do enjoy some of these features in the newer versions of Office, the xml/xsl capabilities and sharepoint integration, the web-service integration, etc... But they are not hugely important yet.
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
Finally we have an Office Suite that is able to read the RTF product documentation that someone in our firm wrote 10 years ago with MS-Office thinking that RTF is a format that you can also read with MS-Office in 10 years. :-)
So what everyone uses M$ Office'97. Ahh, now I get it evolve. But I still agree with Dave Thomas that M$ is the one that should evolve.
So what?
I find office hard to use. In fact its a damn pain sometimes. I like using open office better.
Back in the 90's, their FUD portrayed the Unix command line interface as a trip to ye olde Renaissance Faire, yet now they have that hip new Monad Command line interface for Windows users to look forward to.
If that's your job, I'd say it was somewhere between the 97th and XP ring of hell. It reminds me of the South Park movie, where Kenny glimpses heaven with it's 1,003 population and naked ladies only to be cast into the pit of hell to the tune of "Little boy, you're going to hell" and billions and billions served as the population meter spins out of control. With all the M$ "partners" out there, the average geek who actually gets a job will indeed land in M$ hell. The cool little companies that spend most of their time working and keep a single M$ computer in the corner to communicate with big dumb companies are far and few between.
You must be the one person at your company that actually cares. I'm amazed your coworkers actually use Word's revision controls. The leaks from government agencies are a clue that someone uses them, but the last fortune 500 company I worked for would never bother or care about a feature like that. Nor would they ever trust anything but two floppies to keep their latest revisions because nothing else was reliable. There were one or two Word lovers, but they were entities unto themselves. Has it ever struck you that your ability to master Latex comes from a thouroughness that would make you successful regardless of the tool you use?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Oh, I like that. May I use it? I think I could easily say that at least once a day. Plus, my dog is sitting in my lap as I type this...
Gee, when I installed Fedora for the first time and installed latex2html I found that it automagically rendered all my titles in Japanese characters. It was simple to correct this by manually editing the config files. Of course, then yum uncorrected this feature several times in the succeeding months.
I didn't get a chance to read the article, since it was dugg/slashdotted to death, but I don't think I need to. Its obvious marketeering - 'look how far behind they are'. Maybe MS is tire of being told how far behind they are, and thought they'd dish it out for a change.
Of course, from the common user point of view, it composes and formats text, inserts graphics and tables, exports to web pages, gripes about grammer, and annoys then nearly as much as Word does. Whining about group licenses and 'single user only' usage looks to me as though it doesn't address things from the end-user's point of view at all.
Typical anti-user Microsoft.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
I work as a sysadmin in a educational environment, and all sorts of folks use Publisher for calendars, flyers, handouts, etc. I have yet to see anything that'll digest Publisher files and output "standard" products (rtf, pdf, etc.)
Any suggestions?
I would have stayed with Office 6, but it wouldn't work with the printer drivers for my new printer. It's too bad, because I liked Office 6 more than I liked Office 97.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
By "vertical selection of text", do you mean column blocking? That's what many text editors call it, anyway.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
i haven't heard term 'column blocking' - usually it is called 'vertical selection', 'selection of a rectangular block/region' or some other combination of these words :)
5 96
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=1
Rich
Different poster, but for OOo 1.1.3-2.0 on a 2.4 GHz P4 with 1 GB of memory on FC4 ...
1. Writer: Open RTF files made on different platforms without segfaulting. Yes, this does mean that line-endings are not necessarily the Linux ones...
2. My spreadsheets sometimes have more than 5,000 rows and 20 columns. Tell me that you can't deal with that many rows without spiking CPU usage to 99% before trying to do the same, and often crashing.
3. Search and replace for more than ~150 instances of a string: should not take longer than copying and pasting into a text file and running sed, should not cause all OOo document windows to become unresponsive, and should not carry with it a 50% chance of unexplained crashing. In that respect, running search and replace in OOo apps feels like using Word 6 on an early 386.
4. When a directory contains both recognised image files, and random other files that aren't images, don't tell me your preview window can't parse the other files by crashing the entire application.
