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Open Office - What's the Downside?
cclangi asks: "I'm a current Microsoft Office user, and I run a small business as a consultant (mining). I've read about Open Office and all the good things about it, but what about the downside? As a small business owner and semi-literate in things computer-ese (as a user, not as a developer or administrator), what support limitations are there for Open Office. I'm particularly interested in/concerned with compatibility of software for reports, spreadsheets and database apps that I might need to send to/receive from clients. As I've said, I've read the good stuff, and 'how easy it is', but what are things I need to be aware of before considering switching completely to Open Office? Comments and experiences would be welcomed." A couple of months ago, OpenOffice advocates had space to sound of on the reasons to switch to OpenOffice. Now, it only seems fair to give the dissenters a place to voice their own reasons. What are the reasons keeping you away from OpenOffice and on your current office suite?
It's Microsoft Office compatability isn't perfect, and the other companies I work with send documents created with MS Office.
Microsoft macro support in Open office is far from optimal. However, there are a whole slew of Open Office-centric macros to choose from which could meet your needs.
Then run away now. Both the X11 and the "Aquafied" version totally stink. Terrible usability, horribly slow... unfortunately, there's no good Office alternative for Macintosh right now.
Comment of the year
I for one, had issues with what seemed to be glacially slow startup times. The later revisions seemed to have addressed quite a few of these issues and even the NeoOffice port has gotten to a decent, but still not really acceptable, startup speed.
"An Ye Harm None, Do What Ye Will" Wicca Rede
First, and probably foremost, is simply rendering differences between Writer and Word. I've got a parent handbook I just made in Word, and when opened in Writer (all fonts are available) the pagination is totally off. So I'm resigned to printing only from a machine with Word, or goof around with formatting (which will probably then break layout in Word).
Next, there's just a lack of the robustness one expects with Office. Two quick examples:
A couple days ago I needed to blow out a fax cover sheet. Tried creating a New document and there weren't any templates at all preinstalled.
Nada clip art. If you're into searching, evaluating, downloading and installing as many 3rd party clip art galleries as you can find, you might be alright.
Anyway, I'm really trying to give it a shot, and for most things it is fine. However I keep stubbing my toes on stupid little things along the way, and it is starting to aggravate me.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Open Office is SLOW. Starting up, opening document, typing, saving, etc., it's all SLOW. Yes, even compared to MS Office, OO is a resource hog. If you don't have more than 512MB of RAM or so, you are asking for trouble.
Love sees no species.
Also, before sending something out to a customer that I've written in OO, I check it on a machine that has Word or Excel or Powerpoint (whatever is appropriate) to ensure the formatting remains the same.
In prior versions, I noticed an issue with tracking changes, but I haven't looked at that recently, so I don't know if it still exists.
Openoffice writer is mostly good, and works at least as well as word, if a bit slower.
On the other hand, openoffice calc, the spreadsheet, has serious problems. It has nowhere near the functionality of excel for doing charts. As I recall, it doesn't have the ability to select arbitrary rows for your dataset. This is a killer for me. Sure, I could use a real plotting package, but that's more work than I want to go to.
I've also heard reports that calc is missing functions that are present in excel. This isn't really a big deal -- mainly because excel doesn't have all that many functions either. But I suppose for an excel "pro" it could be irritating.
I think MS makes you pay extra for it, or it's in a premium edition or something. And I found LaTex to be an installation nightmare... the usual "to install this, you have to go to site X and download that" and good luck getting the versions and filepaths lined up.
i made the switch over 2 years ago and i have to say... i have not found a single drawback. the java thing as a dependency is about the only thing i can think. i made the switch to linux permanently on the desktop (kubuntu) from winxp and i noticed that ooo wasn't that slow on windows (on a relatively older pc [2004]) and i've found that it is MEGA fast on linux. it loads up way faster than m$ office on windows or even, as i said before, ooo on windows. i have only once or twice ran into m$ --> ooo incompatibility afa formatting is concerned. i'm not trying to sound like an ooo fanboy, but i can't think of anything negative in regards to ooo.
http://www.ronpaul2008.com/ Ron Paul for President 2008 http://www.infowars.com/
The only reason I can think of to actually use OOo is that fact that it's free. MS Office 2007 is simply too kick arse.
"Oh boy"
In my office there's this AIA thing that people use to generate documents. It requires and integrates with MS Office. Not likely I could get the people behind that to switch over to OpenOffice... and the worst part still is the likelihood that its use will eventually push us into using Office 2007. I'm not happy about this.
If I wanted crap like that I'd use Wordperfect.
I noticed when I do curve fitting, in a spreadsheet, that Open Office does the curve fitting, but does not bother to give the equation of the line it uses to fit onto the data which is braindead.
Has this been fixed in the meantime?
I use OOo for everything here at home. However, when I use it to create a .doc, it doesn't seem to be able to save anything more than the usual font formatting. I mean things like colors in headers, footers, that kind of thing just don't seem to save, even if I open it in OOo again. So if I write a report for school I can't use any of the fancy stuff.
:\
Not major, but this semester I have been writing a report for my Systems Analysis class with all kinds of spreadsheets, diagrams, etc. I can print it out here at home for all the nice effects, but I just learned that for the final the instructor wants the whole report (all the files) on CDR. I know for a fact she doesn't even know about Open Office (or she didn't, but she has at least heard of it as of last week).
State University, but third-rate instructors. Diploma-mill mentality. MicroSoft products or nothing. But that's a rant for another time...
Excel is far more powerful than Calc, and the ribbon interface in Office 2007 (if you've moved to that) knocks the socks off of anything in OOo or 2003. And of course 2003 or 2007 will give you much better compatibility with the rest of the world than OOo as long as you save in .doc.
OOo has save to pdf, but you can get that in 2007 too.
Yeah, openoffice is a bloated monstrosity, especially if all you need it for is simple tasks, like composing a reasonably well-formatted document or a simple spreadsheet.
I'd try KOffice or the GNOME office apps, but they don't run natively on OS X yet. GTK+ and Qt apps are supposed to run natively (not X11) on OS X, but they're not there yet.
In the meantime, I have to fire up OpenOffice or NeoOffice just to use a very basic spreadsheet. ARRRGH!
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If you have a 3rd party piece of software that uses office components, you will still need MS office. A perfect example is Quickbooks. You can export reports to excel from quickbooks, but if you don't have excel installed you can't export(no csv options).
Lack of an integrated Grammar checker. Startup speed does not both me when I use the QuickStart.
There's always the rendering issue, especially when you do stuff like multiple character sets, rotations, embedded Word objects... The presentations I run are from other people, so the rendering is really important.
Spanned displays. If you want to specify the secondary monitor for your presentation, you have to use PowerPoint. Apparently, there has been a lot of discussion about this, and rudimentary multi-monitor support might make it to the next release.
It's also unbelievably slow and bloated.
Have a nice time.
I use OO on a Mac Book Pro. In general, it works well. It opens most (99%) M$ Word and Excel docs provided they are not burdened with macros.
On the down side, OO is a bit slow, it incorporates the same auto format stupidity that make Word such a PAIN!!!, Calc isn't as polished as Excel and the charting feature in Calc is not easy to use. I haven't tried master documents with OO yet, but since this feature doesn't really work on Word, I don't think that OO can be any worse.
