OpenOffice 2.0 vs. Microsoft Office

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."

Comments

The "Outlook" Key

[solarbob]

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

For God's sake.

[ettlz]

How much bloody longer is this asinine OO.org vs. MS Office "debate" going to rage on? Just choose one and use it, 'cause this is getting old. And as for "personable and usable training", I've found it doesn't matter what suite They are using, calling out "James! How do I..." remains the favoured approach in my immediate viscinity.

Re:For God's sake.

[ComputerInsultant]

Mods, get a clue.

This is hardly flamebait. He says that no amount of "personable and usable training" is going to change the behavior of most users.

The most common user most certainly does not want to spend any time learning how to use any software. They just want to get their work done. If there is a way of getting the work done without learning anything they will.

There are only a few people in my small software development company, but the most common complaint of the senior programmers and adminstrators is that they have to keep on repeating the same instructions for the same tasks to the users.

There is no need for training - personable or not - when James is right there and already knows how to do it.

By the way, James, I forgot how to file my TPS reports, can you show me how to put the new cover sheet into these documents? Thanks.

I wish I could agree with Rob....

[albalbo]

.... but I can't. Training doesn't seem to be in demand. I've never been asked for it, few other companies I know have ever been asked for it. There's an organisation in the UK who are funded to give training in free software to local small businesses, and have a good marketing budget. They get interest in mono, PHP, that kind of thing. OpenOffice.org training they can't even give away.

And his remarks about OOo Base are a bit off. It's a buggy application, and unsuitable for "real" work. Believe me, I've tried. It's impossible to use the forms without resorting to macros (you can't even make a button on a form open a different form when it's clicked without writing a custom macro), and it has no equivalent to Access's switchboard. Sure, the reports, forms, etc. may all be there, but without a switchboard you only have Base's bizarre UI which no end-user will ever get.

It sickens me that OOo doesn't seem to excite people. I can't understand why businesses seem so happy dropping so much money on Office, and aren't willing to investigate alternatives. For most people, especially those using the wordprocessor, and maybe spreadsheets, OOo is more than good enough.

Macro editing

[KingSkippus]

First of all, let me start by saying that for 90% of what I do, I love OpenOffice. However, I'm one of these constructively lazy people who would rather spend twenty minutes writing up a macro to save me a couple of hours than spending, well, a couple of hours doing it the manual way.

Unfortunately, I detest the macro creation/editing facility in OpenOffice. Just as a side-by-side test, I just popped open a document, recorded a macro to insert the words "This is a test!" and went in the edit (presumably, to customize) the macro.

Here's what I get in OpenOffice:

sub TestMacro
rem -
rem define variables
dim document as object
dim dispatcher as object
rem -
rem get access to the document
document = ThisComponent.CurrentController.Frame
dispatcher = createUnoService("com.sun.star.frame.DispatchHelpe r")

rem -
dim args1(0) as new com.sun.star.beans.PropertyValue
args1(0).Name = "Text"
args1(0).Value = "This is a test!"

dispatcher.executeDispatch(document, ".uno:InsertText", "", 0, args1())

end sub

Jesus, that's a lot of lines just to insert a few words of text! And if I wanted to customize it, I wouldn't have a clue where to begin! Microsoft Word, on the other hand, gives me this:

Sub TestMacro()
'
' TestMacro Macro
' Macro recorded 3/21/2006
'
Selection.TypeText Text:="This is a test!"
End Sub

Wow! I'm really not just cherry-picking one rare example. As the tasks get more difficult, the macro code gets exponentially harder in OpenOffice than in Microsoft's apps. In my experience, macro editing in OpenOffice is like pulling teeth, but so easy that even I can do it in Microsoft Office applications.

Like I said, in my day-to-day dealings, I use OpenOffice. The applications work just as well for almost all of my uses as Microsoft Office, and the price just can't be beaten unless Uncle Bill comes to my house and pays me money to use his applications. But whenever I'm doing something that involved more than just popping it open and tossing out a quick letter, Microsoft Word is the way to go.

I'm not a programmer, so unfortunately, all I can do is sit around and wish and hope that at some point, the OpenOffice development team, folks a lot smarter than I am, comes up with something a bit easier to use in automating the suite.