5. Mail merge and data sources were crufty but usable in 1.x, why hide that functionality behind complexity in version 2?
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
I remember reading an article a while back which said that a great deal of people refused to upgrade from Office 97 because it did what they wanted, wasn't bloated and the newer versions didn't offer anything more to the average user.
Conor "You're not married,you haven't got a girlfriend and you've never seen Star Trek? Good Lord!" - Patrick Stewart
Complexity through Simplicity.
Proud member of the American Non Sequitur Society. We might not make much sense, but boy do we love pizza!
...a Space Invaders Clone! :-]
I've got 3 words for MS" Export As PDF. A feature that isn't available in office until version 12. I think MS is a little misguided in their beliefs that more gadgets make for a better office tool. This logic would make it seem that a Ford Temp is a better car than a Lotus Elise since the Lotus doesn't have AC or a Stereo.
MadOgre.com
"After all, it doesn't even have an e-mail client!"
StarOffice, upon which OpenOffice.org was based, did have an email client (and even a web browser)... about ten years ago...
from TFA:
1. "Open Office doesn't ship with an email client...if you look at Office 2003 and use Outlook for your email, you can right click and set up a meeting; you right click and see if someone's on the phone or in a meeting; you can right click and see their presence information; you can right click and call a meeting of multiple people..."
Am I really the last person in the free world who uses an office suite to write letters and create spreadsheets?!
2. "One of the things we have done, for example, is that we have really expanded the tool tips where, if you hover over something, you'll get directions to how that feature is used. As well, if you hover over something, the entire text will change right in front of you so you'll see what happens immediately.
How innovative. (By "innovative," I mean "that really sounds like a pain in the ass.")
3. "...honestly the old paradigm of the tool bar user interface had outgrown its utility. Things had gotten too complicated there."
*sigh* See point 1. I can't think of too many other applications that are "too complicated" for a toolbar interface.
4. "There's a wonderful reason to move to the new file formats which is that it's open and it's XML..Other software products can use the XML information in the format that it was originated in."
The jury's still very much out on that one, buddy.
5. Also, we have automated conversion tools so that people can take existing documents and have them converted to the new file format relatively painlessly.
Again, how innovative. (This time, by "innovative," I mean...wait for it, you're gonna love it...Way to catch up with OOo, suckers! Yeah, I know that was a cheap shot, but I couldn't stop myself.)
6. The company has been told users that they are comfortable with Office and they don't want to see too much change. However, in order to differentiate itself from its open source rival, Microsoft has decided to take the bold step - some might say gamble - of telling its customers what's good for them.
Indeed, very bold. We've certainly never seen this attitude from Microsoft before.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
There are still major functional features that Calc doesn't have which were implemented in VisiCalc -- that's 26 years behind in my calender.
We have a small division that does basic mail processing. We have gone from doing just small batches a day to now large batches. We process data to and from our pgsql database with Excel, I have processed some small scripts to do the transfer, as well as the formatting from various channel partners.
I then integrate with some software from Pitney Bowes to scrub the data, then re-export and process again into Excel and then into Word.
Overall the process is fairly quick and i have been able to train a very non-technical person to do the process in less than 20 minutes before it hits the printers and goes to the mail processing equipment. not to mention, no hassle dealing with things like postal bar-codes, and 4-8k pages of merged data pushed off to the printer. It chews through the merge in literally seconds and generates multiple multi-thousand page document without breaking a sweat on an older machine.
The license cost for me on that software from MS is about $250, thats a clear ROI on that software within days of use.
I have tried the process on OpenOffice, as well as Office on Mac. I found that the mac would take almost 30 minutes just to spool the document to the printer and took FOREVER to do the merge (Office Mac). OO worked ok, but it felt clumbsy and would sometimes do strange things if the documents where too big and printing wasn't as fast.
Overall, MS Office is worth buying and using. And I would laugh if one of my IT guys wanted to migrate us over to OOo or anything else when what we are using is working, and from a business standpoint the ROI is clear. Even as my business grows and I need to license more workstation, 1-2 hours a week of an employing futzing around with OO or some alternative isn't worth the savings of license fees. And people that say that Office 2003 is more difficult to use than OO have probably never used Office at more than a passing glance or as a glorified text editor.
