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?"

Comments

Try opening Office 2007

[wild_quinine]

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.

Re:Of course....

[Foofoobar]

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.

A Thousand Times, No!

[eklitzke]

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.

Re:Of course....

[andy314159pi]

I'm confused. Did they even make computers 65 years ago??

Adequate but not great

[koreth]

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.

Openoffice should learn from Mozilla

[jkloosterman]

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.

Excel's crap for scientific data

[Colin Smith]

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.

Look at it this way

[Arceliar]

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.

Re:Of course....

[BrokenHalo]

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.

is support really an issue?

[darkuncle]

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 ...