Word 2007 Vs. Open Office 2.3 Writer

hairyfeet writes "Bruce Byfield of Linux.com has just posted his third Office shootout between Microsoft Office and Open Office. This is the first version comparing the new Microsoft Word 2007 with Writer from the latest version of Open Office. The verdict: while Microsoft Office beats Open Office in a few categories, overall Open Office wins — but by not as large a margin as in the past." Linux.com and Slashdot share a corporate overlord.

Comments

2007...uhggg

[blhack]

A few months ago somebody other than me ordered a few dells from dell.com....they accidentally ordered office 2007 instead of 2003 (which is the standard in our company). The 2007 is absolutely TERRIBLE! The the new inferface is probably great for somebody who has never used a microsoft office suite before, but for people who have been doing things the same way for the last 10+ years the change was too much. The problem was solved by replacing the 2007 office with OpenOffice. The OO interface was close enough to microsofts that OO was an almost drop in replacement for it.

Whats funny is that microsoft releasing this "NOW WITH SHINIER GRAPHICS!" version of Office is actually causing people in my org. to use OO. There was an incident a few days ago where a user needed an XLS 2003 file, the XLS 2003 format that Office 2k7 spits out wouldn't work correctly with the software they were using, the OO version would.

On the last herd of dells that I ordered, i skipped an Office Suite all together. I know that at least in my organization, now that office 2003 is difficult to come by (I know, you can still order it from newgg.com etc.), we will be using OpenOffice exclusively.

Re:2007...uhggg

[DragonWriter]

This was brought up in a different manner yesterday by someone. One scenario for the continued U.S. presence in Iraq is for our troops to be watching the borders for a while longer once the Iraqis "stand up." Vis-a-vis the borders with Iran and Syria, it makes a lot of sense.

I've been using Microsoft Office for well over a decade, on a daily basis. The only way in which 2007 is "worse" than either 2003 or OOo in terms of interface is that its not the same as one would expect from prior versions of Office (which have been fairly constant back at least to Office 95), so I can see why people of the "I refuse to learn anything new" crowd (which, previously, have help fuel MS Office's dominance) might prefer OOo, which is much closer the pre-2007 MS Office interface.

However, Office 2007's interface makes it so much easier to work with things (and much smoother to do things the right way that makes documents more easily maintainable, too) than the pre-2007 interface that I'm was much happier with 2007 after about a day of working with it (my only problem is that I have to switch back and forth between 2007 at home and 2003 at work, and that OneNote 2007, despite being a wonderful program on its own, doesn't have an interface that fits in with the 2007 style, being more in the pre-2007 style.)