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Is it Time for Open Office?
lazyron asks: "I've been using Open Office a bit more lately, and got to thinking: this is much more like my current version of Microsoft Office than Office 2007 will be. Could it be time to try Open Office in the workplace, especially since there is still some time left before Office 2007 will be forced on us by the demands of the product cycle? Are there any IT admins out there thinking about trying Open Office, either with a few users or all of them?"
Not.
OO is different than the offering at MS, and is "incompatible" with every last feature (bloat) that they offer. Because it's not 100% exactly right, not many businesses will care.. Now if MS gets a cracking on "illegal installs", well, that probably would do the trick.
Yes, I concur.
When I am onsite for service calls I always load up OOo for new installs. Most of my customers have peer-to-peer networks or are running Small Business Server. Outlook is a great program and if you have a SBS controlled domain every client gets their own copy of Outlook automatically. I do try to save them money on software so I can charge more for service calls:)
God: When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
Star Office would be a more appropriate replacement because the PHB's would see that they could call up a company and have some support rather than posting something on a mailing list should the shit hit the fan. I use the latest version of Star Office and have no complaints other than it doesn't print presentation slides as nice as PowerPoint does. But then again, I'm a student, so I don't need the most powerful software out there. I know that once I'm out of the university and in the work force I'm going to have to rely on the intricacies of Excel to get any work done, so I'd also chalk that up for another "No" reason.
Every time I answer, "no".
Basically, I can be wrong at most once, and right an arbitrary number of times. Given that I was right the first time, I now cannot lose overall!
If you don't use Word macros, yes. If you do use Word macros (or certain Excel functions that are designed for the european market), probably not.
If all you need is a standard word processing program, spreadsheet, and presentation maker (which is true of almost everyone that uses Office) then OO is the way to go.
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Face it - OpenOffice.org is not compatible with MSO (neither are different versions of MSO either). You cannot really mix them. What you need is to choose one.
And the policies therein.
We mostly use open source software in our shop, but a number of us have Windows boxen - or dual boot Linux/Win boxen - so that we can use Microsoft Office.
At home, a lot of us use Open Office - even on our Windows PCs.
It really depends on how your work is organized. For a small shop, changing over is fine, if you're mostly just using DOC and XLS formats, but not coding for Access (MDB) or doing add-ons for Word and Excel. But if your DBMS is something like MySQL, and you just need to be able to read and write to the DOC and XLS formats, then you should be fine. But this is something that some people regard as highly volatile, so you'd need to have the backing of both your shop and your boss in particular.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
There is no way to move existing companies off of Microsoft Office (which is what they want). The main reason is that many people are scared to move to a new product, while others don't want to have to learn something new (Even if it's minimal). Comfort zone is everything.
From a purely word processing standpoint, this is both the right and the wrong time for OpenOffice.org to challenge the MS crown. It's the right time because, hell, Word 2007 looks more different to Word 2003 than Writer does, on the surface of it. It's the wrong time because, finally, there is a worthy version of Word on the market. It has been ten years since the Office team released anything this decent and free of bloat. But for all those OSS nuts out there, yes, really, now is the time to push Open Office. A bit of serious market share for OSS is always a good thing.
Sure, you'll be fine with OpenOffice... BUT, once some dorks update to 2007, you will be "old", "incompatible" and "cheapskate". Just as strongholders of Office 97 were.
You have no choice dude.... And I say this as a longtime user of OpenOffice... One of the guys that uses it every day and likes it.... But at office they use MS, so what do I have to say in the end for "real work"? (=not my personal budget or my wedding invitations...which I all did/do in OpenOffice)
Also, it's actually called "OpenOffice.org" and not "Open Office."
That you can point out numerous specialized niches that would have problems, perhaps even serious ones is a minor issue. MS Winodows and MS Office have nothing critical that would preclude most users from just walking away, be they corporate, academic, small-business, and even home users. It is all in your head, and in whether you are either reasonably competent or have access to someone who is.
This is a non-issue. All OSs and office suites require a lot of initial training and a non-zero amount of ongoing support and training. There is no magic bullet, and no platform that is magically easy to use for everyone.
Stop drinking the kool-aid. There seems to be something in it.
...are we scared yet?
No, I don't have 'users' but I do have a family. So far, in my efforts to ween them from MS Windows and related products, I find that they ask the same damn questions they used to ask: How do you format the paragraph numbers? How can I insert a picture here? Can you change the colors on this heading? plus the typical spreadsheet questions, web browser questions, and why can't I download this file type questions. I can't tell the difference between them using MS products and F/OSS products.
In fact, I really don't think they give a damn as long as they can figure out how to do what they need to get done.
If you're going to switch, now is as good a time as any. The questions will stay about the same as far as I can tell. Data backups and protection should be managed carefully no matter what OS / APPs you use. If you have the backend taken care of, the tools used to manipulate the data should be about equal. My 'users' really didn't use calendaring too much, or other group productivity tools, so that might be something to be watchful of.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
I personally never use any Word equivalents. I don't use Word, I don't use OO, I don't use AbiWord. I just don't see a need for these products.
If it's text, I do it text-only, there's no need for bloat.
If it requires basic text formatting, I just create a simple HTML file, it's faster and quicker and more portable.
If it's to be a published black and white document, I use LaTeX (don't complain, there _are_ good LaTeX editors around for those that hate coding). This way the fonts and serifs are perfect, increasing readability dramatically.
If it's a complex graphic design publication, word-equivalents suck yet again, and I use InkScape or Freehand or something.
I don't see a place for Microsoft Word, OO Writer, or any such products anywhere above.
I am a big fan of OO and I use it even though our company has bulk license and unlimited installs. I have no problem doing good high quality presentations. I mail PDF attachments. Everything is good. Except Excel's charting and annotating is still far superior to OO. I have been meaning to download the SDK and implement the support I need myself. But after looking at my code for five days I just can do more hacking during weekends. I must be getting old. Further my forte is C++ for non graphical non user interface fast scientific code develepment. So my productivity in the new build environment would be low. Bur definitely I would encourage people to improve the charting support. Just use gnuplot as the engine and slap good UI on it. Someone. anyone.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
As much as anyone cringes, Excel is the best tool for accumulating, plotting, and exporting (to Word, e.g.) data and charts. Yes there are better tools, but they are not as easy to use and they are not as well integrated with the other tools of the trade. So, having said that, Calc in no way measures up to Excel.
For one, charting (especially X-Y scatter plots) is very, very painful to use and doesn't have all the features that are required.
Then there's the VBA macro issue, which judging by some of the comments may or may not be an issue.
Writer doesn't seem too limiting, and I haven't really used Impress too much, but without the functionality of Excel, it's a non-starter.
OpenOffice.org is, in my opinion, the weakest part of the free software desktop experience. It is huge and bloated. It takes 100 MB - 200 MB to install (depending on your operating system), which is way more than it should. It doesn't use any platform's native graphical toolkit. Fonts look like crap in it. Etc, etc.
Honestly, I think that Abiword is orders of magnitude better -- not just in the obvious areas of size and memory footprint, but also in terms of the UI. It looks great in Gnome, and runs on Windows too (and it has a grammar checker!). I'm not a KDE user, but KWord also looks better than OO.o
I don't understand the fixation that people have with Open Office. It's slow. It looks bad. It retains all the things you hated about MS Office. The only things that it has going for it is that it has the most faithful .doc import of any open source office tool, and that it has the best ODT support at the moment. But the day that OO.o dies will be a happy day in my book.
#include ".signature"
Your Open Office system will work fine for about 18 months until the new version starts to become more common, then you (and every other existing MS Office user as well) will start running into problems as the network effect with the new version really kicks in.
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Which is very very handy indeed.
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Personally, I like OO. Its straight forward and useful with a lack of clutter* and imho, looks 'prettier'. Png icons anyone ?
I suppose the main question was about the use of OO in a business style setting though. I don't think its quite 100% ready--not at least until we get can receive a solid amount of support and ease of distribution/control/updates to the networked clients. Formats are already widely support (aside from the rogue usage of Word 97... grumble), along with tools that allow you to easily convert to other formats (pdf, .doc, staroffice?)
However, for personal use, I think OO is great:D
*I mean clutter in the sense of useless/annoying/hard-to-use features. Obviously, somethings are configurable (if you rtm), but seriously, by default I don't want the friggin' Copy-Paste pop-up crap! Also, using and configuring your tab stops is a pain in the arse
...OpenOffice is probably the closest free Office clone I've seen. It still seems to be a little lagging behind in a few features, but I would definately use it as an alternative to Office.
There is definitely a market for MS Office-like software, and I count myself among those who believe OpenOffice fills the bill for the vast majority of MS Office users, regardless of their context. There are people who expect more, however, and neither MS Office nor OpenOffice will satisfy them.
...are we scared yet?
I just fired up Excel to compare the experience, and I had the same graph in under a minute with no after-the-fact fussing around with properties panels. Its defaults were what I wanted and it let me put my columns in any order (though the UI for specifying column ranges needs a little help IMO).
This was the first time I'd used Excel in maybe a year, and the first time I'd made a graph in Excel in... well, I can't remember the previous time. Whereas I use OOO pretty frequently. So I am no MS fanboy -- but OOO does have some catching up to do in places.
Notice, by the way, that the above example has nothing to do with file formats or proprietary languages. I'm willing to cut OOO some slack when it has trouble rendering a document that uses some obscure undocumented formatting feature of MS Word, but that wasn't the case here.
The state of the Openoffice.org project reminds me of how the Mozilla Project was about four or five years ago. It has all the features imaginable (e.g. database connectivity, vector graphic support, full-featured spreadsheet), and is compatible with everything under the sun. However, non o matter how modern or fast a system, it runs like a sloth. I would suggest that it is time for a new Openoffice, much more like what Mozilla has done with Firefox and Thunderbird; spinning one huge piece of bloat into several smaller tools that do their job effectively.
Nobody used Mozilla, because it was big and slow and looked a lot like something from five years before (Netscape Communicator 4.7); people running GNU/Linux systems used it because it was all they generally had (not trying to throw flamebait). If Openoffice and its developers (mostly Sun) learned from Mozilla, we could see a great, useful, usable, and popular product come out of what Openoffice is today.