Formatting is a bit of a problem when moving an OO document to Word. In general, Word has this problem when moving documents from one version of Word to another or when moving a document from one computer to another with the same version of Word. I think this relates to Word's tendency to replace a document's formatting with the local user formatting template when it opens a document.
Overall, OO is about 1 1/2 generation behind M$ Office. For most users OO is more than capable for anything they wanted to do.
Writer works OK for me - it's a little slow, and sometimes image formatting differs from Word, but in general it works.
Calc on the other hand is absolutely impossible to use for my job. Anything more than a few hundred rows of data and it becomes literally seconds to do anything, like scroll. I typically work with thousands of rows of data (once per second baby) and tens of thousands isn't unusual. Excel handles this fine. And others have already mentioned how poor the charting is. Finally, The Save and autosave are horrendously slow, which is especially bad for the autosave - it will literally interrupt your work, and you've have to sit there for 20+ seconds while it "saves"...
So, the main reason I don't use Open Office at work is it can't handle the bulk of my work, which is large data set in a spread sheet.
augment your senses: http://sensebridge.net/
to AbiWord for all my document needs. I don't care for MS Office's feature bloat, and OpenOffice wasn't much better. I tried to use OO's spreadsheet to make a chart, but it's controls were too counterintuitive -- I simply couldn't find them. A couple of versions back, the help file was adequate -- before they were all but useless -- and now we're back to useless again. I may get better. I personally don't make presentations or use macros, so I don't care about those either way. But a small, tight, spreadsheet program, with good sci and statistical functions, and a clean charting ability, would come in handy. Any options?
Disclaimer: I am a founder of NeoOffice.org
Due to politics, OpenOffice.org has exorcised all reference that a perfectly functional, native, and Aqua port of OpenOffice.org exists for the Macintosh. It is called NeoOffice. If you want to use only software named "OpenOffice" on your Mac, yes, you have few options, but if you like GPL software go check out the real deal.
NeoOffice 2.1 is scheduled for release on March 27th. Not only do we continue to push forward with being the only truly native fully released Aqua-enabled office application suite for Mac OS X, there are several features included that aren't even in OOo on Linux, including:
NeoOffice is a GPL project and incorporates the best everyone has to offer to create the best product we can for our users.
OpenOffice.org is a political machine and to meet its own political goals is willing to restrict its users from compatibility requirements like OpenXML and VBA compatibility, not to mention failing to let users know other open source projects exist and are ready now, unlike their Macintosh vaporware. Their own users are hurt by their own desires for personal and political gain.
NeoOffice is free from all corporate influence, is truly GPL free software, and will always be so. If the lack of Mac support is your only reason preventing you from deploying OOo or its derivatives, it's sad that you didn't take the simple time to run a google search and just assumed the information the OOo website was all the larger OOo community has to offer.
ed
When saving files as XLS or DOC, the filesize is bigger than if Excel or Word actually saves it, and by a significant amount. A 20kb Excel file is an 80kb OO.o file. And that's basically straight data. Compound this on the Mac side with OpenOffice and NeoOffice. Also, I don't think even the newer versions of OO.o are quite up to speed with Office 2K3 yet, though I haven't really played around with that intensively.
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.
The interface doesn't feel fast. You click and it's slow to react...both on Windows and Linux. Plus it messes up formatting and is slow as hell. I use gnumeric for simple sheets, and thank god I rarely have to use a Word processing program. I'd use Abiword. If it's not going to be 100% compatible with Office anyways, might as well use something fast.
In addition to what others have mentioned, I have had serious problems with complex documents that contain many sections. Opening such a document and doing certain kinds of reformatting cause Writer to blink furiously as it redraws the screen over and over; the more sections you have, the more times it blinks. When you have a lot of sections, it can take minutes for the blinking to subside. I've also found certain things in such documents, e.g., lines between columns, can disappear with no user intervention. (I've never been able to figure out the conditions under which it happens, but I've been bit by this repeatedly.)
Yeah, I stopped trying to use OO when I ran into its poor support for line numbering and more complex documents.
... come on.
Now I like the OO ethos and idea, but I have invested too much time into learning how to get Word to do what I want to throw all that away (why I fear Office Vista).
All day long at work I need to create documents like this:
Section 1: no line numbers, special header/footer
Sections 2-6: line numbers every 5 lines, restarting at each page. And paragraph numbers (I use numbered lists), numbering continuing from the previous section. Basically I use a style for the paragraph numbering as some paragraphs (section titles) aren't numbered and don't count.
Section 5+n+2 (i.e. section 7 and odd until section 40): line numbers each line, restarting each section. No paragraph numbers.
Section 6+n+2 (i.e. section 8 and even until section 40): no line or paragraph numbers
Section 40: same as sections 2-6
Section 41: no line or paragraph numbers, different header/footers
I have no clue how to create this with OO, and i tried. Importing it in from Word results in OO picking one sections line numbering scheme and using that throughout the document. I guess I could use 41 documents with different line numbering schemes, but
There are also documents that I have to create a Table of Contents using 2 of Word's 3 methods of making a TOC (bookmarks & styles). I have yet to try that in OO, but have little hope for it.
I think OO is fine as long as you don't get too fancy. After that it starts to fall apart or operate in a way that is totally different from Word, which I have invested 18 years (Christ I am old) learning.
Now granted Word is far from perfect, but I have learned to get around most of its problems. I never trust a new feature until it has been in 3-4 Word versions. I try to stick with what I learned for Word 4 for Macintosh. For example, I would love to use the TaskPane to create a dynamic template where I checked off boxes and sections magically appeared or disappeared. But I have no faith that the TaskPane survived the Office UI restart. Plus, while cool and involving coding, the time I save would probably never equal the time I sunk into making the dynamic template.
So, OO good for normal document usage. Not so good for complex documents. Especially if you have invested heavily in using Word.
Uninstalling Open Office on Windows requires you to keep the temporary files it creates when you install it. Unfortunately, it puts these files on the installing user (Administrator)'s desktop by default... so of course, being a person who hates a cluttered desktop, I deleted them.
So, I can't use the OO.o uninstaller. Since I can't download OO.o 2.0.x from the official site any more, I now have to find somewhere to download it.
Did I mention that this also prevents me from installing OO.o 2.1.0 because it tries to uninstall the current version before installing the new one, cancelling the installation when the uninstaller fails to uninstall because it can't find the old installation files I've since deleted?
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
I have never been able to figure out how to get envelopes to print properly with OO.org. It always either uses the wrong paper size, or the wrong envelope position and orientation.
It's not like it costs anything, or you have to uninstall MS Office to install OpenOffice or some other nonsense.
Download it, keep MS Office around for awhile as a backup, and start using OpenOffice. Try using it exclusively for a week, or month, or however long until you feel comfortable that it can do all you need it to do. Them, and only then, should you give MS the boot.
It would be absolutely retarded from a business perspective to proceed any other way - based on anyones advice, no matter how much of an "expert" they claim to be. Just try for yourself - if it fits your needs, great. If it doesn't, you still have MS Office installed, so there is no risk of it hurting your business.
No one knows your business better than you do. Maybe you have special needs OpenOffice can't meet. Maybe you don't. You won't know until you try it out.
