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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. :)
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.
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.
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!
In general I do agree with this, opensource is in most cases not about the good look and feel as commercial products do. However spending the bucket loads of money on this as commercial products do is not a good option. I know there are open projects out there helping developers to get nice looking GUI's. I think that in general one of the aims of the opensource community should be to attacked more and more GUI designers to provide work in a GPL or Creative Commons license.
Regards,
Johan Louwers.
Regards, Johan Louwers.
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 would tend to disagree. I would rather use a less aesthetically appealing interface if the program behind it is more stable and useable. Much like when I use Linux I go straight to the plain and simple command line interface if the task is truly important (I do this in Windows also, provided the fucntion I desire is accessable from the command line). Microsoft has shown in the past that integration of more of their applications (such as the email client mentioned in MS Office) has best served to introduce new security holes into applications that normally would not be affected (due to shared paths and resources). Open Office makes for a smaller "target" in this respect, and as posted previously by others, it offers all the functionality most users need in that style of application. Oh, and let us not forget that while Open Office does have a helper as part of the UI, it isn't that obnoxious paper clip. Perhaps if Microsoft would have invested the money they spent on designing that "pretty little interface" into initial code development there wouldn't be as many patches released for MS Office.
Randimal: AT-CG-CG-AT-CG-AT-AT-CG-CG-AT-AT-CG-AT-CG-CG-AT-CG-AT-AT-CG-AT-CG-CG-AT-AT-CG-CG-AT-CG-AT-AT-CG
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
Oh god help the IT people who have to administer those Office 2000 installations. :(
Office 2000 has to be the biggest pain in the ass to get patched and kept up to date out of any piece of consumer level commercial software I've ever seen.
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.
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...
I certainly wouldn't say the UI is 10 years behind - it's probably comparable to Office XP in most areas. And of course underneath the surface some features of OO are cutting edge, such as its support for a clean open document format, cross platform capabilities, export options and more. They just have to keep working on that UI, simplifying the common tasks, working on the startup time, polishing the wizards, improving the drag / drop behaviour etc.
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.
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.
.sig withheld by request
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.
I have to agree, OOo is nothing short of butt-ugly on KDE. Huge buttons, ugly fonts, colors not matching your desktop settings, etc. But it's not always true that open source community can't provide eye candy.. Baghira anyone?
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
The UI in the new versions of Office feels much more modern. Every time I upgrade I feel like I am getting a better piece of software since the UI is updated each time with a new look & feel.
Feature wise I can't say that I can name a single one, but like I said, it sure feels like the software is getting better. In fact whenever I look at somebody using the old Office 2000 I shake my head at the poor soul stuggling his way through life without the newest version. After all, his software is 3 years older than mine! Some might say that its more about the features and the color scheme or layout isn't all that important; but that wouldn't be true. I know this because I see many other people just like me who have paid hundreds of dollars for an updated version, this lets me know that I made the right decision in the upgrade. Ok I better stop now, this could go on forever.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
You don't have to miss it much longer, The Ultimate Address Book will be done shortly and will cover all your Access needs.
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"
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.
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
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
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.
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
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!
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'
...apparantly. See dog's bollocks (meaning). Coincidentally similar meaning to the nuts in poker.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
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 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
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!
The best version of Word *ever* was Word 5.1a for the Mac. Simple. Stable. Unbloated.
Maybe in a large company, which has automated software installation and license management anyway. For smaller companies without such sophisticated mechanisms, I would expect things to go the other way:
While Microsoft apps need to be watched to prevent illicit extra copies, you can just hand out OOo as needed. No reason to worry about possible under-licensing. This makes things easier on the IT department.
C - the footgun of programming languages
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/
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.
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!
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
The problem is that Office is WYSIWYG, but I want Do What I Want You To Do.
Trying to edit a technical Word document (even in Office2003) is an exercise in frustration. You have to fight the system inserting stupid new sections (2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.22 things), fucking up the formatting on every other line. And then randomly inserting page breaks whenever I though I was done.
And if you try to copy-n-paste a diagram made in PowerPoint into your Word document? That's when Clippy points and laughs derisevely at you and proceeds to completely mess up your previous work by inserting 15 new random pagebreaks and making the diagram float over your previous text (so you can't see it).
Now try to do the work with multiple people with their own section/subsection notation and their own diagrams. Try to put these together into one Word file and watch hell break out.
Seriously, Word is the only editing tool which I have seen which has no problems inserting automatically generated figure numbers IN INCORRECT ORDER. (Ie figure 2 before figure 1.) Naturally all references in the text are messed up at the same time, how convinient.
And compare that to LaTeX. LaTeX may be a bitch to get running. But once you have a working it can be quite nice for handling technical documents.
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.
i think they will be shipped with 2.0.2. 2.0.2rc4 has an ability choose iconset and the one named "Industrial" seems similar to those icons
Rich
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
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. :-)
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.