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OpenOffice.org 2.1 Released With New Templates
Several readers wrote in to mention the release of OpenOffice.org 2.1. It includes support for 64-bit Linux and a number of other improvements, including multiple monitor support for Impress, improved Calc HTML export, and automatic notification of updates. Also, all of the templates and clip-art that were submitted for the template contest are available to download.
I teach physics lab courses at a community college. In the past, we'd had a lot of problems where students made a graph in Excel at school, took it home, and were unable to open it in Excel at home because it was an older version. I figured this was a natural situation in which to evangelize for open source. I got OOo installed on all the Windows computers in the labs, added instructions in the lab manual, and urged my students to use it, explaining the reasons.
Well, basically it was a failure. Given the choice, they all use Excel. In fact, even the ones who don't know how to use a spreadsheet already have generally chosen to use Excel rather than learning OOo. It doesn't matter that I go out of my way to try to help them if they show interest in OOo. In fact, many of them seem to read the OOo instructions, but apply them to Excel -- which works, most of the time, since OOo is such a total monkey copy of Office.
I would like to be able to say that their behavior was just irrational, but honestly I don't think it is. Actually there are at least two common graphing tasks that are extremely difficult to do in OOo. (1) Adjusting the scales on the axes. Sometimes it works, and sometimes, no matter how many times I click on the right place, it doesn't work. (2) Fitting a line and displaying the equation. This is dead easy in Excel, but unless they've improved OOo recently, it requires a mystic incantation (typing two different non-obvious, complicated formulas).
My wife's reaction when I suggested trying OOo was that she wasn't interested, because she'd tried importing complex Word documents, and sometimes it lost some of the formatting. Well, actually, this is an extremely rational reason not to switch to OOo.
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So... do you have anything in a human-readable format?
You are right about LaTeX. It doesn't try to beat word processors at their own game--and why should it? Unix text processing has a much longer history than WYSIWYG word processors.
Similarly, Ledger doesn't try to beat Quicken or MS Money at their own game. It uses a completely different paradigm (the command line, and a plain text data file) and does it very well. Gnucash, on the other hand, plays the Quicken and MS Money game and, I would argue, does not measure up.
But Gnumeric really is an Excel clone, just as OOo Calc is an Excel clone. I'd argue Gnumeric is a better Excel clone than OOo Calc, but it's still just an Excel clone. Can you name me an open source spreadsheet-like program that is not an Excel clone? What this would look like, I don't know. I've often wondered if there is a "Unix way" to do spreadsheets--that is, a way to put data in a plain text file and then do analysis on it.
The other big "office suite" programs--word processing, email--have Unix alternatives that use a plain-text paradigm. The spreadsheet, at least to my knowledge, has no such Unix alternative. The closest things I can think of are awk and Gnuplot, but unlike LaTeX's ability to replace a word processor, I can't imagine using awk and Gnuplot in place of a spreadsheet.
Maybe open-source is doomed to try to emulate Excel?
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OK, here's an immediate reply, right off the top of my head after reading your post. What's more, I'll only refer to the word processing component. I bet I get to ten within two minutes.
I think that's ten, and I basically haven't stopped typing for more than a few seconds between each.
As for how I'd fix them, well, I gave some description of how I'd organise a document preparation tool above. I wouldn't try to fix them with OOo Writer in its current form, because it has too much baggage: IMHO, you need a fundamental change in approach and UI priorities.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Your conclusion is fundamentally flawed: it does not follow that there exist a community of programmers working on something just because a lot of people would benefit from it. For a start, that would require a significant number of programmers (a) to appreciate the need, (b) to collaborate in order to produce a solution, and (c) to be willing to do so for little or no compensation if you think they're going to write it as OSS, and (d) to be willing to do so in an apparently crowded market with a dominant commercial player, established OSS projects as competition, and a user base who have been demonstrated for the most part to prefer paying Microsoft for their offering year-on-year rather than investigate alternatives that might suit them better.
Of course there is. A gazillion people use Word in this role every day. Word isn't very good at it, but most people don't appreciate that because they have little experience of anything else in recent times.
That doesn't change the fact that at a videoconference last week, with several relatively senior members of staff from all around the world and with very limited time available, we wasted upwards of five minutes while the expensive external consultant leading the presentation tried to get his bullet lists in Word to look consistent using Format Painter (which kept turning his text into Greek). He did the same thing the week before, too. Leaving aside the opportunity cost of that time, the cost to the business just to pay all those people to sit around and watch the consultant getting his document in a mess a couple of times was probably $500. In a smart document editor, his new bullet point would have just dropped into the list and formatted itself nicely the moment he typed it, or at worst required a click or two to say "this paragraph is a new item extending the list above it".
At the same company the week before, I spent most of an hour swapping e-mails and calls with a colleague on the same team who couldn't work out why a document with an included image looked fine on her machine but didn't work when uploaded onto the network for others in the team to see; this turned out to be a linking vs. embedding problem. The cost to the business for the time for two of us to fix that and the resources we used in the process was probably $200, and again that excludes the opportunity cost for our time, the time lost as I got back to my own work after the interruption, and so on.
These little things punctuate the daily lives of countless office workers around the world, wasting $100 here or $1,000 there. Those two anecdotes come from just my personal observations of one team at work over the past couple of weeks, and probably total $700 of loss to the business. This is more than enough to send the culprits on a basic training course, or to buy a couple of licences for better software. As the saying goes, if you think training is expensive, try ignorance. Likewise, a smart craftsman with good tools will tend to get better results faster than a low-skilled worker with inadequate tools, even if the latter doesn't realise what he's missing.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Spreadsheet 2000 is certainly a different concept in the realm of spreadsheets.