I'm curious why so many people are concerned with the ability of calc to do statistics. Is this just a carryover from the MS Windows world where Excel seems to be used for all sorts of things it isn't well suited for? Why not do your stats in R, which is much more powerful than Calc or Excel?
I'm a writer and love Open Office except when I have to deal with one particular publisher. Most common Word and Excel and Power Point files open up without any problems, but this one publisher uses a certain specially written macro and these do not work well in Open Office. I can open the file, read it and edit it, but for the formatting I have to boot into Windoze and do a final check.
:-)
On the whole, Open Office is a very robust substitute for Word. Were it not for that one publisher's specific requirements, I'd be able to say that I've been using it -- in an intensive, Word-oriented career -- for at least 4 years.
Hope that's useful.
Here you go.
I mostly use openoffice to generate PDFs from formats that I don't have better tools for (like doc and ppt). I call openoffice on the commandline thusly: ooffice2 -p foo.ppt and, since I've set the default printer to be a PDF converter in the same directory, it creates a PDF in the current directory for me.
Here are my complaints:
1. openoffice won't start, even in this filter mode, unless it has an X display that it's allowed to use. This is retarded since as a filter, it should never even start the GUI. To get around this, I have to start X and then call openoffice with the display option set (-display localhost:0).
This means I can't use openoffice as a filter on headless machines that don't have X installed unless I'm allowed to set the display to some remote X server. Completely retarded.
2. openoffice won't let me specify the name of the output file that I want. Instead, it guesses the name based on the first text it finds in the file, and I have to look for the most recently created pdf in the current directory and rename it to something sensible.
3. openoffice always exits with a status of 0, even when it had problems. If there's a problem (unknown file format, for example), it should exit with a non-zero status so that I can detect the problem immediately.
4. openoffice won't allow you to run multiple instances concurrently. If you start four filters, only the last one started will generate a result. The rest will quietly not do anything (and, of course, won't set status to a value that would tell you anything went wrong). As a result, you have to serialize all your calls to openoffice.
If anyone knows how to deal with these issues, I'd love to hear the solution.
*sigh* back to work...
Microsoft Word doesn't handle large documents well. I find Gnumeric does many things better than Microsoft Excel. For years I've seen Microsoft Windows users needing to reboot their machines a lot for things I don't think they should have to. In Microsoft Windows 2000, I saw an app running with non-admin privileges crash the OS. Shall I conclude that proprietary software is always second-rate?
Overgeneralization is used against minorities to keep them down. It's sad to see that coming from a teacher. Better and more accurate to recognize that some proprietary software is reliable and powerful and some is not, and the same is true for FLOSS. For me, what separates OpenOffice.org from Microsoft Office is that OpenOffice.org gives me software freedom so it can be improved by anyone willing to take the time to do the work. Microsoft Office is proprietary and puts me into a monopoly for support. A long time ago I posted on /. about Microsoft's reaction to fixing bugs I spotted.
Digital Citizen
"Like most so-called Linux evangelists, you're not listening. He wants to use clip art and templates. He wants to do exactly what he does with Word. He wants to use Open Office. If Linux wants to convert people to their OS, then FIX IT!"
The best reason to use OOo - its NOT Word. Its not supposed to be a Word clone any more than WordPerfect was ... its not like the Word .doc format will ever be a standard - even Word isn't compatible with Word.
In other words:
So, in summary OO is good for the planet AND saves you money by NOT being a Word clone.
Kind of reminds me of all the time people wasted/still waste playing with the wallpaper on their desktops. Between that and solitaire, bazsllions of $$$ have been lost.
Yes they should. If that's what they want to do then the software should be flexible enough to accommodate them.
Now you're just being silly.
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No, people who insist on "100% has to look the exact same including all the bugs" are being silly. Who cares if your 99-page document takes 98 (or 100) pages in OO? The world would be a better place if most people were forced to use a plain-text editor for a while. It would stop people wasting time doing things like adjusting their margins, font sizes, and line spacing so that they hit the 10 pages required for their homework assignment, for one. Or subjecting people to ridiculous popwerpoint presentations and excel spreadsheets trying to polish a turd of an idea.
Of course, that would require the average person to be more literate, as well as less susceptible to OST syndrome - "oh - shiny thingee!" ... like that's going to happen ...
He's asking you what the downside is, not whether you think it's good or bad.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
The Java runtime has to load also
Wait, this is still true? I thought that OO.org hasn't been Java-based since before v1.1.
+++ATH0
I've read the replies to this post, and many of them refer to OO as slow and from this it may be concluded that it is bloated as well. They make it seem as an almost unusable application. Is everyone but me replying in 486s with 32 megs of ram?.
In my opinion, OO version 2 speed is fine (for an Athlon 3000 with 512 MB of RAM). If you can't wait for the 20 seconds it takes to launch for the first time, you can use the quickstart thingie, which emulates what MS Office did some years ago by moving most of the components that made it a slug into the windows operating system startup phase.
If bloated means that a program is filled with features most of the users will never use, then the bloat scale should actually rise with the MS suite, and not with OO. I don't know how many CDs (or DVDs!) the current MS Office version has, but the biggest OO install file (2.2 rc3) is no bigger than 100 megs.
cheershearmenot
At the end of the day it's about file formats. People need to be able to read MS Word and Excel documents accurately; you argue against it as much as you like, but this is the requirement.
Yes Word and Excel can be used to create some abominations (happily I have no experience of powerpoint), but if you're a small company you need to be compatible, it's as simple as that.
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What's hot:
Definately the drawing portionm of open office is a real hot item that MS Office certianly lacks. Ii is like what those old Apple User liked about Appleworks, a nice drawing tool, but better on OOo with snap to object lines that make charting easy. Also lines with auto measurement (you know drawing lines like || ) also nice object Transparency and stuff like that.
The database looks like it is something great too but I haven't used it (shame on me). But as it's cross-platform it puts it light years ahead of Access in my book.
Can convert a lot more then MS can
Document conversion convert over Word Perfect and other files to Word that MS Word can't read.
What's not:
The presentation program is slow (some of the whizes in games dev should go in there and work on the rendering. It is functinally good, but is dog slow when it is presenting.
Not that I use Macros, but some documents (more so spreadsheets than Word documents) contain macros that OOo can't handle. Then again, some of those very documents not even Mac Office 2004 can handle either as the embedded code relies on Active X technologies (and the next version of Mac Office won't have VBA support either).
Font management is a noticeable bottleneck (at least on the Linux version, mac seems to work transparently, probably also in Windows), OOo maintins a seperate Font library, which means if you are installing Linuxc and OOo on a bunch of computers you have to install fonts twice, once in Linux and then again into OOo. (the fonts included are really good - and largely compatible to the MS basics, but I have a lot of ones I like beyond that too).
As for anyhting else I have been very happy, I don't do obsessivley huge spreadhseets and Writer handles styles and sauch in large documents quite fine to my liking. I probably use Writer and Draw the most and those are great apps.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Great phrase. Sadly at least 1/2 of my spreadsheets are 'burdened' with macros because I find typing the same thing again and again rather a bore. VBA, and to a lesser extent, charting, is Excel's killer app, for engineers. I agree, we could use Matlab or Scilab, but for spreadsheet-like tasks they are painful.