This entire conversation is a trap, and most /. readers are falling into the trap. The trap is that Microsoft would rather frame the debate around software features than software freedom. This way Microsoft can continue to have a part of the debate rather than being dismissed out of hand.
Digital Citizen
You may only use 10% of the fundamental features of any office suite, and so may everyone else, but the question is which 10%?
You only ever use, at most, 20% of your brain at any given time, but that doesn't mean you can get by with a brain-ectomy.
Many of the things under the belt of OpenOffice.org assist in getting past the 90% of the market that can deal with the core suite, to the 10% who, for example, speak a language that is only spoken by a few thousand people, or who can't afford a proprietary Operating System (much less the office suite), or who have a now-defunct processor that was only produced for two months. All of these people belong to markets that are simply too small for Microsoft to profitably adapt its programs for, so instead of reaching out to them, the users must learn English and buy a new computer and OS (or, as the case may be, simply not be able to use the suite).
The same goes for all the features in the above-the-belt part of the office suite. Even if only 1% of the users only ever use feature X, if they need that feature and can't find it in OOo, they'll switch to MSO or something else (assuming they can afford it). 99% of the (potential) users don't use it, so you take it out. Multiply by all of the different features that people use, and all of a sudden you get people who simply don't use OOo because they might need features Y and Z in the future, but aren't confident in OOo's ability to deliver them.
Besides, look at it this way: with OOo, if you need something that it doesn't do, you can write a macro, ask for help on the forums, submit a bug report, suggest it as a feature for future editions, etc. With MSO, if it doesn't do what you want it to, you can go you-know-what yourself.
With OOo, development is focused on making those 1% individual features accessible. With MSO, development is focused on changing the 99% enough so that people will feel compelled to buy the new version.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
I think that the state government of Massachusetts would argue that we're in the "then they fight you" stage. Microsoft has already fought hard with lies to make sure Massachusetts doesn't stop using Microsoft Office and its proprietary file formats. Very little of Microsoft's shills arguments have merit and those arguments are quickly dismissed once one realizes the power of controlling one's own computer by thinking highly of software freedom.
Digital Citizen
Do you think they mean it is as secure as Office95 on a non-networked computer ;-)
I don't know what OS you use, but texlive supports the big ones (Windows, x86 Linux, OS X, OS/2, Irix...) and the CJK package works out of the box. I just installed it on an x86 slackware box and pdflatexed one of my work files. Even the wadalab fonts came out right.
Having done it more times than I should have on several *nix platforms, I agree that it can be a headache to get nice Japanese output from older TeX installations. Do yourself a favour and grab the latest texlive from CTAN.
Once you've done that all you need to do is something like this:
\usepackage{CJK}
\begin{document}
\begin{CJK*}[dnp]{UTF8}{min}
[your stuff here]
\end{CJK*}
\end{document}
Of course, you don't need to use UTF8 encoding. JIS, EUC, SJIS would also work.
Office 10 years ago didn't even know what an Auto-complete was!
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
I have Excel 2003, and it does the same damn thing. It puts up multiple buttons on the toolbar, which is ok, except that the main close button on any one of them is a fucking global close. You have to hit the lower close button, though every other part of the interface hints to you that it's a totally separate window. His criticism is well placed, and your apologizing for MS is not.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Alan Yates
Anal Yeast
No. The reason they use Dinosaurs in their ads is that they have resorted to Ad Hominem to try and sell thier product. The simple fact is that the price-performance of office CAN NOT compete with OOo, abiword, ... , which are becoming viable alternatives. IMO these ads are purile and offensive.
Here I am, still using Office 97 because it does everything I need. Perhaps next year I'll be able to upgrade to OO.o. :)
.x releases are actually pretty major. GNOME and KDE and distros release cycle is even more accelerated. Even though a lot of people poke fun every new years about premature declarations that this will be the "year of the Linux desktop", the pace of growth and refinement has been phenomenal, and both GNOME and KDE are now at a point where they are more advanced than Windows XP IMHO--Microsoft is playing catch-up with Vista.