If you use OpenOffice 2 Writer and nothing else, you're fine. But interchange with .doc files still doesn't work all that well. Something readable usually makes it through the conversion, but it won't look quite right.
Impress and OpenOffice Draw are OK, but, realistically, PowerPoint and Visio are better. PowerPoint has all those provided templates and graphical items which make it possible for suits to make up elaborate-looking presentations without much effort. With Impress, you start with a blank page and a few basic layouts. This is fine if you have the graphic design skills to start with a blank page, but that scares most people.
The help system for OpenOffice is still terrible. The typical help page describes how to do something, but doesn't tell you under what menu item or button to find the indicated command. The help system is a manual chopped up into bits, not a coherent help system.
OpenOffice's little star popup thing, their answer to Clippy, is just as annoying as Microsoft's, but dumber about figuring out what you're doing.
It's classic open source. The essential stuff works, and everything else is kind of half done. It's far better than OpenOffice 1.0, but it still has a ways to go.
God the problems I had trying to handle large datasets... Where "large" is bigger than say 64k... So what I really mean by large is small. Excel is just completely useless for anything non trivial.
Yes as you mentioned, there are better tools for the job and frankly as hard as they might seem, they just work.
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We've been using OpenOffice exclusively at my company for about two years now, since the 2.0beta days. We've had some minor bumps along the way, and have discovered a few minor annoyances, but overall, we haven't really missed MSOffice.
This is in a small office with about 40 users; however, we do a lot of document exchange with our clients via Word, Excel and PDF formats. OpenOffice has given us very, very little trouble in this regard. For the occasional word or word->rtf document that just won't open correctly, we can use WordViewer, a free utility from MS.
This move was initiated after a "friendly audit request" by the BSA after an anonymous employee tip. After thinking a great deal about the BSA's tactics and methods, we decided to go with open source applications any place we could.
We still use Windows (2000, XP) on the desktops for the simple reason that it works well, and it's what people are used to. As time goes on, however, Ubuntu is starting to sound better. I wouldn't even *think* of running windows on our servers.
Don't forget that OO is free . OO is so simple that my idiot dad uses it. Bold, Italic, underline, font, justification, spreadsheets, presentation. That's it. Fuck features. I think we can convert more people to OO just by showing them how easy it is...then there's the added bonus of being able to solve almost all document compatibility problems.
My experience with Open Office 2.1 is that users are not aware of any difference between that and Microsoft Office. They only want to type a letter, and don't focus at all on software issues. I presume that most businesses have very minimal needs: Click File/ New/. Type stuff. Click File/ Save/. Click File/ Print/. Perhaps 1 user out of 20 has any interest in complicated formatting. For all others, there is Open Office. Price-less.
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U.S. government violence has stopped the centuries-long violence in Iraq and created a peaceful democracy. NOT!
Excel can do quick and dirty charts. The prior is an asset. The latter is BAD & worsened because it is VERY hard to take an Excel chart into another program to IMPROVE it.
Charting in ALL the programs suck. OO.o's current module is probably the worst (but their new chart module that you can beta test shows a lot of improvement).
But you can't make publication quality plots in ANY of them. So, we don't bother. The free/open source advocates use Grace. The others tend to use Origin.
This could still be an issue for legacy spreadsheets. When people find stuff better than Excel VBA (Python kicks butt!), they tend to stop using it for new sheets.
Why not pick and choose good tools from all available options? You don't have to use an app just because it is part of a suite that has other programs you like.
...OpenOffice for the past 3 years... corporate* use, that is. Every one else is using MS Office 2003... and nobody has noticed, and no, I did not have any problems.
The only real advice I can give you is : go on and try... if you don't have heavy scripting you propably will not run in to problems.
*) it is a multibillion USD financial corporation.
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Don't expect success... and you'll never be dissapointed.
Even if you try OO in a large setting, and find it doesn't work, there's not a lot lost. Just reopen and save your stuff again in a M$ Office native format and switch back. OO may lack some of the 'features' of other office suites, but that doesn't mean said other suites can't open OOs exported files with little to no loss. And as always...pointing out the whole "it's free" thing can go a long way.
Microsoft no longer sees Office as it's cashcow.
Sharepoint is the new cashcow.
Microsft Sharepoint is an all in one company intranet, document management, CRM and internet portal system for medium to large companies that has been gaining significant market in recent years. Sharepoint entrenches a company in Microsoft technology far more than Office ever could or ever will.
Much of the killer features on offer in Office 2007 are features leveraging Sharepoint.
If your company has already invested in Sharepoint or is thinking about using it, the choice of Open Office versus Office 2007 is a no brainer. Choosing Sharepoint and then Open Office instead of Office 2007 would rate as a category 5 blunder.
If Open Office supporters want to see it thrive they better keep their eyes on the ball and not the man because MS Office has passed the ball to Sharepoint some time back now.
... that it's worth STICKING with Office. Office 2007 is by far the easiest to use so far (in my opinion) of the Microsoft Office family, and the new interface makes old Office and OpenOffice feel downright antique.
There are licensing issues and business practices and so forth that everyone around here gets all in a lather about, but from a purely user-experience standpoint I think it's pretty great.
Either way, things are at a crossroads. The Open Document Format (ODF) is what OpenOffice uses, and Office 2007 uses Microsoft's own more proprietary version of this, OpenXML. Instead of things getting closer together, it's getting harder and harder (really, due to the minor differences more than the major ones) to transfer documents back and forth between OOo and Office. And since most interaction with the outside world requires Microsoft-specific file formats, I think you may as well stick with Office. Purely from a practicality standpoint -- not ethics, not right vs. wrong, just what's going to cost you the least number of hours over the long haul. I'm sure converters will start to come out, but for pure ease of use and reliable translation, Word to Word is always going to work better than OpenOffice to Word.
I run both and like them both for various things -- still, I think I'll probably be using Office 2007 more than anything else as time goes on. I don't have much call for a word processor or spreadsheet app, but what little I do with these is easier in Office. Just is.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Excel can do quick and dirty charts. The prior is an asset. The latter is BAD & worsened because it is VERY hard to take an Excel chart into another program to IMPROVE it.
Charting in ALL the programs suck. OO.o's current module is probably the worst (but their new chart module that you can beta test shows a lot of improvement).
But you can't make publication quality plots in ANY of them. So, we don't bother. The free/open source advocates use Grace. The others tend to use Origin.
I really don't see OpenOffice.org as a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office - it's nowhere near pretty enough, formatting can be somewhat strange (I remember having to struggle with section breaks A LOT more than I would've liked when using it, though that might still be some repressed flashbacks of OOo 1.1, and I'm happy to hear that charting hasn't improved), and these days collaboration is THE big buzzword right now - OOo doesn't even come close in that department.
To be fair here, I really don't think OOo should try to face off against Microsoft Office - that's a pretty big gorilla to try and take down. I do think it is an excellent replacement for the Microsoft Works-level packages of the world, especially since it does everything those lighter packages do and then some for a better price point. I can easily see it gaining traction at home, since it does everything that Microsoft Office does "well enough" for people to do some productive work on their off hours in it, albeit not necessarily running an entire office off of it. The interface for OOo is also a lot closer to what people use at work than Microsoft Works, too, if you ignore the GTK theming.
I actually like OOo - it reminds me a lot of ClarisWorks, which was a wonderful suite I had on my Mac Classic WAY back in the day. I do have some issues with it, though - documentation is spotty (especially with Base), the UI is uglier than sin, and the way Base uses Writer docs for its forms almost forces you to take ugly to strange new places that you never want to go. I mean, Access apps aren't pretty - for Base to create even worse looking ones by default is just astounding, if not criminal.
I'm not an anti-MS Zealot. Entourage is pretty good. But Outlook is horrible. So much org time is wasted troubleshooting bloated PST mail files or having to explain why a customer who didn't use Outlook is getting MS-TNEF garbage. And the IMAP support is pitiful.
Even many MS developers say you should use Thunderbird on Windows (including the guy who worked on IMAP in Entourage).
Hopefully, Evolution on win32 and Thunderbird+Lightning will mature enough to encourage MS to actually fix Outlook.
I just installed it, set it to use Word & Excel Format by default and hung around while my un-super user colleague asked me a few questions and moaned about the toolbars a bit but after a week the questions stopped and that was that, never a problem.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
and look at all the grief thier getting for it.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
It's always time for Open Office.
I so wanted to like Abiword, but the hurdles needed to make it type in Japanese was a horrendously arduous battle. When it borked a document my short love affair with the application ended then and there.
Open Office is slow and doesn't look very gnomie, but it worked without any real problems.
I'd love to replace Office with OpenOffice. Unfortunately, Microsoft has bundled this stuff so tightly it's difficult to displace.
Visio has no viable competition.
Yes, I've tried Dia, and frankly it's nowhere near as usable as Visio. I wish there was competition here, but there isn't.
Usually I just need the features found in the version of Visio from about 1996. Then, it was just coming out and not owned by MS yet. it worked fine. it allowed me to do the simple flowcharts and connectors that moved nicely. I mostly do
- data flow diagrams
- systems schematics, or
- database schemas
. This is pretty simple functionality but Dia doesn't do it yet. Yuck. I want arrows with different size arrowheads, lines that stay attached to objects as you move them, and the ability to make them curved / bendy or straight. That's it.Likewise, MS Office has Outlook which has an integrated calendar function that invites me to and reminds me of meetings. If Thunderbird did that, I'd switch quite quickly. I use Tbird at home and love it.
That's the functionality I need. I'm sure I'm not the first one to mention it, but I hope that Sun or IBM or Redhat or Novell is listening. This functionality can't be that hard to develop, and they'd get much more users for their products if they did that. It can't cost more than $20 million to field a product with that minimal level of functionality - that's 20 developers for 2 years plus infrastructre, management, and QA. Put it in OpenOffice at $free instead of $400/seat MS Office and their market segment would be... HUGE (the planet).