I'm a writing teacher, and I like to grade electronically. I've been using OpenOffice.org for all my own writing projects for years (since build 643C, back in the pre-1.0 days), but I can't use it for grading my students' papers. Although it is possible to make and read comments using OpenOffice, the UI for doing so is atrocious.
In Word, when I comment on something, I select the phrase that I want, and insert a new comment. The phrase I've commented on is given a different background color, the ends are marked by extra-tall-and-thin parentheses, and the comment itself appears in the margin as a balloon shape tied to the sentence by a dashed line. It's very easy to see and read the comments, and to see what all the comment pertains to.
In Writer, when I comment on something, I select the phrase that I want and insert a new comment. The comment is represented on the screen using a minuscule yellow box at the end of the section I highlighted. It gives the reader no indication where the beginning of my selection was. The yellow is so light that under some circumstances it's difficult even to see that there's a comment there. And in order to actually get the text of the comment, I have to hover the mouse over that tiny little yellow box, and then the text will pop up in an equally tiny box like the "alt" or "title" attributes in an HTML document. It's almost illegible.
Yuck! Given the terrible UI for comments, I cannot use OpenOffice.org to grade papers. Which is irritating, because several of my students want to turn papers in that were written using OpenOffice, and I can't let them. It really irritates me to have to support Microsoft in that way.
Please, OO.o developers - get a usability expert and turn her attention towards your commenting UI!
There are tasks for which people use Office that they can't access in Open Office. For those people, it doesn't make sense to use Open Office. You're welcome to your own prejudices, but why do others need to share them?
I looked at converting an Access application to Base, but it simply isn't up to it. It is OK if you have a few tables and have a few simple forms with 1 to 1 form-DB field correspondence. But any real logic is going to be very hairy. Programming in general under OOo needs to be easier and MUCH better documented.
I had the same frustration in my transition from MS Office to OOo. Eventually, I found that "Sections" in Office had the analogy of Page Styles (F11 or Format/Styles and Formatting) in OOo in which you need to define "new" Section01, Section02, etc. I still find that long documents (e.g., 50 pages +) that are broken into Chapters, Sections and sub-sections are difficult to compose in OOo. Also, your admin staff may (probably?) berate you with the "It's not like Office", or "I need training" whining. While this (to me) reflects a sad state of people not understanding basic concepts about how a word processor works and willingness to adapt to slightly different menu structures that perform the functions, you will (as owner of that SME) have to deal with it.
So Slashdot is actually capable of having an objective discussion about the merits of MS Office versus OpenOffice. I'm amazed.
So then why is it that Slashdot is incapable of having an objective discussion about the merits of MS Windows versus Linux?
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Surprisingly OO.o cannot copy & paste OLE embedded pictures in Linux as pure bitmaps. So create a Word document with pictures by copy & paste, open the document up in OO.o on Linux and you can see the pictures but you cannot edit them, copy them to edit in GIMP, or paste from GIMP into a Word document. OO.o on Windows doesn't have this restriction as it appears to use the native OLE engine.
The copy & paste restriction is confusing to users as if you are editing a OO.o document you can paste into it.
If that was the only issue at stake, he wouldn't be interested in OOo in the first place. He'd only need antiword, and something like this method of reading xls files. The objective here, however, is probably to be able to author MS Word documents as well. Otherwise he'd probably be using LaTeX.
...since, as with microsoft Office, anything you print with OpenOffice is ugly. These people have never heard about typesetting and that it can be done well. Apart from that, the few things I need to work on a Word or Excel document on, OpenOffice gave me no trouble, In fact some people I know have had more trouble with older Office versions, than I have had with OpenOffice.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
For many people (maybe even for you), Open Office is more than good enough for what they do.
For others (maybe even for you), the fact that Open<->MS office translations not being perfect can ruin your day -- but whether or not that's the case, is going to be something that you're gonna have to figure out on your own.
Things that I can suggest (in no particular order):
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
lack of ability to embed audio into the presentation of an Impress document...so it plays continuously while you switch through the slides..
there is a hack creating a macro to play a sound file via quicktime or windows media player or xmms but they are HACKS not solutions.
"Just Smile and Nod." --Huck
Office does not run in the background when you don't run it. Scanning the process list on any Windows machine will tell you that. (Unless you have Office's 'binder' installed, which hasn't been in the default install for years)
How this tripe gets modded Informative is beyond me.
Go somewhere random
I am a trained, professional graphic designer.
Wow - your mother must be proud.
I can assure you that "trashy" is exactly the word we apply to anything that is recognisably clipart.
You know, your elitist snobbery doesn't make the perceived need go away. Lots of people don't have your delicate sensibilities, and are perfectly happy when their clipart immediately conveys their message.
A couple of people in the office use Open Office and whenever they modify my network topology sheets, they always come back with weird fonts, wrong colors and characters replaced in the sheet titles. The spread sheets are always usable, but it's damned annoying for things to be all fubar. OpenOffice seems fine in a homogeneous environment, but for it's not good enough to mix in with Microsoft Office.
ms office is pretty aggressive about auto saving a back up of where you are in you document. when i was working on a lab write up for my physics class open office crashed on me, and i lost a good bit of work. my last save was before the last chunk of work i had done. i had to redo a some stuff. but that situation was avoidable if it had correctly auto saved my work. maybe this was just a bug(i think it normally auto saves my work). but OO in my view has too many bugs right now. i use its equation editor also but some expressions don't get printed correctly(and its interface is BAD too the equations only refresh 'correctly' if you scroll the window up then back down). it's close to great but not there yet. i would say, if one's business has people able to adapt to changes AND it can meet all you need go for it. else it will likely cost you a lot to use it. for people that can't adapt to change easily OO will just confuse them and likely end up with them wasting time. I remember my little cousin doing his HW on OO and wanting some kind of bubble letter font that was in MS office. he spent hours looking through all the menus for some thing to make bubble letters. To him ALL word processors he though would have this feature so just had to find it. Then he started to search the Internet for pictures of bubble letters to add to the OO document as pictures. long story short it wasted a lot of his time.
I tried to open up databases that I was working on for an Access class last summer and most of the functions would not work. In order to make the functionality work the same, I would have most likely had to rewrite the entire thing from scratch.
I don't have the specifics any more, but it became clear very quickly that simply crossing over wouldn't work.
I'll note that I currently use OO on my newest computer because I haven't had the money to pick up a new copy of MS's suite (I spent it all on said computer). Eventually I will do so though, just so I can continue working with Access databases I need to for school. Luckily, Student discounts are the bomb.
H.
When VCR's are outlawed, only outlaws will have VCR's.
The downside is simply that openoffice is a lot more limited than MS office in many respects. For many people that is not an issue because all they do is write 2 page memos. At home I have it installed because it is cheap (free) and does a reasonable job of opening the occasional simple word file I need to read. I don't actually do much else with it at home since I do all of my office work at the office.
There, I am a poweruser of MS word and MS powerpoint. Don't get me wrong, these are applications with a lot of flaws but I can get my work done with them despite that. Particularly ms word has a lot of strange bugs, layout problems, etc. But on the other hand it has nice grammar checking and spelling checking features and I know how to work around its more annoying bugs (thanks to years of exposure to them). Word also has nice features for collaborative editing, change reviewing, etc. Overall, it's a very nice word processor that is pretty much unchallenged in terms of features & usability by any other product.