You don't have to wait until next year--only a month or two.
You see, Open source projects are like dogs--they grow and develop in terms of "dogs years" in relation to Microsoft and most other closed applications. So when Microsoft says OO.o is 10 years behind they mean in terms of how long it would take MICROSOFT to bring OO.o up to MSOffice "quality". However, given that development of popular open source projects happens in dog years, it'll actually take it 10 DOG years to catch up, or only about 17 months.
I mean, look at Windows and MS SQL Server--both took FIVE YEARS or more between major releases. Linux kernel went from 2.2 to 2.4 to 2.6 faster and PostgreSQL went from 6.x to 7.x to 8.x faster too...and in the case of the latter
In any case, both OO.o and MS Office are rather too large, cumbersome and feature laden for nearly all my needs. At home, I use Abiword and GNUmeric. They seem mech less cumbersome--they load faster, have a smaller footprint and are basically just more snappy on modestly configured machines. Furthermore, Gnumeric seems much better suited to statistical analysis than Excel--whereas Microsoft seems to place its priority on fancy integration like embedding powerpoints/word documents/flight simulators/etc into its spreadsheets, or making sure its macros are powerful enough to program it to play Pac Man, the developers of GNUmeric decided that maybe a spreadsheet user might like to have accurate calcualtions and a useful function library.
Wow...what a concept...a spreadsheet that does calcualtions well and a word processor that edits and formats documents well. If that means I'm stuck in the mid-90s then let me live in the blissfully ignorant past.
Filemaker. Same general functionality as Access, more sanely designed. For those who've used it a long time ago, note that it's gotten a lot better since version 7. It still doesn't have the power or elegance of an SQL database from the point of view of a hardcore DB developer, but I've used it for several small businesses and they are very happy with it.
Anyone who has any self-respect will use LaTEX.
then try to given them what they need, ignore what M$ has to say, they are never going to do OOs a good service or give good advice.
It is logical and obvious to conclude that any comment from M$ is bullshit and should be ignored, they are not in the business of telling the truth, they never were and never will be.
Remember they like to destroy things (and perhaps groups of people) that scare them. That is now a fact which is "on the record".
I'm sure you can use YOUR dog's bollocks as you (and your dog) please...
do you have problems with other applications
No.
any spyware or whatever is the trendy thing to have nowadays
No.
which oo.org version
Similar results on the latest 1 series (don't recall what version that was), 2.0, and 2.0.1, on both Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux. 2.0 fixed some, but not all, of the display artifacts.
have you tried to reproduce this in a fresh user account ?
It does this on virgin installs of XP from a system restore CD, and Ubuntu, with OS patches applied in each case.
if you can relieably reproduce this, submit a bugreport.
I believe that I did, but it was closed as WORKSFORME.
vi?
That would make it 1997...the same as the version of Office i am running...
:)
Oh wait, was that supposed to be a good thing or bad thing?
I'm certain that the cross platform support in OOo is at least part of the problem, but I don't accept that it's unfixable. Firefox works just fine for me on Windows, OS X, and Ubuntu.
Face facts, whethere you like it or not, this statement is pretty much true if you compare Office 97 to the current Open Office.
Open Office is still trying to catch up on things, and that is a bad thing in the development world and cycle. They are not setting the stage of the 'next' generation or showing the way of making these products better or easier.
Instead they are still trying to get squiggle red underline misspelling to work, and grammar, etc etc. They are still try to find an interface to be consistent for themselves within their own product suite.
They need to get off of chasing Microsoft's tail and pull in people with 'vision' and re-define what word processing and other business applications are from the bottom up. From a simple notepad to a full fledged tool for writing the next great novel, to a tool for submitting columns and school work or legal briefs.
Everything is following Microsoft's lead, a lead they pioneered in the 80s on the Mac (you see, instead of immitating Word Perfect, they took word processing to the next level, but yet made it easy for the old time WordPerfect crowd to adapt).
