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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?"
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
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.
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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
> 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.
It depends on how you relate to those dorks. We use (small company - 20 users) only OOO. We exchange documents internally and it works fine (since everybody is on OOO). With other guys (you rerfer to them as dorks) we do not exchange documents. All we send are PDF documents like offers, letters, manuals and other types of documents that we do not want them and don't expect to edit.
Now for dorks sending us MSO documents - they don't. Any interaction with clients that supply some kind of data is via web forms and their portal. So we do not need to recive MSO documents from our clients.
We do exchange documents with parties we pay for service - we pay them. So we tell them to send their stuff in format we can read.
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.
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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Yeah, yeah, whatever. Most people don't know how to use Microsoft Office properly. It's an app that encourages bad usage, like using a plethora of different fonts and font sizes instead of simple and reconfigurable styles. OpenOffice.org is slightly, but not much, better in that respect.
I'm confused. Did they even make computers 65 years ago??
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.
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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Geez - didn't you see the sarcasm when the gp poster said it wasn't compatible because it lacked BLOAT?
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.
To me this is one thing that makes Office 2007 great. With Word all the tools are right there easy to see in front of me. I didn't use a lot of stuff in previous versions because I never took the time to go digging for them. My fault, yes, but Office 2007 has removed my need to dig and makes it easy for me to access tools that I'm now finding to be pretty useful.
I love my sig.
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!
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
Well, I do use Open Office in the workplace for about 60 users. They're factory users using terminals connecting to MS server 2003 terminal servers. Installing OOo was the cheapest way for the supervisors who needed to modify a couple of excel and word docs to legally do so. We had one file that wouldn't print correctly, so we installed excel viewer so the user could print that file. Other than that it's worked pretty well. The only app that gives us problems is acrobat reader, and that's always on one user's account. People working in the offices still have MS office installed, and that's not likely to change anytime soon.
BTW, I have many users still using Lotus 123 because of macros. I've given up trying to get people to convert to one app.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Because asshat HR departments require Word format to the rational exclusion of all other formats.
What kind of places do you send your resume to? We always ask for PDFs and when I was last looking at permanent jobs so did most of the places I looked at. The only really good reason I know of to send a Word doc is if it is a security post working someplace full of incompetent people, then you can put a web bug in it and call them when they look at your resume and say, "so I noticed you're looking at my resume..." :)
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
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
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.
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