Important for me is the cross reference feature which allows me to refer to sections and references or list items by number. This feature is not properly supported in open office. It has a cross reference insert dialog but it has serious limitations, including the inability to actually list numbered paragraphs and insert a cross reference to one in the document. The number of things you can actually reference is very limited (outline numbered stuff and figure captions) and also the way to configure how to reference is very limited. I've filed the bug before 1.0 and verified that it wasn't fixed for 1.1, 2.0, 2.1 and is currently being considered for 3.0. Basically, the ooo developers agree with me that the current dialog is too limited and also a usability nightmare.
The lack of this feature guarantees I will never use it for any serious writing and is also the single reason I wrote my Ph. D. thesis in framemaker instead of open office (word being just to unstable for such a long, structured document). I can live with the many other limitations but not the lack of cross references. Framemaker is a very lousy wordprocessor of course but great for working with long structured documents like a Ph D thesis with hundreds of cross references to images, tables, (sub) sections, figures, pages etc. Sadly it never really recovered from being bought by Adobe and recent versions did not really improve it much over version 5.x.
I could have used latex of course but I consider the whole concept of compiling & debugging a text just wrong + interoperability with everything else just sucks big time (and no pdf is not interoperable since it is basically a read only format).
My ideal word processor has yet to be invented. It would probably be a mix of the rigid structure provided by framemaker along with its flexibility for formatting and ms word's human friendly approach to actually inputting the text. I can't really think of anything that open office does well in this context except perhaps its drawing tools.
Jilles
I have some problems with Open Office(.org) ("OOO") that appear to be the same problems that I have had with Microsoft Word. (Word 97 versus Word Perfect Version 7 and Word Perfect 8; I've never upgraded because WP8 works fine for everything I'm doing). I've gotten full (non-upgrade) copies of Word Perfect 8 - at retail, off the shelf - for as low as $15.00, and in one case I purchased a second copy for $39.00 because it was the Professional version and included the Paradox database, so it was worth trying. I think when I first bought Word Perfect 8 it was around $100; I forget what I paid for WP7. I've been a heavy user of Word Perfect for over 20 years, going back to DOS version 4.1, simply because I have yet to have a formatting feature in Word Perfect I wanted that I couldn't get it to do.
I have often had problems with both Microsoft Word and OOO to do formatting that I want to work the way I want to. I have sometimes exported files from Word Perfect using RTF (Rich Text Format) and found that Word will damage the formatting when trying to import the file. (I think I did that because it wouldn't import .WPD files correctly or something, so I think that's when I tried RTF.)
I'm not a word processing bigot, I'd use Microsoft Word - or possibly something else - if it worked as good or better than Word Perfect. In fact, one time when Word imported one of the books I'm writing, it mangled the format of the header, and I liked the way it changed it better. I could not figure out how it had done it or how to duplicate it, but I went into Word Perfect, clicked on help, and looked it up, and in about 30 seconds I duplicated the functionality that Microsoft Word gave me by accident, which if I hadn't liked it, would have been an error.
I'll give you an example of one thing I can do in Word Perfect that I can't do in Microsoft Word. Changing headers on new chapters. I have a book (actually it's the second one I'm writing), it's over 500 pages, and one of the features of the formatting is that the left (even page) header has my name and the name of the book, and the right (odd page) header has the name of the chapter. The left header stays the same, the right one changes at the beginning of the chapter.
Now, in some rare cases there is a chapter that is only one page long, and is on a left page, so that's not an issue. It's when a chapter is at least two pages, the chapter header should change to the name of the new chapter. When I view the file after it's been converted to Microsoft Word / RTF format, sometimes the chapter header doesn't change or it changes in strange ways. And this misbehavior seems to resurface in OOO, too.
Come to think of it, I have a resume I do in Word Perfect that also gets mangled because of header or footer problems in Word/OOO
Also, I don't see - or I'm not sure - how to 'view codes' in Microsoft Word (or OOO) which I can see the internal formatting of a document and know what the program is doing (and even delete some codes, such as if I have an area that is incorrectly italic or bold).
Maybe I'll try copying the file over again and see how it looks, or I could try examining OOO's XML output and see what I get. One thing I do like with OOO is the PDF output feature, I'd like to be able to use it. Plus OOO's scripting is in Basic rather than the relatively esoteric Perfect Script, which the only other program I've seen that uses it is Novell's Groupwise e-mail program.
Another poster here mentioned submitting a bug report, and I think I'll do that (I hadn't thought of it). Of course, it might be that the behavior is wrong in Word, in which case it might not be considered a bug!
My BlogThe lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
From the Open Office Help on my OOo 2.0, 2 ways to create/use a bibliography. Both from within the document, while you are typing it. If this doesn't do what you want, maybe you should be a little clearer on what it is you need. For my simple needs, it seems to work.
Creating a Bibliography
A bibliography is a list of works that you reference in a document.
Storing Bibliographic Information
OpenOffice.org stores bibliographic information in a bibliography database, or in an individual document.
To store information in the bibliography database:
1.Choose Tools - Bibliography Database.
2.Choose Insert - Record.
3.Type a name for the bibliography entry in the Short name box, and then add additional information to the record in the remaining boxes.
4.Close the Bibliography Database window.
To store bibliographic information in an individual document:
1.Click in your document where you want to add the bibliography entry.
2.Choose Insert - Indexes and Tables - Bibliography Entry.
3.Select From document content and click New.
4.Type a name for the bibliography entry in the Short name box.
5.Select the publication source for the record in the Type box, and then add additional information in the remaining boxes.
6.Click OK.
7.In the Insert Bibliography Entry dialog, click Insert, and then Close.
When you save a document that contains bibliography entries, the corresponding records are automatically saved in a hidden field in the document.
Inserting Bibliography Entries From the Bibliography Database
1.Click in your document where you want to add the bibliography entry.
2.Choose Insert - Indexes and Tables - Bibliography Entry.
3.Select From bibliography database.
4.Select the name of the bibliography entry that you want to insert in the Short name box.
5.Click Insert and then click Close.
HELP, a powerful, seldom used feature of many programs, including both MS Word and Open Office.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
Let's separate the requirements.
1.Templates there is nothing wrong with templates for things like a fax cover page. I bet 99% of the ones I get are just that.
2. Clip art. It doesn't matter if it is trashy in your opinion. There is a lot of it included with things like Word, WP, PowerPoint... Most of it I don't like but if it was universally scorned then it wouldn't exists.
In other words develop some manners please and stop bashing someone that probably lacks the time and or talent to produce what you think is a "professional" looking fax cover sheet.
Remember the old saying. If you can't say something nice or at least constructive don't say anything all all.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Yes,
It is slow (Neo office) and does not look to good. Yes it is free but I am really thinking about getting office.
That is the problem with most open source software, it is ugly and well not really finished, yes there are really good OOS products, but if it was not for the big corps a OSS would not be where it is today
Personally I think google office will replace most basic office software. Yes then MS will have the same web office too!!!
You and I and everyone else knows that 99% of what a business uses office for is not time critical tasks. It is opening .doc files attached to emails, commenting on a report, viewing a chart, adding 1-2 cells to a spreadsheet. The amount of time you design some giant new report or huge Excel 10 workbook large spreadsheet is minimal - you do those things maybe once, twice a month.
