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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?"
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.
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.
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.
80% of scripts run fine but some scripting doesn't run... This is a known issue. And as most people only use 10% of the features anyway, most people will never have a problem with this. Microsoft has admitted that 90% of people don't use more than 10% of the functionality within Office anyway. So literally, since Open Office isn't the dominant player, they don't have to reach for that last 10%. They just have to duplicate the vast majority of functions that people use every day... and they do.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
You need that experience huh? Well funny thing is, I installed Kubuntu (the KDE version of Ubuntu) with Open Office on my 65 year old moms machine. She never noticed the difference between Microsoft Word and Open Office Word. And guess how many phone calls I get to help her work on her novel? Zero. This is comparison to the weekly trouble shooting I did before.
I know that you are trying to troll but honestly you are giving me a great chance to show how easy Open Office is. It doesn't take a developer to install or know about it or maintain it... only an open mind who takes the time to try it out and see for themselves. That how Firefox happened. People tried it and it just worked. Same thing with Open Office. It just works.
Maybe thats why Microsoft is so panicky.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
True, but guessing which 10% of the code doesnt need to be implemented is a joke. Either it's all right, or it fails miserably.
Then again, is a CPA's job for debugging an interface that isnt even properly implemented, or is it to be a certified public accountant (that processes fincial data)?
If I have licenses for 20 machines for Office 2000 and my Excel apps run fine, and they don't run on Open Office, do you think I'll switch?
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
Let us read carefully....
"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?"
Notice the aim is looking at business, not your anecdotal stories about your fictional grandmother (I dont know if she exists, nor do I care). I care about facts, and this story aims at business usage of OO vs MS Office.
Right now, in terms of plain old document usage, OO is equally as good as MSO. In terms of scripting compatibility, OO is lagging far behind. If any one section does not work for a business, why would they "switch" and then deal with problems they did not have before?
And last I respond to my answer by arguing if MS ever forces stringent licenses of Office, OO would grow dramatically, and not before.
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.
Deleted
i agree completely with the toad.
i created my resume in MS Office (2k iirc)
when i opened it in OO there were slight formatting errors.
(bullets were all off line from eachother, tab 'deadspace' was also incorrectly presented)
so, of course, i corrected them in OO and saved it.
because im meticulous i opened it in MS Office (since no doubt thats what it would be opened with by the potential employer). to my surprise it was jacked up way more in MS Office after saving it in OO than it was simply opening it in OO.
had i not checked it first, i would have never gotten a job based on the poor initial presentation alone.
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.
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.
If that's the case, then Office 2007 will be rejected for similar reasons.
Actually, I have introduced OO.o to many users who wanted to create PDFs from their word documents. Rather than install any of the free PDF makers out there, I showed them that they could save as PDF using OO.o. Many users just kept using it for more than just that utility purpose.
On an aside, I find that it's an exceptionally easy way to ease the use of OO.o into the workplace. It simply works well enough for most people.
... 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.
You'd be surprised at how many business don't use any of the scripting in MS Office. I'd think that those companies might be interested in saving a few hundred grand.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Why would you send your resume as a Word doc instead of a pdf? Show off your skills and knowledge of portable formats by saving the doc as a pdf, then send it. Then you know exactly how it's going to look to your potential employer.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Not really, I do consulting on the side and see many types of setups. Ive seen 4 person law firms that use extensive billing VBA forms set up within Excel and Word, and then large factory setups with the head accountant with a weird setup of many interconnecting tools. Some businesses also didnt bother at all with licensing (they copied a school version, or downloaded it off of some website torrent).
From my experience, many businesses could get away with running OO, unless they deal regularly with other companies (thats most). Then incompatibilities will rear their ugly heads. And guess who gets the blame? The one who suggested it (me).
Because asshat HR departments require Word format to the rational exclusion of all other formats. I've offered sending to PDF several times trying to appeal to the unreliability of word version X being able to properly render word version y in various cases. Could be partly the HR employee familiarity, and it could be tools that know how to scan word docs (though scanning an OO.o writer document is infinitely more easy, being, basically, zipped plain text -- can't speak one way or the other about pdf files, but the spec is open enough, so I hear).
Exactly - it seems that the quickest way for a computer support shop to go out of business, is to install Linux desktops. Why? Because there is almost NO maintenance business for Linux. Nevertheless, I still install Linux for everyone I can convince to try it and I get 100% acceptance from those that do - not one asked me for a roll-back to Windows. Some have gone on and bought a couple of Apple Macs though. Interestingly, I get more support calls from Mac users than from Linux users. The reason seems to be that the much touted Apple task launcher finder thingy, is much more difficult to use than KDE menus and my solution to the problem is to create a bunch of desktop icons to often used programs. Very simple problem, with a simple solution, but it shows what kind of simple issues stump ordinary mortals. These users are NOT geeks and never will be and don't need to be. The computer is just a glorified typewriter to them. The other interesting thing, is that these Linux and Apple users end up giving me high quality referrals to businesses for big and complex support problems, that stumped other support people. So, I get better quality and better paying work, simply by installing a handful of Linux desktops here and there.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
My biggest beef with OpenOffice is the FUD box I get whenever I try to save a file in .doc format.
.doc files and I probably shouldn't switch to it.
If your average user saw this screen, what conclusion would they draw?
Heck, I work in programming, and the conclusion I drew after I started to read this dialog is that OO.org doesn't work well with
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Why would you send your resume as a Word doc instead of a pdf?
Might be because that is what the job posting says to do. If I want to work for some company about the last thing I'd want to do is show them right up front that I can't follow simple instructions.
Then you know exactly how it's going to look to your potential employer.
You've hit on a jangly nerve which is typically overlooked by Microsoft fanboys and shills. You can NEVER count on a Word doc showing up the way it's supposed to on someone else's computer, even when running the same version of the program. It isn't even that uncommon for the file not to open up at all.
So: If the formatting is important, you should make sure it's there (i.e. use pdf or maybe ps). If it's not important, you can use any text or html editor. Either way, it is unnecessary to use Word.
Well, it really depends on what you're doing, doesn't it? If you're working with a couple dozen measurements (or even a few hundred) in a nice domain like time or temperature, it takes you a trivial amount of time to do this in Excel.
Anyone trying perform data analysis on anything more than a few thousand data points in *any* spreadsheet deserves what they get. It's all about using the right tool for the job.
To the extent that it matters (and I'm nicely employed now) it is/was the general IT market in the Houston, TX area. Companies and/or headhunter agencies ... all wanted *.doc exclusively. Some of the online job post boards tended to prefer *.doc as well. Thankfully its been over a year since I've had to bother -- hopefully things are improving.
I get your point, but it is there for a reason.
If you save in that format, some of your formatting information will be lost, because OO supports some formatting elements that cannot be specified in the .DOC format. Whether or not that bears consequences depends on the formatting features used in the document.
If you save a photoshop project in .JPG, you will lose metadata. It would be appropriate to warn the user "Hey! If you only save your work in this format, you will lose some of your data/metadata."
This is a far less extreme situation, but I can certainly understand why it bears mentioning.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
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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.
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.
That is not a FUD box that is an info-box... Since MS Office formats are closed and have been reverse engineered you must tell the user that something may be lost when (s)he usese MS formats. I have seen similar messages from many different office suites including MS Office (when I've tried to save in an older MS Office format).
...and btw. you may choose to ignore the warning in the future.