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?

Comments

Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Microsoft Office compatability isn't perfect, and the other companies I work with send documents created with MS Office.

Re:Simple

[Fyre2012]

The Java runtime has to load also, which makes a _significant_ difference in startup time.

As much as I don't like M$, when you click a .doc file and open it with Word, usually it's up within 3-5 seconds.
Oo.o takes upwards of 30 cuz it has to load the Java libraries, etc, displaying the splash screen of doom in the meantime.

Re:Simple

[CastrTroy]

MS Office also is always running in the background, just incase you open up a document. You could do the same with just about any application. Keep it running in the background, and then poof, it starts. Of course, if you rarely used the application, you'd just be wasting memory, but hey, the app looks like it starts fast.

Re:Simple

[GIL_Dude]

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.

Re:Simple

[rawtatoor]

It's easy to disable java. I never use it and haven't missed it yet. Startup and load times are very reasonable too.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

MS Office also is always running in the background, just incase you open up a document. You could do the same with just about any application. Keep it running in the background, and then poof, it starts. Of course, if you rarely used the application, you'd just be wasting memory, but hey, the app looks like it starts fast.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Especially if you disable the Microsoft Office entry in the startup folder. With said shortcut disabled, Word is still orders of magnitude faster than java OO to startup.

That said, I hate word, and despise java applications. I find notepad and Vim more than adequate for my text editing needs.

Re:Simple

[rtb61]

Well that is the point if you are happy with your current office suite why swap. However once you are forced to swap when you don't want too, whether it be by a data compatibility forced upgrade or you need additional licences due to expansion.

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?

Re:Simple

[trewornan]

I've got to agree with most of what you say, except the issue with crashing, I haven't found OOo particularly prone to crashing.

On the issue of compatibility it's also worth noting that any macros in the document will not work in OOo but generally most issues are related to formatting and will not affect content. Also bear in mind that compatibility problems exists between different versions of MS Office as well - if you really care about the formatting and having a document displayed exactly the same on any system use a proper format designed for exchange.

As to publisher files, well christ, using doc files is bad enough but pub files are completely unreasonable.

Re:Simple

[opkool]

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

Also, modifying OpenOffice.org's memory settings also help. A quick search at google turns out:

* http://element14.wordpress.com/2006/11/01/speed-up -start-time-for-openofficeorg/
* http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-9925.h tml

You can easily go from 30 to 8 seconds of load time.

Peace!

macros

[Bananatree3]

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.

Re:macros

[mvdwege]

There's also OLE automation, which makes it very easy to knock up some code to use bits of Excel and Outlook remotely.

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

Slow start-up for one...

[Rellon]

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.

Re:Slow start-up for one...

[Fyre2012]

In my experience, NeoOffice is terrible at startup.

The App is great once it loads, but because I'm impatient (as well as my bosses, I have 8, did you get the memo? :p ), I find myself actually using Google Docs for everything.
The sharing features for GDocs are awesome, and it's a quick bookmark click to open up. It's not as smooth as NO once GD is running, but it's great for quick revisions and sharing to whomever else.

A few items..

[Dan East]

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

Re:A few items..

[zappepcs]

I'm not trying to belittle your opinion here, but there are those of us out here that remember those very same toe stubbing situations with MS Word itself, from version to version, and of course when there were still other word processing packages on the market.

It is inevitable that one software package will work slightly differently from a competing similar package. Add-ins, extras, templates will be different. What I like about OO is that you can make your own, and then share them with the world. - yes, sounded a bit fanboi-ish... meh

Stubbing your toes on office applications would still be a problem if MS hadn't been so successful at getting rid of it's competitors in this space. Currently, people just 'think' they don't know how to use MS Word. The real problem is that people don't know how to use office applications but they don't know there are any others besides MS. This means the don't have a chance to 'stub their toes' as it were.

Fonts, formatting, templates, and other *Standard features* of word processors give people trouble all the time, and if you stub your toes because OO isn't quite like MS Word, be happy because those things can be fixed. Finding them and reporting them is part of the process. Until Wordperfect died, people who used MS Word went through the same thing.

Re:A few items..

[Silver Sloth]

At the risk of a 'me too' posting I second everything you say. I really, really want to be an Oo user. I like the ethos and, where posible, I'm a open source fan, but, like you, I've got used to all the little extras which are missing and importing MS docs is far from 100% successful. But, in reply to the original poster, why not do as we've done, give it a try. After all, it's free, you can experiment all you like and make you're own mind up. I haven't de-installed it, and I sometimes still use it for creating original docs, but I wouldn't give up on MS anytime soon. Mind you, maybe the next time I have to fork out mega-bucks... My office 2000 is getting a little long in the tooth and I flatly refuse to pay MS prices.

Re:A few items..

[rbochan]

I would also include lack of integrated mail/calendar/scheduling software. Yes you could go to another third party for that, but it would be nice for everything to be integrated and consistent for an "office suite". I use OOo under Linux, but I supplement it with Kmail/Kontact.

Re:A few items..