Unless you are a total invalid who does not deserve to be a manager in the first place, you should be able to judge form the first few minutes of trying if this "task" is going to be too hard to accomplish under OpenOffice given it's time constraints. If you have a report due tomorrow, have nothing done, and don't have time to screw around with OO.org writer - then do it in Word. Whose stopping you? You can try OO.org later, when you have more time.
If you're too afraid to risk ANYTHING with your business, you are not going to innovate, and your business will end up failing. Innovation is the root of success for all businesses. Why would you not want to be innovative with your Office package - something you use every day?
I mean - say I came to your office and said "Hey - I can tell you a way to cut 100% off your photocopier costs by using this new model. I will bring the new model into your office as a free no-obligation trial. You can use it as long as you want. When you feel it is OK andyour workers have learned the new functionality and are comfortable, you can get rid of your old one - keep the new one for free".
What manager would not take that offer? Why then do they not do the same with Office software?
"Can you people learn to read please? The poster said two examples. One was about faxes; one was about clip art. Not that clip art needed to be available to put in fax cover pages."
And can you learn to read? I specifically addressed the posters comments about clip art in faxes. As to clip art in general, anyone can add their clipart collection to openoffice, and only a dummy would try to confabulate this non-issue with the crap "fax clip art" we've all been subjected to because of Office.
Okay, now time for my morning coffee!
Then again, one might wonder if you really need perfect Microsoft Office compatibility to be able to communicate with others. It's not so bad as being unreadable, right?
I haven't seen anyone mention a learning curve yet.
h tml which make editing my kinds of documents easier. At this point, I have found no similar tools for OO.
I remember in grade school learning all of the keyboard shortcuts for WordPerfect (where the blue screen was good - lol)
After WP, MS Word seemed super easy to learn. The menus were relatively intuitive, and by now I know where everything is. Since I'm a chemist, there are also plugins available http://spectrum.troy.edu/~cking/ChemFormat/index.
But I digress, the menus for Open Office are layed out with slight differences compared to MS Office, and it takes time to learn where things are. I have not done enough in OO yet to feel as comfortable using it as I do MS Office. As a business owner, can you afford slower production times while you and your employees learn OO? Or, do you have the money to spend on a training class (which are probably rare) to help get a jump on the learning curve?
Sorry, but in your defense, you fail it in your "lets separate the requirements" analysis.
The FIRST requirement of a fax is to communicate a message. If it can be done more efficiently by using just a single page (the fax "cover sheet" with the message written on it, rather than both a cover sheet and a page with the message, because your clip art took up too much space on the cover page), then it should be done that way. Fax cover sheets that have a ton of junk clip art are a waste of resources and time. Maybe you don't remember the crudescence that was in Word 2.0? Within weeks, everyone was receiving the same "funny" fax cover pages with full-page graphics, with a second page, rather than just a cover page with the message included. I put the blame 50/50 on Delrina/Winfax and Microsoft Word.
Fax cover sheets with a ton of clip art do indeed communicate a message - same as html email with all sorts of "wallpaper" does - but its a negative message. It screams "unprofessional" to the fax recipient. Sending out a press release about the upcoming 10-year-anniversary of your company? Don't include cheesy clip art of party hats and birthday cakes. DO include a fact or two about the company, its contribution to the community, and a contact name/email/phone# - all of which can be done in plain text on the cover sheet, and is more likely to be retained.
There are 3 simple remedies available to them, two of which are free:
Seriously.
When it comes time to submit something I simply open the text file in Word, maybe do some formatting or cut and paste into the required company boilerplate template to make the corporate weenies hard, and that is it.
When it comes to actual input, vim all the way baby.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I mean, really, it's not a huge download & what's so hard about trying it out yourself? Personally, I've had zero problems with it. The load times when opening an MS document are minimal to me compared to the alternative. It's free, it's open source, it's feature-rich & more are constantly getting added, there's a template repository freely available & (most importantly) it's not an MS solution which means your virus threat level isn't sky high!
I swear, the internet's a wonderful thing but questions like this just go to show how lazy people have become. It's YOUR business, try it yourself? Sure, lots of folks here can give you their points-of-views but how do you know how it will directly affect YOUR business unless you try it yourself? Give it a test run & kick the tires for pete's sake (wouldn't you do that if you were buying a new car or would you just go online & read the reviews & solely base your purchase on that?)!!!
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. -Mahatma Ghandi
Unfortunately, there is a rather fundamental bug in OpenOffice Writer that means that a large class of professional grade fonts don't get used properly when saving as PDF. This has been well documented for several years, but the OO team show no great interest in fixing it; they laughably classify it as a feature rather than a bug, and it's scheduled for "OOo Later". Meanwhile, the first you know about it is when your carefully crafted report/flyer/whatever using high quality fonts exports as garbage instead of a PDF your print bureau can use.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I use whatever tools are available and work. My employer buys licenses for Microsoft Offce for everyone, so that what I used. That is, until I was writing a functional spec for the next major release of our product.
.doc file in Writer and it opened flawlessly. I started inserting the Visio diagrams as OLE objects into the document, and it just worked. I have not had a problem with Writer, and I get free .pdf generation.
I was using Word for writing the spec and Visio for generating ERDs as well as process flow charts, inserting them into the document as necessary. At one point Word just lost it; every time I'd insert a Visio diagram into the document, Word would crash shortly thereafter. No patches seemed to help. Creating a new document and copying/pasting content over didn't help. Word just couldn't handle it.
On a whim I tried OpenOffice.org Writer. At the time I used 2.0.3; I opened the
Well, that's not entirely true; Writer has some pagination quirks when working with large documents. But I've found ways to work around them, and it doesn't crash. I'll take functional quirkiness over lost work any day of the week.
I now do everything in OpenOffice.org (primarily using Writer and Calc). I see no reason to go back.
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
Drawings (such as circles) does not display smoothly on screen in Open Office, I guess its something to do with anti-aliasing.
I don't use OpenOffice for the same (and really only ) reason I don't use Linux: DOES NOT WORK WITH QUICKBOOKS!
QuickBooks has the ability to directly interact with Microsoft Word to create collection (ie, please pay your damn bill) letters and the like from Word templates. It takes the overdue account infomation and automatically inserts it into the template. Very useful when you need to send out collection letters to a dozen or so clients.
If we encourage migration to an office suite, we cannot get away from lock-in. It should be the sort of thing we will not be switching away from in four years when it's clearly not the best office suite. And nobody who's looked at the issue can seriously think that OOo is going to make any dramatic progress in the next four years. It's a mess of spaghetti code, and the whole monstrosity is held together with duct tape and bailing wire. It may work OK now, but modernizing it for the needs of even the near future is not something that anyone can do.
Consider even the issue of startup times: Even Microsoft streamlined the code for fast startup in Office 97. For OOo this would be hopeless. It is hopeless. And it will remain hopeless. This is not the sort of ship we should board.
We'd be much wiser to jump onto something with a future, even if in the present, it is missing one or two features we might like. I personally am rooting for the KDE4 version of KOffice, since it will be so damn portable, progress is incredibly fast (even with a small staff of coders), and the code and plugin system is incredibly clean and future-proof.
"... right ... because everyone should be able to make stuff that looks like a ransom note written by someone who failed grade 3 - three times."
