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

[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

[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

[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.

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..

[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..

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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: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.

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.

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.