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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?
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
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.
Pages is excellent. It's perfect for just about any word processing needs. Even mail merge is supported. Obviously the super-advanced folks want more, and they can get it fine with MS Office because those dorks are using PC anyway :P Seriously though, I think it hits the nail on the head for a word processor.
However, your point about missing a spreadsheet app is notable. I have an occasional need to view and/or edit a spreadsheet. In fact, I use one each month to handle my bills and so forth. It's simple enough, just giving me an outlook of estimates vs. real values and so forth. The solution I'm using until Apple gets a "Sheets" application, is http://docs.google.com/
The spreadsheet on docs.google.com has a large portion of functionality from OpenOffice (Sharing its expressions, for example) and works shockingly well on all platforms' Firefox. It also works fine in IE6/7. I haven't tried any other browsers with it (that it actually supports). Anyone still wondering what to do with spreadsheets on Mac until a more mac-like spreadsheet app becomes available should seriously consider this option. I think you'll be surprised with how comprehensive the app is, despite being a webapp.
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
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.
It's easy to disable java. I never use it and haven't missed it yet. Startup and load times are very reasonable too.
With regards to the look of OpenOffice.org Impress presentations, they do tend to look quite bad with the default templates. (Maybe including some good-looking ones would be a nice thing to do for the future.)
However, you can download PowerPoint templates from Microsoft's site or even the program itself if you have it (even templates designed for PowerPoint 2007 if you use the Microsoft Office 2007 file format converter to convert to the older format) and import them into OpenOffice.org, then save them as templates. It's a little more work, but it works, and you get good-looking presentations. Of course, some people think it's icky to use stuff from MS, but it works. :)
One other thing I like about Impress is that you can export your presentation to a variety of formats, including PowerPoint, Flash, and PDF. That last one is the best for me--it even captures your slide transitions and everything. Put Adobe Reader (or FoxIt Reader--it works too) in Full Screen mode and nobody will know the difference. Plus you don't have to worry about having PowerPoint or Impress on your target computer, just a sufficiently recent version of Adobe Reader (version 6.0 worked for me, earlier ones might too). Or to virtually guarantee compatibility, download FoxIt Reader and place the executable on your flash drive or whatever (no need to install)--and then there's even less to worry about, at least if you're on Windows. But if you were thinking about using PowerPoint in the first place, you probably are. :)
I exported my Impress presentation as PDF the other week for a class and it worked great. Nobody knew the difference, although I'm sure some technically inclined people were curious when they saw me starting a PDF reader. (Not that I really needed to, since I'm lucky enough that my school actually includes OpenOffice.org standard on lab computers. But I just couldn't resist.)
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The other reason that I am not crazy about Neooffice is that every time the discussion come up, the Neooffice people start whining. You have a good product, a good build, and have done something the OO.org people did not do. Whatever battle happened, whatever politics occurred, you have won. Let it go. People who want to use a branch of OO.org in the Mac environment will use Neooffice. Those who don't use Neooffice, like me, probably have a good reason. Most of the time I can live without tight OS integration. When I was growing up I might use four different OS over the course of the day. An integrated product is not a sufficient reason for me to switch anymore than the ability to use a few more website and watch video content is a reason for me to buy a copies of Windows.
Then of course there is the issue of giving credit where credit is due. One of the biggest problems with the OSS community is people taking code, and then pretending that they came up with the code themselves in some hermetically sealed ivory tower. I do believe that the OO.org base, on which the excellent Noeoofice product is built, was donated and is still significantly maintained and supported by Sun. In fact the ability to get service agreements from Sun is one big reason why OO.org is a reasonable competitor to MS Office. I believe Sun is a corporation. Therefore, Noeoffice is quite influenced, and beholden to the corporate culture.
Furthermore, because I do not want to beholden to the corporate culture, and do not want to use bad or unsecured software, the last thing I want on my machine is VBA. That is like wishing Safari had ActiveX controls.
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OpenOffice.org has UNO, which is basically the same thing, and is accessible to both the built-in macro language (a VB-like BASIC dialect) and external scripting languages. Even better, OOo can embed scripting interpreters so that you can write your macros from within OOo in any supported language.
To be fair, the developer documentation for UNO is found in the OOo SDK, and is obviously geared to OOo hackers, not mere powerusers.
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
"get really tired of people who complain about pagination. If you need your pages to flow exactly in a certain way you need to put page breaks and other controls in there. Someone sometimes is doing to change the font slightly or add a few words. Neither should throw your entire document out of wack and make you redo the whole thing. Page breaks, especially odd and even breaks are there for you.."