It's not for you to judge. It needs to be fixed, not rationalized away. Here's a hypothetical example:
"FireFox doesn't support Flash!"
"You shouldn't use Flash anyway, it's unprofessional! +5, Insightful."
"I want to go to Youtube, assface."
"Oh.. uh.. ermm.. uhhh!"
There's always somebody around that has a good use for it.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
A quick glance shows that Office 2007 Professional retails for $437.99 The upgrade is $289.99. If memory serves, I bought my retail copy of Office 2003 Professional on sale for $380. I'm now thinking about upgrading because of the new formatting options in Excel 2007 that make dealing with lots of data much more intuitive. Combined, Office 2003 Professional Retail and the Office 2007 Professional Upgrade will end up costing me about $740, including tax and shipping.
I certainly haven't been "forced to swap M$ office every two years at a cost of thousands of dollars a time per desktop." It's far more realistic to say I'm spending $300 to $400 every four years for the current version of the only software, other than OS and browser, that I use every day.
"The FIRST requirement of a fax is to communicate a message. If it can be done more efficiently by using just a single page (the fax "cover sheet" with the message written on it, rather than both a cover sheet and a page with the message, because your clip art took up too much space on the cover page), then it should be done that way."
I don't know about you but in my company we don't fax messages. The only faxes I get or send tend to be documents with signatures. Of then they are many pages long. Messages tend to be via email or IM not by fax. So yes there is a need for a fax cover page. We keep a few printed up next to the fax machine for the few times we need to send a fax. We tend to receive more faxes than we get. I don't think we have any clip art on our at all and I have no idea who makes them.
"In other words develop some manners please and stop bashing someone that probably lacks the time and or talent to produce what you think is a "professional" looking fax cover sheet."
"There are 3 simple remedies available to them, two of which are free:"
I guess the idea that the real problem is that your being nasty just for the sake of being nasty is lost on you. You could have said what you wanted in many ways without being vile.
Maybe something like this, "Most canned clip art really isn't of very good quality, I suggest that you just leave it out or look for some that you really like."
That is the thing that I really don't like about online communities. For some reason perfectly normal people seem to think that there is no need to have any manners at all. They have no consideration for anyone else,'s feelings. The worst part is that same attitude seems to be flooding into everyday life.
The good thing is if somebody you knew asked you about templates and clip art face to face I bet you wouldn't have been so insulting.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Excel is way better than Calc as far as pivot tables and charts goes. If Calc has a lack of build in functions it doesn't really matter 'cause I'm sure you could get a whole heap of Calc functions from somewhere. Now that Excel 2007 has 1M lines it just owns.
thats the only problem ive ever seen. And no email client/scheduler.
You're wrong again, and I'm right.
http://about.openoffice.org/index.html
The source is written in C++ and delivers language-neutral and scriptable functionality, including Java(TM) APIs.
This means the application has support for including Java routines to do things, much like VBA does for MS Office. Apparently you can remove this functionality to slim the install down and get it to run faster, too, but you don't have to start the Java runtime every time you start the application. The parent poster was incorrect.
Oops! Guess you fucked up again, chuckles!
Give my regards to Osama, you fucking Commie.
+++ATH0
Buying M$ software has not been that cheap and using it has proved to be a bloody expensive nightmare. Forget the fantasy M$=B$ TCO, the reality of the costs of using M$ software has an order of magnitude greater than any of the claims in their B$ marketing.
I can remember the fun of using M$ SBS (small business sucked in) trying to get it to run and finding all those, 'it is a known fault' erros and what ever the crap work around was required because they had no interest in spending money on a bug fix.
The M$ press release was not that long ago when billy goat ballmer said he would be upgrading office and windows every two years, how quickly M$ marketing forgets, or is it the typical info bleed from talking up the share price for investors versus woulda, coulda, shoulda, for the customers. Those crap M$ warranties have been costing customers tens of thousands of dollars for years.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
1-Create an account
_ type=DEFECT&issue_type=ENHANCEMENT&issue_type=FEAT URE&issue_type=PATCH&component=Spreadsheet&issue_s tatus=UNCONFIRMED&issue_status=NEW&issue_status=ST ARTED&issue_status=REOPENED&issue_status=RESOLVED& email1=&emailtype1=exact&emailassigned_to1=1&email 2=&emailtype2=exact&emailreporter2=1&issueidtype=i nclude&issue_id=&changedin=&votes=&chfieldfrom=&ch fieldto=Now&chfieldvalue=&short_desc=large&short_d esc_type=allwords&long_desc=large&long_desc_type=a llwords&issue_file_loc=&issue_file_loc_type=substr ing&status_whiteboard=&status_whiteboard_type=subs tring&keywords=&keywords_type=anytokens&field0-0-0 =noop&type0-0-0=noop&value0-0-0=&cmdtype=doit&orde r=Reuse+same+sort+as+last+time&Submit+query=Submit +query
9 05
http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/Join
2-Login and do a search on your bug/pet peeves
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/query.cgi
(I did a search with component =Spreadsheet and Summary=Large and got this)
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/buglist.cgi?issue
3-Vote for this bug if it matches your problem. (At this time it has only 3 votes!)
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=1
CAVEAT: You might have to cut-n-paste the URLs yourself.
OpenOffice.org might not take links from Slashdot directly (too much traffic from lazy people)
TIPS: You have up to 5 votes. Sometimes you can place 2 votes on one issue.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
1-Create an account
_ type=DEFECT&issue_type=ENHANCEMENT&issue_type=FEAT URE&issue_type=PATCH&component=Presentation&issue_ status=UNCONFIRMED&issue_status=NEW&issue_status=S TARTED&issue_status=REOPENED&issue_status=RESOLVED &email1=&emailtype1=exact&emailassigned_to1=1&emai l2=&emailtype2=exact&emailreporter2=1&issueidtype= include&issue_id=&changedin=&votes=&chfieldfrom=&c hfieldto=Now&chfieldvalue=&short_desc=&short_desc_ type=allwords&long_desc=audio&long_desc_type=allwo rds&issue_file_loc=&issue_file_loc_type=substring& status_whiteboard=&status_whiteboard_type=substrin g&keywords=&keywords_type=anytokens&field0-0-0=noo p&type0-0-0=noop&value0-0-0=&cmdtype=doit&order=Re use+same+sort+as+last+time&Submit+query=Submit+que ry
4 969
http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/Join [openoffice.org]
2-Login and do a search on your bug/pet peeves
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/query.cgi [openoffice.org]
(I did a search with component =Presentation Summary=audio and got this)
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/buglist.cgi?issue
3-Vote for this bug if it matches your problem. (At this time it has 203 votes!)
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=2
CAVEAT: You might have to cut-n-paste the URLs yourself.
OpenOffice.org might not take links from Slashdot directly (too much traffic from lazy people)
TIPS: You have up to 5 votes. Sometimes you can place 2 votes on one issue.
--
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Actually, you missed Office 97 and my own copy of Office XP has 2002 stamped everywhere on it (perhaps you confused the XP version with Office 2000, which came out in 99). Personally, I still use Office 97 on an old laptop I keep around to use strictly as a word processor (running Windows 95 no less!). Mostly use Word, Excel and Power Point, but they all get the job done and I've never had issues opening the files up on newer versions (and only rarely had problems with the inverse). I've got newer versions available to me, but once I have the functionality that I need, why upgrade beyond that? Sure, they've got better spelling and grammer checking tools, but that's what all those English classes were for. And aside from that, I've never found them to be that effective when workign with non-US english.