Here is one for starters, why are word processors limited to 'typewritter' rules of typsetting... Here is something Open Office could be a leader in, support and do full character justification and do it well. Currently all Word processors only do word justification, which is ugly and consider products like Pagemaker were doing this in the 80s, quite surprising it hasn't moved to the word processor level after all these years.
Define the standards, don't scramble to keep up with the status quo.
This isn't about MS, this is about companies like Sun and others tyring to 'maintain' instead of getting what they need to do and just putting the money into the research and doing it.
Even MS isn't stupid in this regard, Office 2007 breaks the UI norm for business applications, again not following the sheep, or even their own sheep, but trying to set the next level of what is easier for users. (Whether it is a good innovation on MS's part is left to be seen, but at least they are trying and not just recycling the same old crap. Heck even Office 2003 and the Sidebar and Web integration was quite a leap for people doing research or multi-language work - at least it was new and useful to many people.)
Firefox is known for starting considerably slower than most of its competitors. True, it's still fast enough to not be a problem to anyone, but it's a smaller program than Openoffice.
The reason I use it is BECAUSE it's 10 years old. Lean and mean and it works and works well. I look at screenshots of Office 12 and I can't wait! I DROOL! Because I am going to make even more money training my clients how to use that junk.
I completely disagree. Open Office still can't do many of the things Office 97 can do. And in terms of ease of use OO is a joke.
is because when you invoke "mailto:" on a windows box, it brings up Outlook or Outlook Express, which is a royal pain.
That said, I haven't missed anything since I switched my home laptop to Open Office, it's pretty easy to use, and I use Office 2003 at work. Since my email is from WebPINE, mailto: doesn't work in that suite either, and I have the exact same problem with MS Office 2003 that I have with Open Office. So can't say it's better, or worse.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Multi-lingual support is better, especially Chinese and such using Unicode fonts.
Do you know how that compares to OOo's multilingual support?
Korean user here.
Generally speaking, MS does Korean better than non-MS overall, mainly because the computer usage in Korea(not speaking for China or Japan since I don't know) exploded with the use of Win98 or WinXP. It could be said that MS almost defined what CJK handling should be like.
I could go into details, but I'll leave it at that for now.
Looking just at the word processor, it seems to me that there are several things that could be improved rather sharply, to genuinely make things easier for users and/or corporate admins, and to improve the quality of results.
Consider a single example from the world of design and typography: paragraph justification. People use fully justified paragraphs in documents all the time, yet the justification and hyphenation algorithms in Word and Writer are kindergarten toys. TeX famously had a better line-breaking algorithm decades ago, leading to much better spacing and less hyphenation. More advanced typography can improve this still further. This seems like a small thing, but it is important, because better typography here makes a significant difference both to readability (in the sense of how fast and accurately a reader can read a work) and to perceived quality (a balanced page with a clean design and even greyness presents a more professional image). There are countless other things that could be enhanced in this area, improving the quality of output subtly but significantly for millions of people, but no-one has yet implemented them in a word processor.
Now consider the related UI issues. When it comes to applying formatting, why oh why do we still have cluttered toolbars with bold and double-underlining and font lists and highlight colours and bullet list symbols? I've long argued that formatting should be based on a powerful stylesheet and template model, with the default user interface providing a simple window onto the commonly used aspects. Show the logical attributes like "title" or "emphasized" on a simple toolbar. You can still support ad-hoc formatting by allowing the easy creation of on-the-fly styles, but this should be the thing that's hidden deeper in the menus, not basic stylesheet support! Provide some decent defaults, unlike the current crop of heading styles and such that are typographical monstrosities in all major WPs. More importantly, provide powerful tools for creating document templates, so corporate admins or home users actually find them simple enough to use and adopt good practices by default. None of this is rocket science; on the contrary, my experiences of helping several non-geeks to write masters or doctoral theses using tools like LaTeX or to present material on the web suggest that people who care about their documents take to the separation of logical structure from presentation and the ready customisation of the latter very easily.
