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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!"

11 of 736 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Single, isolated users. by maxwell+demon · · Score: 5, Informative

    As is Mozilla Thunderbird.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  2. Re:Perhaps it is... by CSMastermind · · Score: 4, Informative

    Maybe you should try Abiword. www.abisource.com It's an open source and simple word processor. I have three office products installed on this computer. Word Perfect came with it when I got it, I downloaded Open Office, and I bought Microsoft Office 2003. Still whenever I just need a word processor I pop open abiword. It works great.

  3. Re:What's the wizz-bang features it's missing? by brusk · · Score: 5, Informative

    Its international support (for East Asian languages, at least, which I use heavily) really doesn't seem to be up to snuff. It's better than Office 97, by far, and probably better than Office 2000, but not as good as Office 2003 with the Proofing Tools pack installed (adds fonts and utilities for a variety of language needs). OOo basically cloned some of the Chinese/Japanese formatting from MS Office, but not all of it and not well enough. There are lots of very specific things it's nice to be able to do with East Asian text (notably vertical text and interlinear/supralinear comments) that OOo doesn't do very well.

    Not a big thing for everyone, but essential for some.

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    .sig withheld by request
  4. Re:Gates knows best by Crayon+Kid · · Score: 5, Informative

    I mean, M$ has pleasing to look at icons, whereas OO has old Windows 3.1 looking icons.

    I think Jakub Steiner would probably take offense at this statement. I mean, the dude spent all this time designing a huge set of icons for OpenOffice. Now, why OpenOffice doesn't actually uses them, that's another story.

    --
    i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
  5. Re:They think "Free Software" is "Spyware" too by strider44 · · Score: 5, Informative

    *sigh* For the mods who don't get the joke, the site linked is satire. Surely the poll at the side saying "Should Mac/Linux/Windows users intermarry?" might have tweaked a few neurons.

  6. Re:Maybe you should try Lyx... by bw_bur · · Score: 5, Informative
  7. Re:Perhaps it is... by Chemicalscum · · Score: 4, Informative
    Abiword has one great feature on Linux, it works with images on the X-clipboard which Openoffice 2.0 doesn't (I know it works with the clipboard fully in Windows). I am a research chemist and I incorporate 2D chemical structures my documents. I can copy a structure drawing from Marvisnsketch and Jmoldraw (both cross platform Java apps) or Xdrawchem (a QT app whose Windows version is called Windrawchem) and they paste pefectly into Abiword, while with OOo I have to save them as files and then import them.

    I now generally use Abiword as my main WP on Linux, at least for first drafts.

  8. ?!?!? care to elaborate? by hummassa · · Score: 5, Informative
    See:
    $ apt-cache search latex japan
    debiandoc-sgml - DebianDoc SGML DTD and formatting tools
    cjk-latex - A LaTeX macro package for CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean)
    hbf-kanji48 - Japanese Kanji 48x48 bitmap font (JIS X-0208) for CJK
    ipe - drawing editor for creating figures in PDF or PS formats
    jlatex209-base - basic NTT JLaTeX 2.09 macro files
    jlatex209-bin - NTT Japanese LaTeX 2.09 command and configuration files
    jtex-bin - NTT Japanese TeX binary files
    ptex-base - basic ASCII pTeX library files
    ptex-bin - The ASCII pTeX binary files
    ptex-jtex - ASCII jTeX with pTeX
    --
    It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
  9. Re:Maybe you should try Lyx... by Gulthek · · Score: 5, Informative

    That's crazy talk. I've used XeTeX to write Chinese for years.

    Screenshot of Chinese/Japanese Unicode support.

    All the beauty of TeX, all the ease of unicode.

  10. Re:Maybe you should try Lyx... by lahvak · · Score: 4, Informative

    I don't know about Japanese, but I never had any problem whatsoever with Chinese in LaTeX, and since the name of the package I use is CJK, which stands for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, I don't see why Japanese would be any more difficult than Chinese. For me, it just worked straight out of the box, with TeTeX on Debian system, and both MikTeX and TeXLive on Windows.

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    AccountKiller
  11. Re:Maybe you should try Lyx... by lahvak · · Score: 4, Informative

    I used to use LyX a lot, I think it has the only usable equation editor I have ever seen, but ever since I started using Vim with LaTeX-suite, I completely abandoned LyX, because I can type so much faster in Vim. Maybe if LyX had vi keybindings, I would give it a try again.

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    AccountKiller