:)
To be fair, I have looked at some of the features in the newest version of Excel, and I will admit that some of them are rather nice, but for my purposes, they're unnecessary, so why would I bother? Each according to his needs, I always say
Lose: misplace or fail || Loose: not bound together
I find that when someone sends me a word doc that has used layout and form fields, it doesn't translate well into OO.o and I have to boot up Word on my old PC (I recently switched to Mac and run OO.o on it) to fill out the form.
Start a happiness pandemic
Ignoring than the fact that it is slower to load the biggest factor is how the document will look with MS office. Also ingoring the fact that PDFcreator exists too.
Let's say you are preparing a project or bidding on a contract with big enough money tied to it. Do you send it with your OO and hope it looks correct to the reader (you know they use MSO) or do you shell out $425 bucks to do it with MSO? A badly presented document could cost you that project. Bill knows this and so do you.
It's a tough decision especially if there is enough money involved. Even if you are an MS hater or a true open software supporter, $425 is peanuts on a $100,000 contract. If someone is going to reply that they would not wave from their view over money, then I do not believe it or they are filthy rich.
Personally, for the amount of documents I put out, an old version of a word processor does the trick but know of people that had to choose. They chose safe. ($=CAD)
And you clearly are too stupid to realize when you're being trolled, you goddamn Nazi. The only person I "heckle" is you.
+++ATH0
But what do you mean by "accurately"?
When we get documents sent to us at work, what we care about is the content. We want the text and things like tables and document structure to be preserved. We really don't care if the pagination is marginally different. After all, we get that every time someone from the US sends us a document laid out on US Letter paper and we print it on A4.
I don't think the minor pagination differences matter nearly as much as everyone makes out. Even different versions of Word aren't consistent on this count. Personally, I wish they'd develop a grown-up paragraph justification algorithm. I'd gladly trade the odd bit of reformatting (if it really matters) for more readable documents.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I don't know enough about the development of OpenOffice to establish for myself whether your criticisms are fair, but your point is well taken nonetheless. Personally, my biggest concern at the moment is the the increasing evangelism of the ODF file format. Justifications always seem to come down to the idea that you should use a document, "open standard" format. Even governments are now signing up to the mantra.
Unfortunately, what this means in practice is just swapping one effective vendor lock-in for another, less well supported one. If you don't believe me and think ODF is really the highly-portable panacea of future document formats, just look at the comments made by senior OO developers on bug reports, where they note that such-and-such an obvious fix can't yet be made because it requires a change to the ODF format. The ODF standardisation effort is demonstrably holding back the development of OO itself, and for what? Does anyone really think one word processor's document format is ever going to be flexible enough for every other word processor's (or similar tool's) needs? Will the ODF format constantly change to support the latest OO needs, and will the same be true of any other software that adopts the format?
When it comes to file formats, I'll buy being fully and openly documented as a clear advantage: it facilitates interoperability. But the whole "open standard" thing for ODF seems just a sham to me, and little better than Microsoft's "standard" formats.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I've never been able to find the following feature in OO, and I'm wondering if it's just in front of my nose: MS Word has the following "views": Normal, Print Layout, and 2 others that I never use. Print layout lets you see pages with a little bit of border, so you can see exactly the margins of the printed text. In contrast, Normal just shows text without borders - which still page-wraps at my page widths, but isn't as distracting for me as is the Print layout. Does OO have this feature?
I don't like OpenOffice. The best all-out Office Suite I know is Lotus SmartSuite, but that sadly has mostly gone the way of the dodo. Then again i is the best non-monopolist Suite out there. Just the other day I was using Excel - which is actually considered a good Spreadsheet programm, be it MS or not - and tried to export into something other than xls. In order to do that to be able to process the sheet with a script I had to click myself through 3 popups per action at least.
You won't miss anything if you're ok with MS Office. Some things are a little different with OOo but it's basically the same without the pricetag and the lockin.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I use Oo 2.1.x on a daily basis, I used Office 2003 in a previous job.
The things that I find frustrating:
- Spellcheck is very annoying. It seems to be missing a lot of common words.
- Startup as many people have noted is slow.
- I've noticed random spaces being inserted in printouts when they don't appear in the document.
- Draw doesn't have nearly as many templates as Visio does for hardware like SANs, Cisco Routers, etc...
But it does save the company a boatload of money and in many cases has little to no effect on my productivity.
For what it's worth, we did get Office for the Sales group, they had too many issues with change tracking on contracts.
Doing things like lists or tables in OO.org Writer is a bit more unpredictable than it is in MS Word. Especially if you have to go back and edit, and later find all the spacing messed up. Despite weird behavior in those areas, it still manages to do the job for the most part.
I run a SBS server (for myself, hobbiest.. I wanted to learn something new, I bought a SBS server for home)
I can, from any pc webserver, log on, check my email, add appointments & contacts and notes, and have them available when I get home, and on my motorola q....
at work, I have on the desktop bookmarks to webechange urls that let me add appointments and contacts t my outlook with a simple click, and username/pass combination...
other people at work can access (*read only*) my calendar based on the permissions I supply to them...
from what I've seen.. there is nothing in OO to compare to outlook/exchange combination.....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I like Open Office word documents, and the save to .pdf has saved me and two employers quite a lot of time and money, since we were able to write /directly/ from a document to .pdf without unnecessary steps or proprietary (and sometimes too expensive) software. Calc has also always worked for me, though I don't use it nearly as much, and can't tell you that much about the differences between Excel and Calc. Draw is a really good tool, and my sister switched to OO.o from MS just for that feature (combined with GIMP, she's made some really nice brochures, flyers, business cards, etc.). Open Office's Impress, however, is no Power Point. It's not nearly as nice looking (just check out the demo: http://www.openoffice.org/product/impress.html), and is just noticeably slower - more of an annoyance than anything. A lot could be done to make it look better, though. /twocents
I am not an animal! I am something worse!
I'm reasonably happy with OpenOffice.org--it's free, after all--but it's so ugly! Under Ubuntu 6.10, it uses the default (i.e.: hideous) GNOME icons, instead of the much prettier Human icons, and I don't know if it's themable. The Windows port of OpenOffice.org looks a little strange as well. I can't place it, but there's something about the user interface that looks strange. Toolbar shading, probably; I've gotten too used to Office 2003.
I wonder what the F/LOSS community's response to the Ribbon will be. I personally love it (even though I hate Microsoft), and I think it's the first upgrade-worthy improvement in Office since the '97 edition (which I'd still use if my school didn't insist I use the free copy of Office 2003 they gave me).
Since Java's license is neither free nor open source, a small but vocal minority has responded both strongly and negatively.
Welcome back, 2005! We sure missed you!
In other news, the 1.6 JRE is noticeably faster in every regard to 1.5. Just sayin'.
Open Office 2.2 was released a few days ago, with support for kerning. I'm extremely pleased that my Word-created handbook now renders perfectly in OO2.2, including all pagination.
And in response to individuals that somehow thought I was wanting to fax clipart, those are two completely different downsides. I needed a fax template at one time, and on numerous other occasions have needed clipart.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.