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OpenOffice 2.0 vs. Microsoft Office

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the buddy-tux dept.

Jane Walker writes "Slashdot's own Robin 'Roblimo' Miller compares OpenOffice 2.0 and Microsoft Office in a recent interview with TechTarget and, when asked to identify one of the main obstacles facing widespread adoption, calls for the OSS community to deliver personable, usable training for new OpenOffice and open source software users."

2 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. The "Outlook" Key by solarbob · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I do think the author is missing the point of Outlook in that for some people its just an email client and Thunderbird would work. What he misses is the shared calanders, remote mailboxes, offline working etc all which middle managers need to work. They stick with outlook as it has a good feature set for them. Users want things to "just work" and not have to worry about compatilbity or similar

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  2. Re:Mr.Clip for OOo? by Imsdal · · Score: 5, Insightful
    in a corporate world people use MS Office because its already installed on their workstations and can ask the person sitting next to them how to "bold" a word.

    I know this is /., so we should all hate users and consider them to be morons.

    However, in the real world, there are millions and millions of users of the Office suite, and a surprisingly large number of them are power users in Excel. This is where MS has a true mind share monopoly. There are so many companies that have invested literally millions of dollars in "development" of Excel models, macros and procedures. Telling those people to switch to an inferior product just because it's a bit cheaper is quite futile. (OOo is much cheaper in percentage terms, of course, but only marginally cheaper in terms of total savings per employee per year.)

    Excel is the best software ever written for the mass market, by quite some margin. The rest of the MS Office products are OK with deficits (Outlook) or just plain bad (all the others, except Visio, if one includes that).

    Getting people to move away from Word is probably quite possible. Likewise with PowerPoint, I'd guess. Getting people away from Outlook is obviously possible, considering that people actually use Lotus Notes (Ugh! I get a pain in my stomach just writing that...) No one uses the MS Office Suite becuase of Access. And no one uses MSO for any other of the programs.

    Excel, people, Excel. Give us a superior spreadsheet and you will see it catch on like wild fire. Unfortunately, anyone trying will find that making a better spreadsheet is pretty darn hard...