Re:Macro editing

[ciw42]

Yeah, it's very poor indeed. But the reason is primarily, that even though the language is BASIC, the structures behind it all are really Java-like, and that brings with it a whole host of baggage. Users presented with an environment for programming in BASIC, will naturally expect a simple and easily understood object model to work with. As it stands, to use the OOo object model, you have to write pages and pages of the ugliest code, if you want to do even the simplest of things, largely because it's stuff that BASIC just isn't well suited to.

Was doing some data analysis and automation work using VBA in Excel for a client recently, and as I had a little spare time on my hands, and use OOo exclusively myself, I decided that I'd re-implement everything using OOo. I gave up.

It's not because it was difficult, although it's absurdly convoluted and finding the info you need to use the API is a pain in the arse, but because it would have taken at least 10 times as long to achieve the same results, and that was way longer than I had spare.

I've developed in some God-awful systems over the last 20 years, and even I looked at it and thought "I just can't be arsed". Can you imagine what a regular end-user with no programming experience is going to think?

Show them VBA for automating MS Office however, and even though they'll probably never really understand the full implications of what the simple commands they are issuing do, or the full extent of the object model, it doesn't matter. They work, and the commands they type just seem to make sense, they "read" right, and are straightforward enough to memorise and re-use.

What's really needed is a full re-implementation and extensive simplification of the object model, but obviously for a product as far along the path as OOo, that's not going to be practical. So, I'd personally suggest either a set of macros, possibly even implemented in OOoBasic, or the creation of a parallel API hiding all the messy nonsense and allowing users to interact with the suite in a similar way to VBA in MS Office. You need to get rid of all those cryptic Sun-isms like "com.sun.star.frame.DispatchHelper" if you don't want to scare off casual users.

Until this happens, nobody in a business environment is going to take OpenOffice.org particularly seriously. It's fine for individual members of staff just adding up columns of numbers and typing letters, but being able to automate things when your requirements go beyond that, is such a major thing even for many small businesses, that OOo won't get a look in until its macro facilities become significantly easier to use.

Re:Mr.Clip for OOo?

[Imsdal]

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...

More than good enough?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

For most people, especially those using the wordprocessor, and maybe spreadsheets, OOo is more than good enough.

No, it's not. That's exactly why most people/businesses aren't switching to the free-as-in-beer alternative and still cough up the cash for MS Office. Contrary to popular belief, I rather doubt most people using an office tool really do just type letters and view using right alignment as an advanced technique.

Before I continue, let me just say that I personally use OpenOffice at home and MS Office at work, and have done for several years now. I don't use office software enough at home for MS Office to be worth the asking price to me, and I don't believe in ripping off other people's software illegally, so OO it is. I'm grateful to those who give OO away so I can use it, and I'm not criticising them for having an inferior product. They are several years of development time behind MS here so it's unreasonable to expect the two to be similarly powerful/refined.

Having made that clear, I have to say that OO simply isn't up to scratch on usability yet. The other day I was editing a word processor document, and using a lot of small capitals formatting. I wanted to add a button to the toolbar or a shortcut key to make this easier, but in OO you can't. I was going to report this, but found there's already an open bug to this effect and has been for years. In general, the keyboard support in OO is weak, which near-fatal in a word processor: where are the easy ways to set keyboard shortcuts for styles, special characters, specific formatting, etc? Compare and contrast with Word, which has done this stuff in its sleep for years.

I try to think of a different example every time I make this point. Last time it was silly limitations in mail merging and fundamental weaknesses in the data sources model used in OO. Next time it'll probably be underpowered charting in Calc, or maybe the terrible keyboard and mouse behaviour when using things like tables and text boxes in Writer. The point is, MS Office products are quite mature now, and while they may not have changed much in years and certainly have places they could be improved, they have relatively few really daft shortcomings. OO just isn't there yet, which is why I'm happy to use it at home for fairly simple jobs, but wouldn't dream of recommending it for business use.

Ultimately, the feature list is a battle OO can never win, as long as they're trying to be a better MS Office than MS Office and always chasing the leader. Microsoft might give them a huge boost by actually sending MS Office backwards with the weird new interface, but I'd bet by release time there will be an option to switch that off. Meanwhile, if OO wants to start providing genuine advantages over the MS offering, it needs to stop trying to be that MS offering, and start focussing on improving its own features and particularly their usability, and on offering things MS Office can't (like page layout and typography options beyond kindergarten level, or genuinely useful writing aids, for example).