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These days, I never take OO out of my mind. I have zero interest in requiring clients at the three small organizations whose PCs I keep, to struggle through a whole new interface in order to do things they know well how to do. And OO is frankly a simple improvement over Microsoft Word in all ways except VBA (and if there were real and good OO BASIC docs maybe I wouldn't say that), and its spreadsheet and presentation capabilities are definitely usable. One of my three has twenty-five workstations to be changed out soon, and I am going to recommend against Microsoft Office entirely, except where Outlook is required. I keep hoping someone really good will build a free-software or low-cost-software Outlook total replacement, but it hasn't quite happened yet. But I haven't used Microsoft Word at home for more than a year, and I am a power user of Word...and many people have a whole Microsoft Office suite because they want Word, as a result of Microsoft pricing schemes. So I am just overjoyed at the prospect of making life easier for word-processing users with OO, while saving them the dollars too!
J.E.B.
Joshua Corps
I remember similar question popping up maybe a year or so ago, sadly the answer is still no, at least in legal vertical.
Why?
Integration with various "Office Helpers" - document management systems (keeping track of client/matter), contact management (keeping track of mailing addresses, fax numbers, etc.), cost recovery/time docketing....All these third-party apps are written using Office API and show as buttons in Word, Excel and other Office apps.
Until vendors start writing plug-ins for OpenOffice apps, I will have a really hard time selling the idea of anything but Microsoft Office to my executive committee.
Cost alone won't do it - things have to click, and click good.
I am migrating one of my clients to OO this year for sure as they are a large non-profit and you just can't beat the price. I have had 4 workstations in there on OO 2.1 since it launched and none of those users has reported a single issue outside of the couple days it took to get familiar with it. For their needs (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) there is no reason at all not to move now.
Play me online? Well you know that I'll beat you. If I ever meet you I'll "/sbin/shutdown -h now" you. -Weird Al, kinda.
I've been using Open Office for a while now and I'm very happy with it. My wife uses MS Office 2003 and she is very happy with it. We share files back and forth regularly with absolutely no problems. The biggest issue I see is that Open Office apps are significantly slower in opening closing and the same for opening or saving actual files. I can say for certain that the law firm users I used to support would HATE Open Office based on that fact alone. Another issue might be a lack of an acceptable substitute for Outlook. Then again, based on cost savings, the partners might very find that Open Office is a good way to go as long as the email issue could be resolved.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
Scrooge: 'Bah! Humbug! It's Free... So stop yer yammering, or I'll subtract the cost of MS Office from yer next pay check...'
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Of course it is.
Source: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061204-835
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
The IT guy at my small company tried this a couple of years ago. Everyone hated OO. They ended up putting vmware on the Linux boxes to run Office and Outlook. Works much better.
Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that there have been dozens of Ask Slashdots a week, it seems like, and they all tend to be kind of frivolous (as opposed to genuinely thought-provoking)? Most of them basically seem like half-baked article submissions wrapped into a half-baked question. Then again, has anyone noticed how many article submissions end in a half-baked, pointless question anyway?
Limina.Log
No.
,unfortunately, take over in the mainstream just about the time Linux does. The main reason being corporations are wary of adopting software with no promise of support.
Long answer?
Nooooooooooooooooooo.
Open office will
And people just aren't going to use one prog at work, one at home, etc. Just causes a hassle.
Still, I'm rooting for you OO!
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Like the fabled "Year of the Linux" desktop (YotLD), the "right" time is never going to come. Opportunities don't always land in one's lap, they have to be created.
When I say that the YotLD is never going to happen, I don't mean Linux or OS won't ever dominate, just that there will never be a dramatic turnaround in any single year. The best strategy is to chisel away. And to keep chiseling.
Even if only 1% of the people switch over and stay switched, that means a significant higher user base, which usually translates into speedier development in the Open Source world. Perhaps the next year, market share ratcheted up another percentage point or two, and the trend will keep going.
I believe OO.org is fully ready for 99% of the people - though I do acknowledge it has faults. For instance, the last version I checked (6 months back, Neo Office J, OS X port), while I could fit a line to a curve in the spreadsheet document, I could not actually get it to give me a formula to the line - this is a pretty big problem (for people that need the feature) that many people at various message boards could not fix, but it should be trivial to fix (it boggles my mind why it didn't have this feature). But the best we can do is point it out to the developers and hope it is fixed the next time (or fix it yourself but that is too much for most people).
Also, the reason it is good right now to promote switching is that Microsoft is clamping down with licenses in the US. Especially many business could benefit from cost savings this year if they switch.
Hm, I haven't used anything other than StarOffice/OpenOffice/NeoOffce in years. It's a rare situation that anyone ever misses MS Office and the number of times someone missed something in MS Office (usually some excel tidbit) has been less than the number of times someone liked something in OpenOffice that MS didn't have (save as PDF comes to mind, sales and marketing people LOVE that). The security people love the fact that it's not hacked to shreds by every script kiddie in the world.
:)
I once switched MS Office with a version of OpenOffice where I changed out the icons (editing the binary with a resource editor) and everyone loved the new version of MS Office I hooked them up with
I did the same thing with Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox (back when it was phoenix). They all loved the new version of IE much better (since I added a couple of nice extensions to the standard)
Ease a few key people into it. Usually, there's a few business types who fancy themselves uber-geeks. Go for them first.
I just learned today that early this year our company will start using OO. We are a large national company (not IT) with probably about 700 employees. About 20% of those are 'power users' and will retain a license to Excel, but the plan is that the avg desk jockey will get a copy of OO on their Citrix connection.
I know right away that I can't use OO simply because of the lack of ODBC support.
OpenOffice 2.0.4 had a bunch of minor issues eating MS-Word files '97 through '03 variants. No real "showstoppers" but enough to throw newbies off.
OO2.1 is loads better, at least with Word files and to the lesser extent I've checked, Excel.
If M$ tries to play wacky games with their proprietary file formats, I think the OO community can come up with translators good enough to keep up.
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Aside from the corporate world, if you start doing a bit of support for home users you soon realize how many are jumping to OO just for reasons of cost...and are very happy with the jump. As OO penetrates the home market, some of those people will have some management influence and will start talking about the shift without us geeks needing to do squat.
Copy/pasting plain text tables works quite fine in Excel. I just fired up OO.o and much to my surprise, it doesn't handle space or comma separated plain text, but tab separated plain text works great.
As for fast and accurate
Absolutely. OTOH, it's pretty hard to take ANY chart into another program to improve it. Of course, I want my charting program to do it all for me so that I don't have to improve it somewhere else. I always thought SigmaPlot or Origin were good ideas, but frankly they're priced too high to bring it into our small business environment with any sort of saturation. Really. At $600+ per seat, on top of all the other licenses we have (geometry modellers, FE meshers, FE analysis codes, ad nauseum) the $300 one-shot cost for MS Office SMB is a no-brainer.
I call bullshit. I've got my PhD. I've got publications. I read through lots of papers, I see lots of theses. Guess what? I'd say that an overwhelming majority of tem use Excel. Excel charts have a distinct look to them. And while it's distinct, there's nothing inherent about it that makes it not "publication quality". Just like Gnuplot plots and LaTeX documents have distinct looks. If you can make a reasonably clean chart that effectively communicates your data and doesn't look like complete shit, then it's publication quality.
Yes, Python's great. We use it when it's appropriate, and that's pretty often. But as a replacement for VBA? Really? I assume that you don't mean as a means of scripting Excel (if you do, please provide a link!). I've looked at plotting libraries for Python, including the gnuplot interface, as well as wxPlot, but frankly, they don't quite match up to what we want to do. And frankly, I'm the more tech savvy engineer in our office. There's no way the "ordinary" engineers would do any Python scripting to do what we use VBA/Excel to do (which is essentially RAD of data reduction techniques -- once we've worked it out in Excel, we usually write custom apps
The sad answer is because it's not practical or cost effective. In my field, everyone knows Excel. The newbie just-out-of-school engineers through to the greybeards. Not everyone knows Gnumeric or Gnuplot, and it's not worth it to them to learn. So, we use Excel. And OO.o "Calc" does not replace Excel (which was the point of the whole thing).
Most of my clients couldn't run anything other than true MSOffice because of a whole slew of mission critical software which integrates with various MSOffice programs.
I'm a sysadmin, and "where's the support contract?" is a common mantra among management. However ... when was the last time _anybody_ called Microsoft for support with MS Office? Can anybody even name a single instance of this? I know I can't (granted, I haven't been in desktop support for ages, but I don't think most companies even bother to purchase a "support contract" for MS Office - they just buy the software and move on).
...
Anybody out there know of an instance of someone actually utilizing an MS Office (or any office software, for that matter) support contract? This argument strikes me as one that just doesn't hold water
illum oportet crescere me autem minui
I made a presentation using OO with some microsofties in the audience today, I had to reboot (old beatup laptop woot!) and when the OO loading screen popped up I got some heckling:
"Use Microsoft Office" they said
"Microsoft makes an office suite now?" I asked
I was the only presenter who wasn't asked to submit a resume to MS.
A12A.713 is the root of ASC('evil')
If I'm going to be a guinea pig, I'd rather be Google's (Do I even need to add the link...?)
LaTeX for da win!!
I'm actualy very happy with the neo office port of OO for os X
I'd Tell you all my secrets but I lie about my past
Which excel features are you refering to? Or are you just guessing? I've used both in professional engineering projects ( don't ask why the engineer wasn't using CAD?!?) The only problems I ran into were third party excel add ons that obviously didn't work with excel.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I'd switch the entire office over in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, MS Office comes with Outlook and we run with Exchange Servers. We use the calendaring and other features that make a switch impossible without an Outlook clone. Evolution is starting to come around for Linux but my Windows users have no where to turn that I know of. Mike
All of these comments sound like my experiences with the 1.X series. 2.1 rocks.
I think the "fonts and serifs" will be just fine, printing from anything that supports fonts and printers. Maybe you mean kerning, tracking, or leading? Surely not serifs.
If you're going to switch, now is as good a time as any. The questions will stay about the same as far as I can tell. Data backups and protection should be managed carefully no matter what OS / APPs you use. If you have the backend taken care of, the tools used to manipulate the data should be about equal. My 'users' really didn't use calendaring too much, or other group productivity tools, so that might be something to be watchful of.