These are the same people who randomly push the ENTER key at the right-hand margin rather than let the words wrap around to the next line. Its not funny getting something from them and your setup is different.
Telling them to press CTL+ENTER when they want to insert a hard page break ("what's a hard page break?") is a waste of time.
Thanks for adding that clarity. I've made way too much money helping people just understand MS Word. I try to teach them general principles and how Word handles those. The trouble is that they don't understand general document principles. When you show them what a page break is, their response is one of astonishment and relief: Oh, that's how to do that? Cool, thanks.
The one thing that MS did to make Word and Office quite usable (that HARDLY EVER gets implemented) is shared templates. Yes, even in the company that I work for, they have a website of logo pics and such rather than lock the applications to the 'shared templates' and make it work 'out of the box' for everyone. Even though MS has done some stuff right, nobody uses it that I can find.
That is typical of mankind in general.
This is something that I urge all F/OSS proponents to do: Show how OOo can be used in a group environment and make those shared resources work, make OO work like everyone should have been making MS Office work all along.
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I'm not entirely sure why you would ever want to do this. I can find many cases where OpenOffice doesn't work exactly like MS Office, or where it doesn't have some function that MS Office has. In many cases, you can implement the function, or find the function, in OpenOffice, and sometimes you can't. The point is that if I actively try to find excuses for OpenOffice not being good enough, then I can find them.
The easy solution is to not do what you're talking about doing. There isn't a good reason to have an audio loop in the middle of a presentation that stops on some random future slide that you designate later. If you want to make the mistake of embedding audio in a presentation, and it happens to be a loop, then you could always embed the loop into each slide that you want it on. Honestly, a presentation is something you're supposed to be using as a visual aid to guide a speech or to illustrate specific items that you're discussing. I don't imagine your use will ever be a priority, since it actually makes it more difficult to conduct a presentation.
If you absolutely need such a thing, right now, then you could contribute the code, pay someone to contribute the code, or keep using MS Office.
I really believe that the better answer is to change your lesson plan to not do that, regardless of which above choice you happen to make. I will admit though, that I'm biased on that topic: I hate presentation with noise and pointless distractions, like slide transitions. I find it much more productive to think of a computer aided presentation as a glorified slide projector. It keeps you on topic and guides you towards giving a better speech.
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!
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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.
thats the only problem ive ever seen. And no email client/scheduler.
No, that's a text editor, and you get one or more free with every mainstream OS on the planet.
Word processors -- as defined by the marketing of every major brand currently in existence, from MS Word to OSS tools like AbiWord and OOo Writer -- are far more than simple text editors. One of the major distinctions is that they offer formatting capabilities, such as choosing different typefaces for your text.
You may not accept this definition, and that's your prerogative, but it is how those people who claim to supply word processors advertise them, and it is what the users of those products expect.
That's just silly. OOo made a huge deal out of the fact that (until recently, at least) they could export to PDF but Microsoft Word could not. Countless past Slashdot discussions have seen OSS evangelists cite this as OOo Writer's "killer feature" advantage over Word.
And yet, the simple facts are that (a) the feature does not work in a trivial use case (changing fonts) in a wide variety of contexts (e.g., pretty much all pro quality fonts supplied by Adobe today are affected), and (b) the first you hear about this is when you've finished creating your document and decide to print to PDF (for on-line distribution, sending to a professional print shop, or whatever). This single bug renders the entire PDF export facility a joke, something that cannot be trusted by anyone who cares what their document looks like and makes the effort to format it nicely. This isn't a new feature, it's a show-stopping bug, and the comments on the official bug report make it pretty clear that I'm not the only one who sees it this way.
I did try Scribus, several times, since it was ported to Windows. Its interface is horrible, and its reliability was so poor that I was lucky to get through five minutes of work without a crash. I abandoned each attempt before I had been able to complete a single page of work using it. No disrespect to the development team, I'm sure it's got a lot of potential, but it simply isn't ready for production use yet.
<OSS Newbie> So the downside of OpenOffice is that it just doesn't work, the suggested OSS alternative is something that doesn't work, and failing those I should spend hundreds on a professional DTP package? I think I'll stick to Word, thanks. </OSS Newbie>
And for the record, I have been involved in serious document production for many years, using just about every big name commercial and OSS word processor, DTP package and typesetting system there is at some point. I have nothing against free packages -- for what they do, I think TeX and friends are fine products, for example -- but I also don't have rose-tinted spectacles when it comes to OSS and make excuses when the quality is poor. And in this case, no matter how much the developers are concerned about portability and different systems on different OSes and all that jazz, the simple fact is that from a user's point of view, this bug sucks.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.