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Is it Time for Open Office?

Posted by Cliff on from the opportunity-for-adoption dept.

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?"

5 of 449 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Of course.... by Foofoobar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  2. Adequate but not great by koreth · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I put OOO on my girlfriend's Windows laptop (replacing a pirated copy of MS Office) and it's been a mixed bag for her. Writer works fine for most of what she needs to do. Impress is okay but not great -- when she looks at other people's PowerPoint presentations, they are usually at least legible, but most often the formatting is messed up in some way or another. But Calc is a source of frustration. Last night she wanted to make a simple X-Y graph and it took us a solid 15 minutes of clicking around different dialog boxes to get what she wanted -- and even then I had to modify the spreadsheet to get it to work (it doesn't really like the Y axis values to be in the column before the X axis values, for example.) The default formatting was lousy; one of the columns was nothing but whole numbers yet Calc decided to put in grid lines for fractional values and display the numbers with three trailing decimal places. And so forth. All eventually fixable -- we got the graph -- but not fun.

    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.

  3. Openoffice should learn from Mozilla by jkloosterman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Look at it this way by Arceliar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:Of course.... by BrokenHalo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.