[westlake]

What I like about OO is that you can make your own, and then share them with the world. The problem is that [people ]don't know there are any others besides MS. This means they don't have a chance to 'stub their toes' as it were. Fonts, formatting, templates give people trouble all the time, and if you stub your toes because OO isn't quite like MS Word, be happy because those things can be fixed. Until Wordperfect died, people who used MS Word went through the same thing.

That was then and this is now.

The secretary isn't being paid to re-invent the wheel.

The secretary is being paid to get the monthly employee certificates, good-will posters and office newsletters out the door before the close of business Tuesday.

The one-click download from MS Office Home gets the job done.

Re:A few items..

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:A few items..

[tomhudson]

"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.

This is what it will
end up
looking like because the
person doesn't have a clue as to what
they're doing and you have
a
bunch of embedded CRs
in the
file!!!

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.

Re:A few items..

[Ash-Fox]

I have never met anyone who didn't know how to use MS Word (or admitted it, at the very least).

I have met many people who claimed they knew how to use MS word, but when I saw their documents...

• No page breaks, just a bunch of CRs to got the next page
• Not setting the headers under the appropriate header style and then just customizing that... Instead they manually change the font, make it bigger, add bold, underline and type it in caps.
• Don't let the application word-wrap, instead they hit enter when they get to the end of the line.
• Just do something with some elements todo something like tables, but when you look at the document, they some how made it a picture...

Do I think they can do the same crap on OpenOffice? Yes.
Will they have a issue at first? Yes, because OOo Writer doesn't look and behave exactly like Microsoft Word.
Will they complain they don't like it? Probably, because it's different and they prefer the behavior they know.

TODAY, Microsoft office is probably the best office suite.

I have to acknowledge the UI and behaviour of Microsoft Office is certainly superior to other office suits.

However, that said -- I am not very impressed with the compatability Microsoft Office has with it's own documents between different computers and different versions of Office.

I also find it a little obscure that people complain so loudly about slight formatting issues and things that occur on OpenOffice with documents from Microsoft Office when Microsoft Office itself can't get it right.

Re:A few items..

[zappepcs]

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.

Bloated

[KermodeBear]

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.

formatting on complex documents

[radarjd]

I agree with many of the other posters -- formatting simply isn't spot on perfect when you open a document started in Word (or excel or powerpoint) with more complicated layouts. OO.org 2.1 is the best version yet as far as that goes, but I still open some documents, and have the formatting be off. I haven't tried any database work, so I can't comment on that.

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.

spreadsheets

[alphamugwump]

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.

Re:spreadsheets

[SECProto]

Exactly the issue I was going to bring up. When graphing data, it has difficulty/it is impossible to display the equation of a line of best fit, place several sets of data on the same graph, etc.

Nothing bad I can think of

[disturbedite]

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.

Known issues

[Animats]

• Microsoft Word import is still iffy. Some documents import fine, some import badly, and some don't import at all. It's better than it was in older versions of OpenOffice, but if formatting matters, you still can't freely interchange documents between OpenOffice and Word. I know, this really is a problem with Microsoft's obscure format. It's the biggest obstacle to widespread OpenOffice adoption, though.
• The help system is terrible. Each help box needs to stand alone. Instead, help text often assumes context from previous help text. For example, search help for "print envelope" and you get "Letter Wizard, Page 3", which isn't helpful. In general, finding answers with the help system is hard, and when you've found them, there's a good chance they will be out of context. A bad help system is a significant barrier to adoption.
• OpenOffice's answer to Clippy, the diamond-shaped popup thing, is even less useful than Microsoft's version.
• Auto-completion of words is badly designed. In Word, if you don't accept what it's doing, auto-completion doesn't try again for a while. In Open Office, it gets in your face and keeps trying. This is obnoxious. In typical open-source style, there's some obscure configuration parameter you can change to fix this. Wrong answer.
• "Draw" is reasonably good, better than what Microsoft Office used to have. But then Microsoft bought Visio and integrated it into Office, and Visio is better than Draw.
• "Calc" is about as good as everybody else's spreadsheet.
• "Impress" is OK for producing dumb presentations, but PowerPoint presentations tend to look better.

Re:Known issues

[R.Mo_Robert]

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.)

Re:Do you use it on a Macintosh?

[cybereal]

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.

Use NeoOffice

[soullessbastard]

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:

• Word OpenXML document import and export
• Excel VBA macro compatibility
• Microsoft Works file import/export
• linear programming extensions for Calc

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

Re:Use NeoOffice

[fermion]

Just FYI. I am a OO.org user. I know about Neooffice. I have used Neooffice. I think Neooffice is good software, and the main reason I have not used it is that,for what I do, OO.org is very reliable. Neooffice has not been as reliable. I continue to load it to see if it has become a mature product. It would be useful, on some occasions, to have an integrated MacOS interface, although in some ways X Windows is better.

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.

Re:Use NeoOffice

[aaronl]

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.

Line numbering and complex documents

[ahbi]

Yeah, I stopped trying to use OO when I ran into its poor support for line numbering and more complex documents.
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 ... come on.

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.