The biggest difference is ease of install and machine stability. Mepis takes about 20 minutes to put on a slow machine. That with an apt-get of a few favorites, like gqview, and the machine is good to go for years. Debian stable takes a little longer to install but lasts even longer. Not having those oh so important business memos to type up, OO sees use only for fancy fonts with Kword doing just as well and GIMP doing even better. Then you don't have to mess with it - no antivirus, spyware programs and all that. It just works, so you don't have to.
For backup, grsync or rsync on chron work wonders.
For group ware, Kontact works well enough even when naively set up. It's like Outlook should be.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Tufte notes that Excel CAN be tricked into making nice infographics. It just takes a ton of work & most scientists/engineers use some other package.Python can script OO.o or you can make stand-alone scripts.matplotlib and the numerous grace programs are also good....This is completely opaque to me. To each his own. In my office, people live on python. New people quickly learn it. We do still have some matlab hold-outs, but scipy/numpy are put to quick use. VBA is as simple as python, but it doesn't scale.Ah, but you said you didn't use OO.o Writer & discouraged deployment because MS Excel was "better" than OO.o Calc. This is silly. You can buy Excel stand-alone & save money, so it IS cost-effective!
We tried moving to OO about a year ago I put a number of our folks on it and for the most part it worked great. However, our primary customer (A gigantic US Retailer) is addicted to Excel and uses excel worksheets laden with VBA Macro's to populate a lot of their internal reporting systems. OO choked on most of these worksheets.
I'd love to get off MSOffice, not because I don't think it's a great program, but from a realistic point of view there haven't been any new features since Office 95 (Other than outlook) that have changed the way we do business. OO Has these features and free is a pretty darn good price. I'd even be willing to pony up 10-20$/user for support contract of some kind.
We don't use Sharepoint/Infopath/etc... to automate business processes. I'd love to but laugh at paying 300+ for the licenses for each user to use this. I think half of the new features that MSOffice implements are only used by Redmond.
It mentions building it from sources with links to pre-compiled binaries, even an installer.
It's funny, but just this afternoon I tried to help someone make a simple graph with Excel and can say most of the things you did about Open Office. The graph defaults sucked and while I remembered every one of the tweaks to fix it, it was irksome to have to. Calc is not that much better but Gnumeric is. It requires substantially less modification to have something that looks good. The long and short of it is that everything takes time to learn, you might as well learn the one that's free and improving.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
MS Office doesn't work correctly on my laptop. When I bought it (brand new) Word, espcially, kept crashing, and images wouldn't work, at all. I was forced to move into using OpenOffice.org by my situation (needed office apps, MSOffice didn't work). So, I've been using OOo for a year and half now, and I don't think I'm ever going to switch back. It works, perfectly, and costs 0$. I am also sure that eventually, most of my classmates will use OOo, because they aren't very fond of the ribbons in the latest MS Office.
is the flexibility it gives you when telling it what to print and how to print it. OpenOffice might do OK there, but in my admittedly limited experience trying to do some things I have done in Excel in OO with tweaking the printed output, Excel won by a mile. To be fair, OO might be better on Windows - haven't tried that.
I've been using OpenOffice internally in my business since it was founded, many years ago. However, externally, we have often resorted to MS office through Wine and other cheap hacks because many of our clients required reports and documents in (.doc format).
We don't use macros, just text and images, so I don't really know about that, but We find that OpenOffice is highly compatible at this point.
We are considering telling our clients that we are only going to support Open Document Format, although I am concerned that it may not be time yet.
If anyone elae has had experience being strictly Open Document on the end user side, yet, I'd like to here about it.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." - Mohandas Gandhi
Jeeze, it's the same damn stories every fucking week.
Conventional logic would say that OpenOffice should indeed be able to supplant Microsoft Office as an office productivity suite. After all, it has most of the same features, sports a similar graphical user interface, and can open/save proprietary Word .doc files (ensuring that you are not cut off from the rest of the world's data).
When my mother (who has no understanding of computers whatsoever) recently had a hard drive failure, I decided to take a walk on the wild side and install OpenOffice.org 2.1 instead of Microsoft Office. To me it made sense--we wouldn't need to pay tribute to the "evil empire" and I could (hopefully) wean most of my family off proprietary software and onto F/LOSS applications. Unfortunately, the user (in this case, my mom) absolutely refused to use it. She tried it for a few days, but found its distinctive lack of "Word-ness" too confusing. Eventually, she settled on Wordpad (ugh) for her word processing, so in the end I had to revert back to Office.
This raises an interesting question: how many people are so used to a very specific user interface that they will refuse to understand anything else? In my experience these small prejudices (especially in the eyes of non-technical people) can be huge factors when it comes to adoption. My mother is an interesting case, as she has refused to use SUSE Linux (I set it up to be as user-friendly as possible, but alas it didn't look like XP apparently), Mozilla Thunderbird (it wasn't similar enough to AOL's inbox format), and OpenOffice.
Just because it looks good from a tech point of view does not necessarily mean that it will fare well "down in the trenches", so to speak.
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I switched to Open Office because it was easier to download a free office suite than to pirate MS Office
For what it's worth, I used OO in a corporate environment as an experiment. I worked in multiple departments simultaneously where .xls and .doc files were constantly passed around and updated, changed, etc.
I used OO for two years with no hiccups, no problems, and nobody else seemed to notice.
To me that was enough to compell me to use it at home and at work. If nobody else had any problems, and I had no problems... then why bother spending $300 for MSO when OO worked just fine for $0...?
In a group dynamic, where others were relying on my input and updates to critical documents I found no compelling reason to choose MSO over OO
d4c
You really have no idea whatsoever what "groupware" is (I assume you mean "enterprise collabrolation" here, because otherwise even OE is great). Or for that matter how Outlook is used. Do you?
Well, happy Twitter fan, I'm not sure what groupware is because I've never worked in a business that really used it. The pieces were mostly scattered, constantly replaced and never worked together well. KDE is now offering most of what a company wants in a way that works. Free software is like that.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Great, another OO.org fanboy talking about how he swears he's going to use OpenOffice.org more and so are other people because Office 2007's user interface is just too drastically different. It just seems obvious that people want the same interface they are used to, why change it?
I haven't used Office 2007 myself but what I am seeing in the ribbon interface is merely docked palettes. Look at any decent Mac application, particularly anything using Cocoa or coming from NeXT (see Omni Group programs) and it will typically use palettes as the primary interface for interacting with object properties. See OmniGraffle or OmniOutliner or OmniPlan. Or see Apple's Pages and Keynote applications.
All Microsoft has done here is reduce the menubar to the file menu and replace the toolbar with what essentially amount to palettes and drawers as found in NeXT/Cocoa applications. NeXT did this 10+ years ago. However, Microsoft has stuck with the old menubar/toolbar interface. Microsoft's menubar is just a bastardization of Apple's which removed it from the top of the screen as a global contextual menu and put it inside the window as a hard to point at set of choices. Microsoft's toolbar is I believe a Microsoft UI invention that started off with the good intention of making a small button for each of the most common functions of an application.
Microsoft's ribbon interface has finally shown that contextual interfaces are the best UI paradigm we know of today. For what it's worth, Office 2004 and v.X for Mac both have palettes although sadly maintain the modal dialogs as well. I really hope their MacBU team does a good job with the next version of Office for Mac.
Could they have done better? Well maybe, I haven't used it yet so I don't know. I will say the default blue-ish color scheme is garish to say the least. However, it does look like Microsoft is finally starting to realize that adding cute animated characters to a poorly designed interface doesn't help. No one really wants to learn how to use a program, they want a program to work as they would expect it to.
What interests me more is how they were able to pull this off from the programming side of things. The Win32 event and windowing model does not lend itself well to these types of interfaces. It would take some smart developers to come up with the necessary framework to implement this type of interface. In contrast, Cocoa's target/action system makes writing these types of interfaces a breeze. The OpenOffice.org team has one hell of a task ahead of them now.
Still, OO.org hasn't been all bad. I think its biggest contribution to office software is hilighting how completely crappy Microsoft's Office interface has been and showing Microsoft that if they want to compete they are going to have to do better. My guess is that it's going to be several years before OO.org catches up unless they move to some sort of toolkit that does this stuff for them. If I were them, I'd ditch the crap they have now and move to GNUstep and put some development time on it. Of course, it would be blasphemy to use Objective-C at Sun since Java is supposedly the evolution of Objective-C. Having used both I can say it seems to me that Java is a step backwards not forwards. The reality here is that OO.org is basically dead because Microsoft just killed it the old fashioned way: by making a better product.
... you insensitive clod!
(X11 and NeoOffice kludges don't count)
I have a big problem with WYSIWYG word processing: I spend more time "formatting" than "writing". Even with the shear amount of templates available, it still puts a severe lag in my productivity. LaTeX is nice and powerful, but at the same time, it is complex and generally overkill for what I need. So, I started on simply use HTML for my documents, but tagging sucks just as bad. I prefer to write just plain text files with minimal markup and limited formatting, so I can focus on what I am communicating. Well, wiki syntax is relatively simple. So, I decided to find some tools that allow me to do simplified wiki markup. I ended up finding Muse, an Emacs mode that allows the user to create wiki text and have them compile into various output formats (LaTeX, DocBook, HTML, PDF, etc). So now, I create documents and resumes in text, compile it into HTML, apply stylesheets and publish/print.
Coderz 4 Life
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>I call bullshit.
I have to call bullshit on you calling bullshit. What kind of lousy journals are you reading? In physics/theoretical biology journals, excel figs are very rare. And there's a definite trend towards *not* using excel as the quality of the journal increases. Just flip through a few "flagship" journals: Nature, Science, PLoS. Very few (if any) excel figs.
> I've looked at plotting libraries for Python, including the gnuplot interface, as well as wxPlot
I've been using matplotlib (http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/) recently, which is looking very good indeed. What if you need to plot 1001 lines, with custom symbols, and with unique x+y axes, all in the same figure? I had to do that recently and matplotlib was the only thing that could do the trick (and not look shitty).
Basically everyone I know uses matlab or octave if they need to do serious work with large datasets. That said, I wish there were better open source spreadsheet options for little jobs.
