Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Parent is very wrong. I'm one of a couple of devs in my office using Ubuntu as my desktop. I use Open Office and can open all docs that people send to me: Powerpoint, Excel, Word docs. They all work fine. Plus I can export as PDF's and a variety of other formats. The only time I have run into a problem is when people are saving in a very old format like Word97. But then, even Microsoft Office users have the same problem and do the same thing I do... ask the user to resend in a more recent format.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
I'll call your anecdote with one of my own.
At work we have several word-based forms that are filled out and passed around via email. Open Office corrupts these forms. They are unusable by Word 2003 after being modified and saved by OOo.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
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.
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.
Deleted
there's an entire class of fallacies dedicated to the flaws in your post.
Person A is a Developer using Linux.
Person A can use OpenOffice.
it does not follow that you must be a linux using developer to be able to use OpenOffice.
Incidentally, to add one more anecdote to the pile - I'm right this minute using MS Word 2003 to look at a document created by someone else using MS Word. For them it looks fine, for me, it's horribly wrong - in OpenOffice it also looks horribly wrong, but equally as horribly wrong as Word 2003, but once I've managed to correct the wrongness (people that use a word processor as a page layout tool need to be stabbed repeatedly until they stop it), I'll at least be able to export it to PDF from OpenOffice writer.
Advanced users are users too!
I have a simular issue when cloning a hardrive that was failing. I had to reactivate office for some reason. It wasn't the phone call that anoyed me, it was the having to dig up the specific cd andlicense key for that comuter then call, waid thru the auto system to get a love person then be tranfered to times to a person who decided to place me on hold while they finished a conversation with someone else in the room. The hold button didn't mute their end, I heard everything and part of it was asking someone else if they thought i was using the software on too many computers. Evidently they have some ways of checking.
In all, it took longer to activate office again then it did to clone the drive and replace it. This may be a one time issue but i pass it off onto someone else when it comes up again. And also, the strange thing is that office doesn't need reactivated on every clone. sometimes windows needs activated and sometimes other MS software. Sometimes nothing needs activated. There doesn't seem to be to much of a pattern to it.
Give this a try.....
Evolution for win32
we use it at work (I know using a early beta in an office YIKES! all our vertical apps we paid huge $$$ for are early alpha quality) and are quite happy with it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
We have a Pango renderer in the development (2.5.x, will become 2.6.x) version, if you know Hebrew please help us test it out! http://www.abisource.com/ and http://bugzilla.abisource.com/
Thanks so much!
I recognize people by their sigs. Is that a bad thing?
Personally, I'd prefer if they'd figure out which features don't save well in .DOC (or whatever) and only complain when those features are being used in the file that's being saved.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
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.