Obviously there are 101 other graphic design and typography features that could be useful to significant numbers of people -- those writing multi-language documents, for example -- or could simply be introduced subtly in the background to improve quality without any action on the part of the user. Likewise, there are any number of corresponding UI improvements that would make these things easy enough that Joe User could take advantage of them, rather than only so-called power users who know arcane nested dialog box options inside out.
And this is just in the area of formatting and presentation! I could make similar comments about writing aids (spelling, grammar, matching against "house style" that amazingly no-one seems to have picked up on yet, simple things like accurate and flexible word counting), collaboration and proofing tools, large document support (things like indexing, tables of contents, bibliographies and cross-references) and more. Word processors could do so much to help people, and yet all they do today is tinker with menu colours and dialog box layout, and obsess about importing 17 versions of .doc without any characters shifting position. How sad.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Would you be able to be productive today with 20 year old versions of those programs? (The GUI version of PowerPoint came 1987, Word 1984 and Excel 1985.) Absolutely. The only problem would be that you would have to use a non-mainstream OS, as they all were released for Macintosh.
> Supposedly only suitable for the single desktop, isolated user.
t s/(your OS Level)/(your OS major version number)/(your OS minor version number)/(your OS release build)/(your processor type)/(your processor build number)/(your compiler type)/(your compiler major release version number)/(your processor minor release version number)/ and download the 17-part file. Join with HK-split (version 4.3 beta or later, but not 4.7 build 43), rename the combo file TrippleDogDareEmail (careful on the caps, it's case-sensitive, also "Tripple" has two p's in it, it's an inside joke.) Then tar -xvf it, then gunzip the resultant file, then rename it to the exact same name but all lower case, then run the installer and point it to /home/etc/* and let 'er rip.
> After all, it doesn't even have an e-mail client!"
Oh, for god's sake, just go to this other web site over here, change to directory ~homeaux74beta12alpha17/TrippleDogDareEmail/Clien
Then, edit the crontab file and
(Read rest of message here...)
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Clicking on the link gives me a "cannot find server" error, and using Coral gives me a 503 error. Sorry, but this is a phantom story.
The only thing that prevents me from ditching Ms Office is its speller, it's sad that OpenOffice doesn't have a speller as good as microsoft's....
Per Aspera Ad Astra.
This is why I stopped using OOo. Word 2000's spell checking automagically "knows" if I'm typing in English or Spanish and spell checks accordingly. This is a very important feature for multi-lingual people. I use it all the time.
The other reason is OOo was very slooooow with documents that were over a 100 pages long. XML is the catchall technology of the day.. but Word's proprietary format is better suited for large documents. And I save very often.
Interesting. How much does it cost per user? Last time I enquired for a Rational product (Rose), it cost an arm and a leg. I guess for Clearcase probably a foot and a hand disappear into Microsoft's pockets for the Office file format and versioning code licenses.
... but the equation editor in OOo is light years ahead of MS Office (even with the MathType add-on) it's just not funny.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I still think that Word 97 is one of the best word processors around. It is almost as good as Word 2.0, but without the Monster easter egg. :)
OOo 2.0 is exactly what I need, with nothing fancy added on.
I cringe every time I open Word 2003 on my Wife's machine. What a porker! (The software program, that is.)
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
I like the editor that can do things like this:
I never really wanted to touch a mouse. I got bit by a rat once.
and typesetting like this:
H${\Psi}$ = E${\Psi}$
The wheel was stone age technology but the last time I checked it's still round and rolling fine.
Autonomous Retard -- Is your camp safe? UnsafeCamp.com
The only reason I still prefer Microsoft Office 2003 to Open Office is the huge selection of templates, clipart, and other related goodies available from right within the window.
These benefits just aren't available to OO (especially compared to the scope and selection that is offered through MS Office).
PS: Yes, I do use linux, but not for making documents.
...it's open source...
Is the monolithic cross-platform OO.org still strictly necessary? The project has given the best gift we could have hoped for, a free and open office document format. Perhaps now instead of focusing on the clunkiness of the cross-platform OO.org interface in a particular operating system, we can convince experts in each platform to write native OpenDocument-based tools. That would be a chance for folks to solve some of the usability ills by leveraging the services each platform has to offer. For example, OO.org would no longer have to burn precious cycles developing cross platform OLE. Instead the native tools would use such facilities available in each platform. OO.org can then focus on making sure the file format can handle new features like collaboration tasks. My .02c
-LLM
Annoy a Conservative...