For people who haven't tried Microsoft Office 2007 yet, I really recommend that you at least give the trial of Microsoft Office 2007 a test drive using the trial available on Microsoft's website. If you have to do serious word processing (research, writing a book, education, etc.) then Word 2007 is a gift from god. You can't understand this though unless you try it and use the new citation features, etc. From a purely technical IT POV though, Office 2007 is finally based on an open XML format. The application exposes a brand new beautiful interface that is innovative and much easier to use than anything in the past. I would go as far as saying that Microsoft will probably revolutionize the way we see menu bars in many other applications. I'm looking forward to seeing Office 2007's wide adoption as well as Microsoft Office 2008:mac which will bring the Apple platform up to speed with the new XML format (and hopefully MAPI/RPC over HTTPS).
Oh, I don't disagree with you about the scarcity of Excel plots in those journals, but those journals aren't at all in my field. Look at the journals for the applied sciences and engineering. No, I'm not talking about the "trade journals" either, but rather the ones with real scientific content. For me, that includes The Journal of Composite Materials, Composites: Part A, AIAAJ, and other such journals. They definitely don't look as pretty as Nature, Science, what-have-you. But that doesn't make they lousy.
There's a definite divide between the hard sciences, the medical sciences, and the applied sciences.
I attempted a roll-out of OpenOffice.org. Upper management eventually decided to keep MS for a couple more years and try again because a few managers complained loudly and expressed concerns about compatibility with customers and learning something new. I was able to refute these concerns but because of other circumstances (mainly time constraints -- this is a relatively new branch I'm at and they needed something right now) I decided to give in on it for now.
.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc. so files are saved in a format compatible to MS Office by default.
I do honestly believe OpenOffice is ready for prime-time although you will undoubtedly run into issues.
The main issue my office had is that documents created in Word looked slightly different when opened in OOo and vice-versa. This was a major issue because the documents had to look precisely as they did in MS Office -- they all had to be modified. Also MS Office docs opened in word were set to A4 paper size for some reason and this office does not use that size -- every document had to be changed to the right format so it would print properly.
Some things I recommend doing if you are considering migrating to OpenOffice or any other office suite:
- Test it thoroughly. Have some "power-users" test it after you have done so. Try everything you can possibly think of that the users would try.
- Get the support of your management -- it will never be a success without that. You may have to "campaign" for OpenOffice and put together a proposal or presentation of sorts to get them comfortable with the suite.
- Do the roll out in a short time-frame so you won't have some people using the old suite and some on the new suite.
- Set the default document format as
Hopefully all this (and the other postings) helps sysadmins considering such a move. After all, the more organizations that convert, the more issues will be resolved and migrating (and using) to OpenOffice will be easier, thus even more organizations are likely to go for it.
At present, the company I work for is mostly open source on the desktops (and about half on the servers. all future servers will be Linux unless it is absolutely not possible). We use 7zip, PDFCreator, Thunderbird, GnuPG with WinPT, Firefox, Dia, and certainly a few others I can't think of right now so in a couple years, I think it is likely we will finally migrate to OpenOffice.
Mike
Thanks for the link. Interesting, but not relevant for me. Do people really try to do statistical analyses with Excel?
Ah yes, name calling. Care to discuss where the majority of "real work" is reflected? Science, Nature, etc? Or some of the "low-end" journals you refer to? Or (ick) conference proceedings? --Whatever-- It's rather useless to discuss this without discussing a particular field anyway. For the health sciences, the "hard" sciences, and for the applied sciences / engineering the standards, major journals, and locations of "important" work are totally different.
Well, I won't speak for "scientists", but for engineers we will have to disagree. I have rarely in 15 years of engineering consulting in the aerospace industry seen anyone use anything other than Excel for plots in reports. Well, other than a minority of the more academic folks at some of the defense agencies: DARPA, USAF, NASA, etc.
Huh? I never said we discouraged deployment. We do not deploy OO.o, but on the other hand, it's available to anyone who wants to use it. And yes, my whole point is that Excel is better than Calc for the tasks that we regularly perform. I don't know why that's such a repugnant idea for you. And, while you're dictating to me what's cost-effective for me, consider this: We can get an Office 2003 SME license (Small Business Edition, including Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, Publisher, and some other useless cruft) for $275 (CAN$), while buying Excel 2003 on its own is $280 (CAN$). So, how does it make sense for us to adopt a complete different office suite (I suppose it's OO.o you're advocating), train people on it, deal with the incompatibilities in file types as we exchange data back and forth with our customers, and separately license Excel to get crappy plots? And you're calling me silly?
I'm the CTO of a 4 person startup. If i could have my way we'd all run linux and use oo, but the fact of the matter is that when we communicate with the outside world, (particularly with our attorneys) we can't trust oowriter to properly emulate word. All internal documents are oo compatible however.
Naaah.
I posted an "Ask Slashdot" on deploying OpenOffice 2.0 to a corporate environment. About 40-50 desktops.
The thing I needed was for OOo to default save documents as MS Word (or MS Excel) since that's what that government agency has to produce (or PDF) to fit with the other agencies they share information with.
I got a range of answers .. mostly to "Well, you have to edit the .MSI file with ORCA", or "Well download and compile the source yourself.
I'm a geek, but am not a programmer and I don't have time to go through all that just to set a default. And setting it for ONE user requires "hands on" .. installing it globally on the workstation is damn near impossible, or so I've found. Even if you go to the all users and set the .XML file that way, it doesn't remember the setting.
It wouldn't be THAT hard to put a command line switch on the installer, or a checkbox if you're not installing it silently, or even a registry entry, to tell OOo to default to MS file formats.
Oh, and document compatibility is another reason .. I sent a state form we use (that's unfortunately a MS Word document, not a PDF form) to the OOo list, with a challenge to make it OOo format (as OOo totally jacked it up format wise) and never got anything worth using back...
As much as I hate to say, it's a Microsoft world out there, and if you want to unsurp the MS beast (which I'm ALL for), then you've got to play the game at LEAST as well as MS)..
= Grow a brain...
Well, a lot of people in scientific/medical commmunity might move to OO, but the main problem is lack of support for EndNote and/or ReferenceManager. Scientists and students working in biomedical and related fields usually have the draft version of their current paper(s) on their computer, so we are constantly changing the draft, figures, and bibliography. This means that we use Word processor (no problem with OO), we use PowerPoint (also no problem with OO), we definitely prefer to use Adobe CS for vector grafics and images (well, I can substitute for Gimp and Inkscape, somehow), we are running a lot of special software for such a things as routine DNA sequence analysis (Windows, Ma, some Linux versions) or FACS analysis (Mac versions available only). So, is there space for OpenOffice? - No!!! Because OpenOffice is NOT supported neither by EndNote nor by ReferenceManager! And before this will change, all biomedical scientific community will stick with M$O. During the last years I have contacted Thomson ResearchSoft several times asking about the Linux version - seems to be no way.
Faithful .doc import/export is the main thing I need as a translator. I get Word files and replace their contents with Finnish, English or German text. Happily, MS Word has been known to mangle documents, too, so I haven't yet been penalized for not paying the Microsoft tax: In the occasional cases when a document has its formatting messed up, the customers apparently just sigh and readjust, thinking that the translator doesn't know how to use Word properly.
You see, that's the great thing about most Microsoft's users: They have built in fault tolerance.
Name those 'certain functions' that prevent switching. C'mon. I dare you.
Still quiet, eh? Thought so.
Perhaps you meant the statistical functions in Excel which are broken (warning for PDF) and MS has refused to fix, going on quite a few years now. You can't be serious about Visual Basic macros. MS is phasing them out so that's not a reason to hang back on last decade's technology either.
Hands down I would use Office 2007.Why?Cos who ever who designed the UI,IMHO,is a mother f*cking genius,everything is well place,everything has purpose and I get to use more features that i never knew existed.OO acts like the older Office and that sort of feels to me,a bit restrictive to what i can do on office.Also,unless API's for Office are ported to OO,Bloomberg users will not jump to OO.
At one of my client's, we've used OOo for a few folks who only need access to basic spreadsheet software. I.e. to give them somewhere to type that will do math for them.
.xls as the default file format.
OOo fits the bill perfectly. It's compatible enough that the "normal" Excel functions and files will open and save fine. Version 2 of OOo has finally fixed up the worst parts of OOo v. 1 -- the multiuser hackery and the option to set
Will the entire office ever switch? Not for years and years. Some people actually do need to send and receive complex files out of the office for revisions.
Seriously, how many Slashdot readers are there? Plenty, I'd say. Let's all start saying "Closed Office" when we reference the best-known closed-source Office package, and when asked to clarify, select any one of the excellent and obvious answers to that question. Not Open Office, the other one. The one that you can't just fix yourself when it breaks ("Imagine of your car bonnet was welded shut, and you couldn't even pay a mechanic to fix the engine?"). The one that keeps you opening your wallet.
I have used OO, and I am / was a beta tester for office 2007. There is no comparison. While I am usually critical of Microsofts offerings, I have to say Office 2007 hits the nail on the head like no office has before. Please try it before you start preaching about the difficulties of switching users to the ribbon, as you will find that it is more than intuitive. And for many, whether they be pirates or just well off, the cost is irrelevant.
There's an improved version of Chart coming to OOo finally in the version 2.3, which should be released in September of this year. It should be good enough for most purposes it's currently not. It's been development for a long time, since the Chart module basically hasn't changed much since OOo 1.0.
Hopefully they'll revamp the equation editor at some point too. It has good potential, but clearly it's another module that hasn't been touched for a long, long time.
Anytime this subject comes up, I must mention Igor (www.wavemetrics.com). This small company has been building a great data-analysis program for 20 years or so, and I don't know any software that is better quality. Wavemetrics does not tolerate bugs: I once found a rare bug dealing with the import of a black/white interlaced tiff file. The bug crashed the program. I didn't know the cause, but I did have the tiff file that crashed my Igor. I mailed it to Wavemetrics and within 24 hours I had received a patched version that worked fine.
I can't recommend this program high enough. They don't do any marketing, it's all word of mouth (like I'm doing now).
Bart
...then you make a rule on your spam filter to deny any documents in the new format and post a message to sender saying somthing like : "This format is not allowed. Please save in either the ISO OpenDocument format or the old MS format".
--
Yes, you can do it... you just don't belive that you can... That is the reason why you loose.
