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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?
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.
The Java runtime has to load also, which makes a _significant_ difference in startup time.
.doc file and open it with Word, usually it's up within 3-5 seconds.
As much as I don't like M$, when you click a
Oo.o takes upwards of 30 cuz it has to load the Java libraries, etc, displaying the splash screen of doom in the meantime.
This is not the greatest
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.
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
Older versions of office did do that; they were always have a "quick launcher" run, but the last three versions (Office XP, Office 2003, and Office 2007) do not do that.
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?
That does not help much.
t o-speed-up-open-office-org/
3 /22/204244
From the article you linked: "...go to Java options and disable them."
That is all it says on the matter. Where are these "Java options"? Do I have to apply them to each OO app seperately? Is there an OO settings utility? What's the deal?
This link is more helpful:
http://www.cyberciti.biz/motd-archive.php/20/how-
And this older article is most illuminating:
http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/0
It seems a lot of features die if java is disabled.
What a crock, java bites the big one.
Then conduct a review, bearing in mind that you will be paying for the M$ version every two years whether you want to or not, and pay for retraining costs as well as data conversion costs.
So swap to open office once or keep getting forced to swap M$ office every two years at a cost of thousands of dollars a time per desktop, especially when you add in M$ free bug testing program, the program they never stops making M$'s customer pay for their ill informed decisions.
There might be bugs in open office but at least your not paying for them. The M$ anti virus program, Onecare (their profits), the only anti-virus software that guarantees not to find viruses, WTF?
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
It is posible to disable the loading of Java libraries. If you don't need advanced stuff (90% of users), disabling loading of Java speeds up the load time of OpenOffice.org
p -start-time-for-openofficeorg/h tml
Also, modifying OpenOffice.org's memory settings also help. A quick search at google turns out:
* http://element14.wordpress.com/2006/11/01/speed-u
* http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-9925.
You can easily go from 30 to 8 seconds of load time.
Peace!
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.
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