Keep drinking that Microsoft Kool-Aid, it's nutritious and delicious!
I've used a lot of Microsoft products over the years, and most of them reach a stage where the only thing that changes is the layout of the menu. Something simply being "three major versions behind the curve" doesn't mean it's outdated or a dinosaur. Office is the perfect example here. Unfortunately we don't have a derogatory term for people that've bought into the whole "upgrading for the sake of upgrading" belief. If we did I would put that term squarely upon you. I'll suggest one. How about Upgrade Monkey?
AccountKiller
Maybe OpenOffice isn't ready for people build applications inside of Microsoft Office. Maybe it's not ready for those people who actually use the more powerful features in MS Office. But the majority of MS Office users barely scratch the capabilities of it. The majority are using the subset of the features that were present in 1995! Legions of office employees don't spend the time to learn how to use an office suite to its full extent. Microsoft is handing them a tank when they need a bicycle. These people would be just as well served with OpenOffice.
OpenOffice is ready for most users today.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
What did we have 10 years ago that was usable, free and Free?
Pretty much nothing.
So now we have something that allegedly is 10 years behind (and this, taking the MS person's word for it, I think he is not the most inidcated person to offer impartial advice about Office suites, I hasten to add).
Let him laugh, we know what is the road to profit starting from here.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It's enough to make me seriously consider doing without MS Office, but I'm really not prepared to go the hair-shirt route just yet - although I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Unix bigot, MS really is the best desktop environment going. (Yes, even better than the Mac, since there's a lot more quality software, and a much higher percentage of that is free, or at least much more reasonably priced than Mac software which can get expensive in a hurry. Besides, can you imagine the outcry if MS tried to charge $129 for security updates and fixes of really nasty sloppy bugs like Apple does with their OS X upgrades? And no, no desktop based on Linux, BSD or Unix is really even close - I've been hoping for a decade now, but am still waiting.)
Well I get all my OSX security updates for free thanks. It's just that I actually see new features like Vista offers every 18 months or so instead of every six years. Perhaps that's what you were thinking of.
You might be able to get a lot more software on WIndows it's true, but then again I'm not sure I'd brag about having to hunt down and aquire all sorts of software that;s either built into OS X or comes free with a computer purchase.
In the meantime enjoy your Windows Intel box downgraded by the need for active anti-virus software! I think I ran my scan last october or so, probably time to fire up another run.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you're going to flame Office, that's fine. But at least qualify that you are stuck on a 5 year old copy that's soon going to be three major versions behind the curve.
I use Excel 2003 almost every day at work, and I can tell you that his complaints are some of the exact some ones that I have with Excel 2003. Quite simply, whoever designed the MDI for Excel 2003 was on crack, and deserves to be smacked. Seriously. And the copy/cut/paste thing pisses me off a lot too.
Isn't front-line tech support the monkeys who read scripts and esclate you to the people who actually know what they're talking about?
Anyway, you're wrong. MS Office has never had a preloader and has never run in the background. The old "startup" app did very little (something to do with toolbars). Office starts very fast largely because MS wrote their own linker just for these applications, and it only loads needed code on demand.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
I disagree with comments that Office 2003 is not worth its price.
Granted, some of the more advanced editing features of Word are not intuitive. I can always make a document look precisely how I want it to look.
Simply put, Outlook drives business productivity. We integrate everything into Outlook - CRM, EPM, Accounting - not even mentioning standard Exchange features.
For those comparing to Office 97 - don't you remember anymore how often that thing crashed?! I have not crashed once in Office 2003 that was not the fault of an add-on application. Even though, my Word never crashed and neither did Excel. My Outlook is so full of add-ons, that yes it does fail to respond sometimes, but the failure is always in add-on components.
Native XML support in Office 2003 is huge in its target markets. Excel is an unsurpassed business analysis tool that only competes with itself. Visio - enough said. I don't particularly care about Access, but it should be noted that it no longer uses JET as its DB engine by default and switched to MSDE.