I don't get why people ask stuff like this

[brunes69]

If you're worried if OpenOffice can fit yoru needs then just DOWNLOAD the thing and try it for awhile.

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.

why calc for statistics?

[belmolis]

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?

Re:why calc for statistics?

[belmolis]

Statistics and spreadsheet usage are sufficiently different that even if you are familiar with Excel or Calc as spreadsheets, that in itself doesn't yield familiarity with the statistical functions. R is not that different from other programs for doing statistics and scientific graphics, so if people have any sort of background in those areas, they shouldn't need to learn a lot to use R. Are intro stat courses using Excel? I find that hard to believe given the criticism I've heard of Excel from statisticians.

Speed Up OOo

[soloport]

Here you go.

Re:Speed Up OOo

[Anonymous Coward]

That does not help much.

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-t o-speed-up-open-office-org/

And this older article is most illuminating:
http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/03 /22/204244

It seems a lot of features die if java is disabled.

What a crock, java bites the big one.

Java runtime?

[StarKruzr]

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.

Re:How about OOo bugs?

[Ash-Fox]

How about those wonderful OOo bugs that cause it to totally screw your formatting?

Never experienced it.

Randomly deleting document files?

That's probably a document deleting virus on your computer. OOo doesn't just randomly seek out documents and deletes them. I've certainly never experienced it.

Missing pasted images?

I had this when opening a few documents some people made in Microsoft Word (which I rarely ever do). But do images disappear in OOo when you paste them into it? I certainly haven't experienced it.

Everyone assumes the real problem is just "We need MSOffice people to convert!"

I don't see why? They seem happy paying for Office. Additionally they don't seem to have a interest in software freedoms etc. They just want something that they feel works for them.

when it should be "We should actually get our shit working first before we make other people eat it".

I don't really have any issues with OOo, if I did, I'd try todo something about it.

I must admit I have taken a liking to Microsoft Office's ribbon UI.

If I wanted crap like that I'd use Wordperfect.

Which costs 269.99 USD more.

What's Hot and What's Not

[JoeCommodore]

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.

Why Don't YOU Tell US?

[darkonc]

Open Office is free. Why not just download a copy and see how it works for your specific workload?

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):

• If you mostly generate and use documents internally then OO is likely to be just fine for you.
• If you have a boatload of specialized (VB) macros that are critical to your workload, you might have to have to (at the least) hire someone for a bit to do the translation for you. This may also be a reason to use the Novell extensions.
• If you have really precise needs for formatting and spacing, and do your document formatting in the 'dumb' way (hard-code line ends, and page ends, and use spaces where you should be using tab stops, etc., etc., etc., then moving to OO might hurt your brain.
• If your documents are done relatively sanely, and you're not going to have a fit if one page has 3 words that spill over to the next page in OO where it didn't in MSO then OO is probably a great fit for you.
• Convincing your normal correspondents to install a copy of OO, rather than always bouncing back and forth between OO and MSO formats will make your life easier.
• For the previous point, you might want to burn yourself a handful (or a crate full, depending on the size of your business) of OO install CDs.
  ... While you're at it, you might also want to includes copies of things like Gimp and Firefox, and any other Free software you'd like to see other people use.
• Given that OO is more OS agnostic than it's MS alternate, and it's easier to get mission critical fixes done (i.e. you can hire someone to do them for you) you might find that OO is your better choice in the long term, even if you determine that you could have some short-term problems with it.

Parent is wrong

[bheer]

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.

Re:IOW, Word is a waste of money and resources ...

[iminplaya]

HEY! Don't go knockin' solitaire! I thought I had seen my last Windows upgrade until I saw the new version. This Bill Gates guy is pure genius.

just more limited

[jilles]

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.

MS Word doesn't work for me, either

[rfc1394]

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 Blog

Not true and you know it

[brunes69]

This is total nonsense FUD and you know it. Of course there is a learning curve - but that's why I said KEEP OFFICE INSTALLED.

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?

Learning Curve?

[eagle52997]

I haven't seen anyone mention a learning curve yet.

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.h tml which make editing my kinds of documents easier. At this point, I have found no similar tools for OO.

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?

OpenOffice PDF export is a liability

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Why bother? Just convert it to PDF or print it to postscript.

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.

Re:OpenOffice PDF export is a liability

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I hate to say it, but you've made a common mistake MS Word users make. A word processor is not designed for creating high quality print materials, it's not designed for doing page layout, hell it's not really intended for doing anything beyond what a typewriter could do.

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.

I would imagine this is why the OOo developers are ignoring this at the moment, it is indeed a feature and not a bug.

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.

Try Scribus, it's free and open source, and works quite well once you get the hang of using a desktop publishing application instead of a word processor.

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.

As far as commercial apps are concerned, if you are developing single page content, Pagemaker or even Illustrator are pretty good. If your formatting books or manuals I like Framemaker.

<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.

The worst downside: OOo has no future.

[Dr. Spork]

I'm posting this too far down the thread, and I'm surprised it hasn't been said earlier:

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.

Actually, APK

[StarKruzr]

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.