I use OOo in an environment where I have to exchange lots of documents, spreadsheets and presentations with MS Office users.
In about 500 files with OOo 2.0, I have had one problem - a drawing that did not come out right.
The people I work with don't even notice that I'm using a different tool. Indeed, some of our customers would probably have a fit if the understood that I was building my presentations with a tool that I paid nothing for and for which I have no support.
Our school moved to OO.o a couple years ago at my urging once I saw that we were running one of the other teacher's copy of Office on fifteen computers. So we put OO.o on there and that worked without a problem and everyone has been happy.
But now, we're switching over to Google Docs for most of our word processing.
I mention that because the question was "it is time to consider OpenOffice." In business, it is certainly time. But for us at our school, it's past time and we're moving online. The services there are only getting better and I imagine that there will be a time very soon when people will wonder why anyone other than publishers would bother having a copy of office software on everyone's desk.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
We use it on quite a few machines at work (in addition to a properly licensed MS Outlook, as nothing is quite up there yet) and people accept it readily. It does what everyone needs, and for free - perfect!
Ironically, where I used to work - a charitable organisation struggling for money - nobody would accept OpenOffice. "No no, it's got to be the Microsoft one, that's standard". But then this kind of money-wasting went on with lots of things... part of the reason I left. They're busy being threatened with liquidation by the charity commission as we speak...
Yes! OOo can do anything M$ Office can do, it edit and create M$ formats, it can even do stuff like editing PDF documents! I would use OOo over M$ Office any day of the week
I didn't really say everything I said -Yogi Berra
...because I find OpenOffice to be better at recovering broken MSO documents than MSO typically is.
"Broken," by the way, wasn't referring to envirussed documents, but that holds true as well. (-:
Oh, yeah, & you get to make PDFs without having to add more software.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I don't believe any part of MS handing the specs over for either the format or .docx formats over to open source guys. They just got slammed for not providing docs asked for in 2002 by investigators.
I think at least one of the benefits they will get is the forced incompatibility of the new formats.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I have written a book with over 750 pages and some 150 illustrations. Initially I tried to type it in Word, but I gave up after page 45. Damn MS Word could not hold page number still no meter what. After page 50, Word2000 decided to count it "american way" - each page=100 page numbers and growing like mad. And illustrations were so alive... I could not "catch" them, they constantly played hide&seek with me.
Then I switched to OpenOffice 1.3. At the end I just pressed "convert to PDF", and send the file to press. They did not had any objections.
Anyway, my instituion uses some 100+ computers, all of them with OpenOffice 2.x They do have three MSOffices, but only for conversion of files when explicitly needed by customers.
Doing a good job is like spilling coffee on a dark suit, you feel warm all over, but nobody notices.
I *love* the text prediction system. It was one of the main motives for me to switch over to OO as I often had to write reports which contained complex technical terms and foreign names. OO starts picking these things up after about the 2nd occurrence which dramatically reduces typos you'd have to correct afterwards (I'm otherwise pretty good apart from strange bits of dyslexia where I type 'teh' a lot instead of 'the' - I wonder if AutoCorrect doesn't actually enforce that problem).
:-).
:-).
Most of the work I did for my former company had to put into Word with incredibly convoluted style automation macros. To me it looked more like the IT department was creating work for themselves as nothing wouldn't have been achievable by just telling people how styles work, but we had to live with it (and the sodding hassle it created when Word got it all mixed up), so I wrote the content first in OO, then pumped it into Word. Even with that extra step it was significantly faster than doing it in Word simply because of the debugging (and I didn't have to battle the template macros
Note that this is different from Autotext - I tend to zap most of the word list as it has an ugly habit of changing things you don't WANT to change. CaPiTaLiSaTiOn is another one - quite a few tech long words use it as component separator and that, of course, doesn't follow the rules MS wants you to follow so it had to go
And there's that other argument (which is why I suspect MS is rather desperate to keep it out of corporate desktops): Outlook, Word and Excel are for quite a few people 'the computer' - Windows is just a path for them to get to that icon on their desktop. If you get them used to OO there's a significantly lower barrier to eventually get them off Windows altogether..
Insert
Just use Latex and texshop (mac osx sorry) for docs or even text edit. For spread sheets use google sheet.
I installed neo office (openoffice on mac) on my mac and was not impressed, the documents did not look nice when converting from office and the UI is not that polished.
I never liked office, in 2001 we wrote our BSC thesis with it and we had all sorts of formatting issues. Back then I was pushing for corel or star office, but now MS office is still the best.
I have no formating issues and the collaboration / tracking changes features are very good. I could not find these features in neo office.
BTW I used latex to wright my MSc thesis and fxxx fxxk I had more stupid formating problems with latex than I had with word in 2001.
The short of it is they all suck and MS sucks the least. Latex is bettter if you know how to use it!!
Latex + google sheet / google docs
collaborate and track !!!
I disagree. Businesses operate in contexts, and the same object/product/service has a different overall presence when placed in its context. The original Napster was a devastating innovation that opened up the world of online songs to the mass market awareness.
...
Given that the RIAA *has* won several cases now, despite their subsequent silliness, means anyone *now* starting a pure clone of Classic Napster better have a legal trick up their sleeve.
There was a heady day of Microsoft - 95-2001. They delivered the famous series of OS's, established (however sneakily) the Blue E, and completely cemented the corporate world.
Then Microsoft effectively went into Semi-Limbo for 5 years. No new major OS. No new major browser update. Lots of problems hit public awareness.
Here comes 2007, with Microsoft's "Bet the Bank" coordinated suite. Vista, aka Windows '07, Office '07, and related items. And we get
Vista, starting to draw uncertain looks from DRM critics, and information freedom observers. Office completely annihilates the sacred Microsoft Guidelines that MS forced upon all vendors for a decade or more. I find both Word and Excel *completely unusable*. Vista looks "usable", but it just feels sneaky as hell. IT generates the kind unease normally seen in Faustian contracts. MS IE7 looks like the improvement that should have been released 4 years ago, and barely matches the status quo set by FireFox.
Things are different than 2001, the year I think Microsoft "jumped the shark". FireFox was successful first. People noticed. It's on the map. Given the jaw dropping re-work of the Office Interface, I think this *is* the chance Open Office needs. It just came out of Beta, and is now at the solid 2.1 mark.
Value is based on perception. Microsoft's Deadly Trilogy used to be Browser, Office, OS. In that order. I think there could be real value squeezing MS from the outside in. I just realized that my KillerApp is a thin client to a remote system, which might have a Linux version either ready/in the works.
My workplace can't be the only one that "just builds documents and makes phone calls" to do work. These kinds of businesses might actually be the first to survive without MS.
Open Office is already on our MultiUser server because when put to the test, Management didn't REALLY want to pay a $5000 license fee for all the user instances of Office.
I changed my Sig recently. I think I want to take my whack at building a Linux replacement for the MS monopoly. This is SlashDot's Mission, right? So bear with me on the NervousNewbie questions.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
At my previous job I tried it, the problem is all 15 desktops were OS X, and all users had MS Office v.X or 2004 already installed. The users were too lazy to even consider switching to OOo, plus there was no cost advantage, those licenses would last at least the life of each individual workstation (not a hell of a lot of pressure to upgrade from v.X to 2004 or higher when available).
The sad thing is that the year I tried to do this I participated in National Novel Writing Month for the second time, this time I did all my work from OOo in OS X. Except some minor learning issues with the way styles are defined and applied, my experience was overwhelmingly positive. Still, it was not enough to impress my users into even trying OOo.
If you want to see a book written and typeset in OOo, you can download mine here. It is licensed under Creative Commons, feel free to pass it around.
Now with NeoOffice we don't even have to keep X11 running, and eventually the main OOo branch will be offering a X11-free version for OS X.
One thing I know for sure: it's going to be one cold day in hell before I purchase another MSO:mac license for any of my personal macs. There is no reason for a home user to be shelling out for MSO:mac just to write letters and make spreadsheets when both OOo and NeoOffice are completely capable, easy to use and completely free.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
I've found that OOo Draw works really well for lite desktop publishing needs. If they added native table support, header & footer controls, better control over OOo Math OLE objects, and tweaked the user interface we could start to use it for real typesetting and layout work... Spin it off as the DTP application for the suite, we could call it "OpenOffice.org Style".
Sure, it's nice to tell a client that Some Company X is behind Commodity Office Software Y, but in all likelihood, are you really going to contact them directly and pay for it? Why would you, when you can get answers much more quickly by using Google, ExpertExchange, mailing lists, forums, books, etc. No, the problem is all of the 3rd-party applications that use MS Office functionality for document assembly, mailing, contact sychronization, you name it. Perhaps you could move some light-use departments (basic word processing requirements), but you'd be hardpressed to find a manager somewhere who doesn't have some sort of "mission critical" Excel macro that might not work in Star/Open Office.
body massage!
> I think I want to take my whack at building a Linux replacement for the MS monopoly. This is SlashDot's Mission, right?
....
I'm totally with you there.
The biggest challenge, I think, is that there is quite a bit of software out there that organizations depend on that totally ties together the whole MS stack and makes their operations easy. So it effectively ties them not only to Windows, but also to Office, SQL Server, Exchange, etc. Really sad.
Even sadder may be the fact that the open source community probably does not have many people who understand fully what this software does. I know I don't.
I think what MUST happen for World Domination is a pretty big effort to understand all these solutions, and get solutions that are just as featureful AND just as easy, and build them on top of Linux, OpenOffice, Postfix/opengroupware/whatever, Apache, PostgreSQL, etc.
I would argue that these solutions don't even need to be open source, they just need to exist on the open source stack. Certainly bonus points of they are open source.
Of course this will never work if we don't get a large number of people together (probably at least 100) to join in the fun. I know I would be in, but probably unqualified to lead it
Really, you can argue all day, but OOO is too bloated and slow to replace MS Office. Only hardcore geeks and cheap businesses will want to replace it. Ms Office is miles ahead in terms of speed and stability. As a proof, I've hacked MS Office 2003 to be totally portable and it opens in a second from USB drive!!! I also moved it to my Celeron 433MHZ with 128MB server running Windows 2000 and it opened in the same time. The whole thing is 58MB with grammar checker(though no VBA) and no installation is needed. I can't even imagine the horror of running OOo on the same machine.
Last time I installed OpenOffice it took ages and the directory was 200MB! And whilst running my laptop's hardrive was getting raped(the sound was so loud I fought it would crash). And it took 45 seconds to launch Writer or Calc, even though I disabled Java, Memory objects and Python.
Instead of fixing the existing problems, the OOo team continues to add more useless functions such as DB program, Project alternative. Fix the existing apps, make them smaller and portable. The OOo should only have Writer, Calc and Impress. After these are fixed and run smooth can there be logical argument for OOo of replacing MS office.
And anyone who already legally has MS Office 2003 has to be crazy to replace it with OOo. Excel, Word and Powerpoint are much better than the OOo alternatives. In fact, I don't see any reason to upgrade to MS office 2007. The horror stories that are told here on Slashdot are myths, of course if you use Word to layout a book it's going to crash, there is a program for that and it's called Indesign.
So the only hope for a free opensource office suite is Koffice since its really light and perfect for small/medium businesses and home users. But unfortunately they do not plan to convert it to Windows.
"Since Vista sucks, XP users will all move to Ubuntu. Since Office-2007 sucks, Office users will all move to OpenOffice." And the non-sense goes on and on: "msft missed a release cycle!" or "msft stopped supporting x product!"
First, lets not overlook the obvious: it if far easier for XP and Office user to just stay with what they have. Why do they have to change to F/OSS, even if msft's latest upgrades suck?
And so what if msft stops support? I never use msft "support" anyway. I still use windows 2000, and office 2000, they both work fine. A lot of people even use older stuff.
So please stop jumping to the absurd conclusion that a msft upgrade glitch will for everybody to F/OSS - it doesn't.
To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.
It varies a bit by field. In mine, proceedings are useful to reveal the newest, most bleeding edge work. Many papers are pretty poor. With a bit more work (both real work and polish), these usually go on to be published in a discipline-specific journal with a high impact factor. More "notable" papers do go on to Science/Nature. Poorer or less important papers end up in poorer, less read, and/or less cited journals.
And, of course, those at many universities. Journals are the playground of academics. Those that get read/cited the most have a greater proportion of writers and reviewers in the academics. It is comforting that these people do seem to disseminate information & journals are THE way to do this. Some corporations/contractors also occasionally publish, but the incentives (grant money/knowledge sharing/pride/prestige) aren't there to the same extent.. There are often competing interests (IP/trade secrets) & other outlets (patents/technical reports/press releases/actual products). This is all nasty generalization, I know. And it may be hubris to describe only "archival" journals as "real publishing." But, I do think the trend that those who are more serious about publishing use more serious tools is real.
You said that, since OO.o Calc was not as good as Excel, the complete OO.o suite was a non-starter.
Pricing never made sense to me! However, the Office you linked to is OEM & must be purchased with a system. The MSRP of a version of Excel with the same purchase constraints (upgrade/full, OEM/stand-alone, volume/academic/retail) is less than the price of the suite.
If you must purchase from this vendor & are purchasing equipment to satisfy OEM requirements, I guess it doesn't. If you can't purchase OEM, are able to go to other vendors and/or get volume licensing, it still makes sense for you to buy only what you need.
I'm advocating the use of whatever individual products are best at getting the job done for the best price. My science/engineering org uses mostly Gnumeric, MS Word (which is easier to use with commenting/change tracking for our users) and/or LaTeX, and Origin/Grace. Your org may have some other set of applications that best fulfill your needs for the lowest cost.
Sun and Novell both uses StarOffice/OpenOffice exclusively. The licenses or Office haven't been available for years (you can buy it through the company but you can guess how well that $500 order goes over when nobody else is using it and you still can't open all the ODT files sent by everybody else). Novell used it in the 1.x days even and it is just the standard now. Macros are supported to an extent but I don't know any people who actually use them even though they're in 2.x. Honestly, Microsoft Office is nothing special and they're scared people will find out. I didn't even use anything beisdes OO.o through college (1.0 back then) and my entire university was using it in all of the computer labs. Students didn't even notice and always loved the Export-to-PDF feature (and would ask how they could get it in Microsoft Office, which was a great time to tell them they could get OO.o for free on their box in about 100 MB).
It's not about the Office application people are using. It is about the format they save their documents in.
.doc or .xls) and customers should demand this feature. Of course this is a drawback for businss, since there would be no more vendor lock in on office documents. I don't understand why customers don't see this, maybe they deserve the update costs of ~200 dollars per worstation...
As an example I don't care what programm you are using to record your music. All I care about is that I can play and edit the music on my system with my programs. It's best practise to save music in a open an well documented format so that everyone can play it back (r.g. ogg). Using an open format makes it possible to play back the music in ten or twenty years.
The same thing should be taken into consideration while saving office documents (text, spreadshets, presentation..). There seems to be some efforts by Microsoft to support an open document standard. It's a step in the right direction (better than
I can't speak for equivalents in AIAAJ, but for materials, look at Acta Materialia. This is a higher profile journal that is even more relevant to your field than Nature/Science. You'll see few Excel charts there.
One good tool for doing large scale data analysis is ROOT which has been developed at CERN. ROOT contains facilities for storing, analyzing and visualizing very large data sets fairly quickly. Online User's Guide contains a nice overview of the ROOT system.
Was it time for OO the last time Slashdot asked this question and more importantly, will it be the next time Slashdot asks. OO is getting better all the time but adoption needs to be driven by a sales force that gets out there and lets Enterprise customers know that it exists. Is anyone getting paid to do this right now? With Office 12 coming out soon, OO has a short window to take advantage of the upgrade uncertainty but to succeed, they would have to put more sales people on the ground (or evangelists) than MS has going out to the bug enterprises.
Haven't you read "Rodney has four grandfathers"?
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
What is the difference? Well for one thing X11. When someone downloads an OSS app such as VLC or ffmpeg they get a DMG (disk Image) file they click on and a window comes up where they simply drag the icon to their hard drive to install. When they next want to use the app there is an icon they click on. Click on the icon and the app opens and the normal menu items are there where they are used to them. File, Edit, View. The user needs to download no extra files and needs to do no command line commands in the terminal etc.
It simply works and the user needs no instructions either to install or use.
Compare that to open office. They download the file the same as they are used to. Get a file they have no idea what to do with. Finally go back to the site and are told they must install an X server app but one is available called X11. Read thru pages of documentation and find that their are several versions of X11 they can install but none of them are at all easy.
Try to find that 3rd disk that came with the OS, find out that they have lost it because they have never opened it because everything else was installed when they bought the computer or had some friend that installed it for them. They call the computer store and are told by some salesperson that yea we can't sell you just a single disk we need to sell you the complete OS in a newer version.
Then they find out by searching online that all the X11 servers are free downloads and they can get them for free but which one to use?
Fink, Darwin ports apples own X server? They find that the file size is huge and comes with a large list of dependences. They have of course never heard of any of these things and so by default try to install everything. Many of these people are on dial up connections. So hours or days later they are left with a bunch of stuff that rival MS office in size and are even more complex. Now they go back and install the open office. It installs like nothing the user has ever seen. And installs it in a place they never knew existed.
Finally they have it installed and open it. Ok where do I open a new document? Go to file? Where is it on this? It isn't at the upper left corner where it is supposed to be. Its attached to the window? What's it doing there? Drag and drop a document on the icon to open it, it won't open. I must have messed up something. Well I guess MS office might be worth the money if it avoids all of this stuff and how do I get rid of fink and X11 and especially open office? If they all work like this I don't want to ever accidentally use any Open Source Software ever again.
I look at any X11 app as a testament to and complete proof that the developers are completely incompetent. I have had about 10 people so far that have tried to install and use Open office. All of them have so far decided to never use any OSS ever again and it's hard to get them to even try any workable OSS apps after trying out an x11 app. I can't say I blame them a bit.
If you want to make a Mac app make a Mac app. If you cant make a Mac app then say so and ask for a real programer to help make one. Don't make a unworkable piece of crap that 1 user in 200 might be able to get running after a fashion and claim oh! It will work on Mac too. All you are doing is making sure that users will go well out of their way to make sure that they will never use any OSS ever again. Its hard to make any Microsoft product look good but when you come up with a X11 app for OSX you are actually driving people towards buying Microsoft and away from Open Source
I gave some folks a document that I maintain in OpenOffice. I told them they would need to get a copy for free in order to make any edits to it. Now they download it at customer sites on systems without any Office suites, so they can work on docs and speradsheets. Enough little things like this, and you start getting wider, and wider adoption.
Another client of mine, I have entirely on Linux workstations for all their employees (he's scared of Windows, since he does a lot if HIPPA related stuff). They exclusively use OpenOffice.
I dont use MS Office anymore in work or at home OOo is great i think the only draw back i can fin (bar loading times) is that if you "Draw" in OOo then when you open it in MS Office it doesnt display
Open Office offers all of the functionality that the vast majority of users need. I think that Microsoft knows that they have serious competition just around the corner and that is why they want to see Office users become trained and used to their new (patented) "Ribbon" interface. I am not saying that office is not very good software, it is and has always been very good. However, inevitably all of the high priced software with the every couple year upgrade cycle with limited new features will end up being made less and less relevant by the free or cheaper alternatives. I just can not see how programs like Office can really maintain their market share for the long term without relying on ininformed users indefinitely.
I have OOO on our four laptops at home, which don't have Windows loaded on them.
.doc, .ppt and .xls. But it's one of the few software packages I use on Linux that I positively dislike. I'd ditch it in a second if there something less user-hostile were available.
While the user experience on Word and PowerPoint are inconsistent, baroque and infuriating, OOO has managed to be even more opaque, arbitrarily complicated and unintuitive. No small achievement, that.
I use it only because of the compatibility it provides with
That's the fundamental problem with "compatibility packages." There's file-format compatibility, and there's similarity of user experience. The first is essential to interoperability, and I suppose the other is regarded as necessary to keep a lid on training and cutover costs. But user experience similarity is only a good thing if the original software had a decent UE to begin with.
To further exacerbate my feelings of powerless in this whole matter, if there were a Visio clone out there with the same annoying UE problems, I'd hold my nose and use that too.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
Based also on Large FLOSS Study Gets the Real Facts (more specificaly Economic impact of FLOSS on innovation and competitivness of EU ICT sector, page 102:
Q: Can you be as productive in OpenOffice as MS Office?
A: YES - more than 20%, YES but some problems - almost 60%, NO - under 10%)
I can say YES.
hany
This is SlashDot's Mission, right?
I wasn't aware that SlashDot had a single 'mission.'
I've viewed the Slashdot site as a place where there can sometimes be interesting tech discussions, etc.
'Interesting' almost entirely eliminates anything Microsoft has been doing recently. But that simply excludes Microsoft from interesting discussions. Being Anti-Microsoft is tired and boring. Being post-Microsoft means not looking back much.
I have written over 150,000 words in OpenOffice Writer on both Windows and Linux. The windows port has not crashed in years. It's more than stable enough for production work. Both the Oasis file format and the old writer formats are zip compressed XML, which allowed me to save all 1,500 versions of my book from the day I started on it--to its revisions. An entire 100,000 word book weighs only 242KB whereas the Microsoft word version is 697KB. My pet peeves are: I hate quickstarters, and I want the quickstarter in OpenOffice removed from the project. The program starting(desktop) icons are poor glyphs. The questions is: Now that Sun is blowing MS, how do we keep Sun from sabotaging OpenOffice? http://www.brendamake.com/numbers/
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
When I was in high school, my math teacher told us all to get TI-83's because he wouldn't be able to help us perform certain functions on our calculators if we had a different one.
I got a TI-86 for programming purposes and, as it turned out, our teacher didn't know how to use a TI-83 either so everybody turned to me for help. I didn't own a TI-83 so I couldn't help them, so it ended up I was the only one able to do certain problems in the class:P
Open Office versus MS Office is similar. A lot more people out there use MS Office (myself included) versus Open Office. When my friends ask me a question over the phone about Excel, I can guide them through the steps without even looking at their or my own computer. If they were to use Open Office I would tell them I had no idea how to use it.
One of the benefits of a semi-monopoly over a certain software area. Community support systems.
No, not a chance, Word 2007 is a reason NOT to run openoffice.
Imho word is piece of shit and openoffice tries very hard to be exactly the same, which can only result in one thing: Shit, sligthly less shit imho but still shit.
Word 2007 on the other hand have had a major UI clean up and looks like something which might be usable, so by trying so hard to be just like word instead of better than word openoffice loses.
I hate this "let's make it like windows/word" crap, Windows UI isn't the greatest, perfect and flawless, word UI definitly isn't. So stop copying it and come up with something better instead.
KDE 2 also looked and worked like shit because it was way to much of a Windows copy, still imho.
So what word processors do I like then? Had a look at the iWork Pages videos? It looks sweet, and comes with a non-bloated UI. Personally I use LaTeX thought, and I guess the best alternative is to just make the information and have an applications which knows how good text should look do the rest.
My biggest fan asks me:
So in other words, OpenOffice's chart making is no better than Excel's.
No. A quick trial of OO Calc shows that it's much better, even though I don't know how to use it. It's been a while since I've done anything with OO Calc because I like gnumeric better. Rather than claim OO is better I just left them as both nebulously annoying because Calc tries to hard to be Excel. A quick trial shows how Calc 2 is better than the recent but not 2007 copy of Office I tried yesterday:
I would not be ashamed to give an OO graph to someone informally and could, with a little effort, make it into something that could be published.
Just the same, if the two were identical and I had no other choice, I'd use Calc. Can you tell me why you would spend $400 for something you could have for free, especially when the free thing is actually easier to use?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#Securi ty
a cy/browse_thread/thread/86ffeb1d7a68f0f9/177461595 ad705cf?lnk=st&q=open+office+macro+security&rnum=1 #177461595ad705cff fice/browse_thread/thread/c57bccbf0eb40efc/be17e0c cb5a3b5ca?lnk=st&q=open+office+macro+security&rnum =2#be17e0ccb5a3b5ca
e v&msgNo=17386e v&msgNo=14458
http://groups.google.fr/group/comp.os.linux.advoc
http://groups.google.fr/group/mailing.comp.open-o
http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=d
http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=d
I don't understand all of the excitement about OOo, KOffice is coming along much faster, less bloated, more comprehensive, and is easier to use.
That is actually common practice. Take a look at Monster, HotJobs, or even Dice. Those recruiting firms typically have some automated tool that reads .doc files and scans for keywords. Since they never actually see your document, they don't care to know that .pdf is best for non-editable files (preserves the appearance), or that .odt is easier and better for automated tools, because they never accept anything but .doc.
;-)
Yes, that does make them incompetent idiots. But all you have to do is look at most of the people that they select and you'd know that.
You were doing well until halfway through and you entered the realm of nonsense and scare mongering.
Office 2007's UI is completly different yet I think it is far better than Office 2003 (and OpenOffice.) Sure the UI is completly different but after a few hours of using it I was quite confident and started discovering things in Word which I never knew existed. The few (me and two/three others) that I know who have tried it have completly the same feelings which are, weird and difficult at first but soon easy to use and adds power to your use of word/excel/powerpoint. Thats with technically literate, for most people training will be required. Now its the time for companies who don't want to stay in the MS rat race or can't afford to upgrade, to move over to Open Office. I'm quite pro Office 2007 but I can see how many of the features of it would be unnecessary for big business (I think the newer versions of excel and word would be an asset to small businesses.) My main reasons for not using OpenOffice (pre Office 2007) were bloat (took much longer to load) and the UI looks like something from ten years ago, its a good product for business's and the free price tag has to be alluring espeacially now businesses would have to pay a pretty penny for training as well.
Your opinion on Vista is FUD, Vista for most pruposes is a glorrified version of XP. Sure the network stack has been rewritten and I found my online games working much better but, at the same time setting it up for my university's wifi network was much more hassle. Sure it will have direct x 10 but how many companies will need that? Sure its forced most vendors to create x64 drivers but that effects the consumer market rather than business. The fact I can't install drivers it doesn't like annoys the hell out of me. As for the DRM, that thing that is only turned on when the media requests it? I'm not worried since I won't touch DRM media.
There are many reasons to choose Linux or OpenOffice.Org just as there are many people like me who like the Microsoft range (If I was a business manager running a office that made phone calls and used basic office apps I'd probably have the machines running Ubunutu instead of Windows.) I like Open source because its fored MS to bring out new improved and worthwhile applications. Argue real points don't spread FUD
I've had the oppornutity to migrate a company of size one hundred employees to OpenOffice. They are indeed opening MS Office documents with OpenOffice and so far they haven't had any issues as such. Initially they had some problems with file formats. But now they've learned the workarounds. More than anything else the company are freed from endless licensing wrath.
Sudheer Satyanarayana
www.techchorus.net
It's Visual Thought, freeware / abandonware from Confluent. (they stopped selling it in 2002) IMHO, it's excellent (I've tried dia, and agree with you). It does everything you asked for and a few things you didn't.
Learn more about it here
The bad news is that it needs to be ported to Linux, the Windows version is a major reason why I run Windows in VMware Server on this box, I have yet to successfully install it on Linux, it blows immediately as soon as one starts the install script with the following error message:
If you want to try it out - warning... grab the VT14.zip instead of the separate tar.gz files, unzip them and you'll get all the downloadable tar.gz files in working form. (in the separate files, hpux blows out with a CRC / length errors on untarring)
Tech Public Policy stuff
error message...
Tech Public Policy stuff
I operate similarly to you - using firefox, openoffice and some Java applications on both platforms. But Visio is a gap unless you are prepared to upgrade to the latest version and exchange via exporting to svg which I understand works. You current can't save to Visio format directly, and may never?
I use Visio on wine, works but cludgy.
I know that Visio is not stricly MSO but pretty close.
Playing the 'FUD' card means you believe I am making up falsehoods in attempts to discredit Vista. This is different from using vivid language to describe existing breaks in features.
... Vista looks "usable", but it just feels sneaky as hell. It generates the kind unease normally seen in Faustian contracts. "
... and then surprises occur. The Denizen from Below is not invincible; he only oversells his side of deals. I equate this to the Quarter One surge of pre-Vista promotion, in which all of the positives are heavily promoted, and the downsides are downplayed.
... but, at the same time setting it up for my university's wifi network was much more hassle. Sure its forced most vendors to create x64 drivers but that effects the consumer market rather than business. The fact I can't install drivers it doesn't like annoys the hell out of me. As for the DRM, that thing that is only turned on when the media requests it? I'm not worried since I won't touch DRM media."
My words were:
"Vista, starting to draw uncertain looks from DRM critics, and information freedom observers.
The Germanic Faust tradition follows the theme of "Look how easy and wonderful this is!"
You wrote in part:
--- Except that it is forcing *business vendors* to re-write drivers, many of whom have not had time to do so! Therefore, when a business's killer apps stop working... it most certainly affects business. As for the DRM, you simply said you would be opting out of DRM media... which means you agree that those features are present.
The fact that it's free means it will cost less, but it doesn't mean it will work better. Do you understand this? And you "showed" absolutely anything other than your preference for OO Calc, however, that is your opinion and personal preference.
Wow Bungi, you are something dense. I'm not sure if it's because you are stupid or just a fanboy. Let me summarize what I've told you.
That's three ways that Open Office Calc is better, only one of which is related to personal taste though most people would share that taste because I never see anyone present the defaults from Excel. I also compared Excel to another program, gnumeric, which I'm almost equally familiar with but like better. You can't name one useful feature Excel has that any other spreadsheet does not. Yet still you try to pin me into some kind of free software Zealot hole, while declaring M$ Excel the best spreadsheet.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
No, you misunderstood. This is just copy/pasting directly from the clipboard to a sheet.
for the past year or so, everytime one of our salemen's outlook does something retarted, I replace it with thunderbird, and install openoffice. We are a large format digital printing company and occasionally we have people sending us their images as an office doc. Not really that big of a deal to print to a pdf in M$ office, but it's much easier for our technically disinclined salemen to click on export. I have actually installed 2007 on my computer to play, and had the salesmen and our boss come give it a try, and let them make their own decision, all around they wanted openoffice instead.