Further integration with Sharepoint creates further value. OpenOffice is great for simple needs. The needs that we have to support are a lot more complex. I spend two to three weeks training appropriate users on advanced features of Office. Ultimately, it all boils down to training and once the users are proficient, we see a sharp drop in tickets related to these technologies.
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
that brought out edlin which was just so advanced compared with the competition
There they are a conga line of suck holes. On the conservative side of Australian politics. - Mark Latham
I tried using OOo to make a graph of our pop server's drive usage, with a mathematical prediction of when it would be zero.
Well, OpenOffice's spreadsheet program doesn't even let you make a graph in a different window. You have to embed it in the spreadsheet itself. And moreover, no, it doesn't do extrapolations. This not only makes it useless for my particular application, but don't bother trying to use it for physics class either. I found Excel 2.0 (that's right) to be infinitely useful in that capacity however. I don't know where the OOo guys' heads are, but it doesn't seem to be in practicality.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
A Rich Neighbor Named Xerox
"When Steve Jobs recruited Microsoft to be the first third party applications software developer for the Macintosh..."
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
... that Microsoft Access is infinitely better than OoO Base. After all, who needs mySQL? :rolleyes:
I believe that I did, but it was closed as WORKSFORME.
:)
well, that sounds reasonable
if there is no way to reproduce this for somebody else, it is hard to find the cause.
the issue probably contained some additional information, including video card, mb chipset, drivers used etc - maybe you can paste a link to it so that we can continue gathering info ?
Rich
I've been using OO for a year & ~ MS Word & PowerPoint the only complaint I have is that when I convert OO to PDF the resolution is unusable. Tt
Evolution and Thunderbird have the potential to render Outlook obsolete. Evolution has the Exchange support and calendaring but no XP version. Thunderbird is cross-platform but Exchange support and Calendaring are ongoing.
Sorry, but neither Tbird or Evolution are really even contenders for supplanting Outlook. One of the biggest reasons: They can't connect or sync to *anything*! Outlook syncs to web-based services and calendars, multiple PCs, PDAs, phones, etc. Palm Sync for Mozilla and Thunderbird has been vaporware for at least six years. (It's taken that long to get the extremely basic roaming profiles synchronization from Netscape 4 back into the first Mozilla Seamonkey release of just a few weeks ago!)
There has been no effort or commitment of the Mozilla team to add sync functions for Palm, much less PocketPC/WindowsMobile devices or any of the myriad web services.
Further, there is no open source solution of any kind that I'm aware of that's even remotely complete that addresses the issue of task and to-Do list managment and again, provides any sort of sync support.
In my mind, this is one of the biggest failing of the open source movement, and even though I *hate* Outlook with a passion, I am seriously considering moving to it simply because it's the *only* viable way to get my vital data synchronized between the various apps and platforms I want to use.
That's the really ironic part: Oulook's ability to sync makes it the perfect data exchange hub, and allows me to choose best-of-breed applications for mail, tasks, calendar, contacts, etc, or even multiples of each to leverage cool new web services interfaces and the like. In other words, Outlook actually lets me replace (or augment) Outlook, but nothing else can give me that same capability... This is weird, and a complete failure of the open source model to respond to real market needs. (Which is hardly surprising since this sort of thing is rarely important to programmers, who are still the only audience open source deveopers care about. Microsoft can win in the end by realizing this and building the apps and functionality that real users really want...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
I have office 2003 and open office on my computer. If I had some simple document to write then either would be fine. I find though that out of habit I end up using word just used to it. Now will I be upgrading to a newer version of office? I don't think so. I will be using google's office product when it comes out. I have no doubt they will get an excellent product out under their name when all is said and done. I also have no doubt it will be much more effective and advanced and cheaper then both office and open office.
I want spam! cranbers@gmail.com
'operation too complicated to perform'
(Clippy popping up): It seems you want to perform a join query. Try the query on your 2Gig database without a join statement
I think I stick with Postgresql; even though Access is easyer to pronounce.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk