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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.
I wonder if Open Office defaults to all the annoying rubbish turned on.
I really miss Word Perfect 4.1 :o(
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
So how about price vs. performance
Hmm, I seem to keep getting an overflow error.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
I RTFA, but it doesn't compare Mail Merge. Does Mail Merge have any improvement in OO.o? It used to be completely unusable.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
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.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
Interfaces: Verdict: OpenOffice.org, not because it is well-designed, but because Microsoft Word's changes seem pointless and upset users for no good reason.
There are 2 advantages to OO that mean anything.
1. Its free
2. Its open source
Does it surprise anyone that linux users go for it?
Frankly, I find this amazing this got on slashdot, not because it is so anti-MS, but more because its so transparent, meaning it ends up doing it really badly. In the reading of this, all you see is paragraphs about the features of word, then at best maybe a sentence about OO, and then OO is declared the winner. Honestly, I've tried both and this article doesn't bring up any of the really good points MS has going for it, and doesn't bring up the use of Open Office at all- if open office has a feature that word also has, open office gets declared better I don't know why.
If you've got money to burn, buy MS Office. If you are a tightwad, download Open Office. If you are somewhere in between, download Open Office, use it, and if you decide you aren't happy with it, buy MS Office. If you still aren't happy, I can't help you. You'll probably never be happy.
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." - Shepard Book Quoting Malcolm Reynolds
Except where he forgot to review things like collaboration (shared workspaces, SharePoint and NetMeeting interop), revision control, integration, extensibility model, autoformatting, the insane amount of clip art available for free from the Office website, mail merge, the document map functionality, Office Update, speed, etc. etc.
People don't generally use something like Word because it's a good word processor - there are cheaper solutions for that. Word is good because it's part of a complete integrated solution. Otherwise you can get something cheaper or more specialized.
Of course, it's also somewhat amusing that OO has "won" the author's three comparisons in 02, 05, and 07, given his obvious predilection for Linux, and the fact that the article is published on linux.com. I wonder if it would have been published had he said that Word 2007 was superior?
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Linux.com favoring OpenOffice? Get out, really? This comparison is more like a 500 word high school paper. There are no real details, no screenshots and few specifics.
If Microsoft wrote a review / comparison this we'd have 200 comments here screaming FUD.
I'm sure Open Office is a great match for Word now, but if the writer wants to make that point, he needs to use some specific metrics.
Although I initially disliked the ribbon, after using it for a couple of months I find the menu bar so 2000's. The ribbon really does expose more commands and make them easier to find. Other features I like about Word 2007 include the live preview and a very smart right click menu. The spell checker and suggestions are pretty dead on, and the new grammer checker is actually useful enough to leave on.
Other features I find valuable in word include macros and really powerful indexes and table of contents. The whole color scheme and master documents (although difficult to learn) really are helpful.
The real problem with word is that it needs to satisfy a large number of users with different expectations. Everyone who uses word says that they only use 10% of the features, yet the 10% selected is always different.
I guess the real benefit to word is complete compatibility with other word documents. For collaborative editing, going around in cycles with different software is a pain.
Given the relatively low cost of office (about $120 for home/student, and about an incremental $200 on the purchase of a new machine for a small business license) makes it pretty difficult to switch. In a corporate environment with software licensing the cost of the full office suite for a new employee is less than it costs for the office chair. Saving money a couple of bucks isn't enough of a reason to switch.
I'm a technical writer, and for doing long documents, I would not use either of these products. Open Office, while prized by some of my colleagues, seems to have too many mission critical failures or half-baked features. Microsoft Office, while good for both the home and small business market, becomes a hindrance when you use it for larger projects with more diverse requirements. I can make either one do what it must, but I would prefer Adobe FrameMaker or its open source clone, Lyx.
technical writing / development
As GP said, the OO Writer was actually more familiar to their users than MS Office 2007. Which shows that introducing something new and different can backfire even on a near-monopolist that supposedly controls the market.
:-)
The fact that Microsoft has spread FUD about re-training costs for Linux in the past makes it only more funny
C - the footgun of programming languages
You were suppose to multiple by the number of users with the price. So for Word, it may be 100 * 200 = 20,000, while OO would 100 * 0 = 0.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I've been interested in this and conducted my own tests. You can definitely type faster in Word2007 whatever the OO people say. All those millions spent in development go somewhere you know.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
It hasn't yet. It's at RC2, so almost there.
http://download.openoffice.org/680/
and changes What's new
Wow.. almost as in depth as the original comparison.
Apples new word processor looks interesting because it separates content from layout, too bad they don't support ODF. All other modern word processors are badly munging 2 distinct disciplines. When I was last forced to use Microsoft Word, I copied and pasted the text from notepad and then spent 10 minutes convincing Word who was boss. That's 10 minutes to lay out a document; it would have been easier in a DTP package and I could have manually typed a CSS layout in half the time!
In 2007 Word processors (like spreadsheets being used as "databases") are a non solution to a non problem; a proverbial hammer for the computer illiterate.
Indeed, not least because Word 2007 does not have a Linux version. Since I'm a Linux user, OpenOffice wins because the opponents never turned up.
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Miles ahead doesn't help much if you're going down the wrong road.
-- Alastair
Don't have any Karma to burn anyways
I do think the UI in 2007 is an improvement over 2003/XP/2000, but that's really anything's an improvement over that.
"The Federal Reserve is a fraudulent system."--Lew Rockwell
End The FED. -
Any series of articles that thinks OpenOffice Writer has been better than Word in the past is dead before it starts. Only the most OSS-loving evangelist would make such a claim. Of course, the claim is only made because Writer won (according to the reviewer) in more categories (arbitrarily selected by the reviewer, and having equal weight).
In this case, it's interesting that he pans the ribbons in Office 2007. It's only as anecdotal as his claim, but I personally haven't yet found anyone who's given Office 2007 a fair try and didn't prefer the ribbons after a period of getting used to them. Microsoft's usability people seem to have done their job well on this one. Word certainly isn't perfect as far as usability goes, but it's hardly the disaster this guy makes out.
On the styles count, he pans Word 2007 for not having page and frame styles, but frankly, I have never used those features in OO Writer. I use styles and templates a lot, but if I'm doing something with enough flash to be using styles like that, I'll probably be using a DTP program anyway, and neither Word nor OO Writer is really up to that kind of page layout. Meanwhile, has OO Writer got shortcut keys for styles (and for removing them) that actually work yet?
On page layout, apparently the only thing Writer lacks is the ability to link text frames. I imagine that will be of great concern to the DTP big boys! Or not, unless a whole bunch of other stuff has been added since 2.2, and a whole load of bugs fixed. (I can't tell, since only 2.2.1 appears to be available for download so far.)
The comments about templates are only about those supplied with the packages, which unless you're Joe 12-year-old doing a high school project are utterly irrelevant. Professional organisations will generally set up their own, if they use them at all, which means the tools for setting up and modifying templates are far more important than the page layout equivalent of clip-art.
On numbered/bulleted lists, Writer apparently has little room for improvement over 2.2. I imagine anyone who's suffered the pain of trying to get multi-level lists to lay out properly and struggled through the ludicrously overcomplicated numbering architecture will disagree. Lists suck in Word, but they suck even more in Writer. Neither has a feature worthy of a serious word processor.
On headers and footers, the review criticises Word for its limited flexibility. When Writer can even put the most recent heading in the header automatically, get back to us.
On the footnotes and endnotes thing, calling Word's facilities basic in comparison to Writer is rather harsh. There are one or two nice tweaks in Writer that Word doesn't have (at least, I haven't found them yet if they were added in 2007, and it didn't before). Most people will never use these features.
On the subjects of cross-references, both Word and Writer suck beyond the point of being usable. They just suck in different ways. Someone should introduce them to LaTeX, which uses the stunningly complicated system of naming a place you might want to refer to later, and then referring to it by name elsewhere. When the word processors here have bookmarking facilities that do this, reliably, and without a tendency to corruption, they can claim to even have a useful cross-reference facility, but until then, it's just not true.
On indices and tables of contents, the reviewer apparently confuses his own stylistic preferences with faulty design — unfortunate, considering that almost any professional typesetter is likely to disagree with him on that one. In any case, again neither program really shines in this area, though. Simple things (in terms of the kind of documents where you'd care about these things) like having both a table of chapters and a detailed table of contents are bizarrely awkward if they work at all. Again, without better support for pulling these things in and actually getting them to work (there's no point being able to generate both tables if you can't get
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
http://oestrem.com/thingstwice/?p=65 provides an informative comparison of the aesthetics of LaTeX, Word, and OO Writer. When beauty is the goal, LaTeX wins.
You do know, that had this been an entirely different forum, the Chiefs of Staff in THAT alternate universe would have started the war as you've ordered, Mr President. I'm soooo glad I found you here. Now, take your medicine...
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Styles are usually just format related, ie font face, size, indent and tab settings, etc. all wrapped up into a "Style" which you can apply to content all at once instead of making the same dozen changes to every place you want to update. Also, once the style is set, you can change the style in one place, and it gets updated everywhere. This is nice if you want to revamp the look of a document.
A template has styled elements to it, but is more like a partially pre-populated bunch of content, like a form letter. You open the template, and it generates a stub of the document you're creating. You fill in the unique bits, and save it under a unique filename. Ideally as much of the work should be done for you by merely opening the template as possible.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
well duh, when was the last time that a sensible discussion of the different features and the pros and cons of two pieces of software, objectively weighing up the advantages of each in an unbiased manner was entertaining? ummm never. Now, when the last time a flame war was entertaining? Every time, that's when, and on that note I declare you a big fat monkey who knows nothing about anything, plus you smell like steve balmers armpit after a vigourous chair throwing session
P.S. It's spelt M$.
*Rolls in gasoline and pours powdered magnesium into hair*
*Puts bottle rockets in mouth*
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
Crow over this guys story if you want to, but don't be a hypocrite. Consistency would demand that you call his story FUD against Office 2007.
Most of MS's efforts against Linux adoption have been aimed at the server market, where the difference between Linux and Windows are major - arguably more so than the difference between MS Office 2007 and OO.o (any version). The fact that people are switching to OO.o because Office 2007 is too unusual for them is a strong indication that switching to Linux would have MASSIVE retraining costs.
(Office 2007 isn't that different; have you ever used it? The ribbon is basically a merge of the toolbars and the menus, and the hotkeys haven't changed - I personally found it easier to find many the features I was used to in 2007's interface than in OO.o's, even when I had already found them once before in OO.o and had only installed 2007 a few days ago. YMMV of course but I've never liked OO.o's interface and KOffice isn't really any better.)
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
* Ignites bottle rockets *
* takes a few steps back *
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Let's be serious, would you show up to a Linux user party?
Neither spreadsheet is too bad. I used to prefer Excel in the days when I did large spreadsheets, but now I regard them as essentially identical - except that I need WINE to run Excel.
I agree the word processors are horrible, but I think that is because the concept is flaws. What we need is something like Lyx, but a lot more polished: what Lyx would be if it had received the same resources as Open Office.
"On the Mac, it managed to crash _and_ lose my document. Yes, it corrupted the file on disk and couldn't restore it."
Here is the fix: Open the Microsoft Word file, that Microsoft Word is not able to read, in Open Office. Save it as a Microsoft Word file. That will fix the file, and you will then be able to get Microsoft Word to read its own file.
For that reason I think Microsoft should include a copy of Open Office with every copy of Microsoft Word. If you have Word, OO is a necessary tool.
I'm not joking. I've had Microsoft Word destroy its own file and I've used OO to repair the file, and so have many other people.
"Who would've guessed that a bunch of hobbyist programmers could give a billion dollar corporation a shiver. That's quite an accomplishment."
It was not "hobbyist programmers". Sun paid $88,000,000 for the software that became Open Office.
because it always comes down to either what your job makes you use, or personal preference. The involvement of personal preference guarantees that rancor will surface in short order. As far as business/job use, saying that product x is "required for serious document creation" usually means that the company has painted themselves into a corner with previous decisions/purchases and so now lack the flexibility to use the alternative, but they have to paint the poop pretty colors so they pretend that their document needs puts them in an elite class that can only be served by an expensive office suite.
Interesting. I have been using WP 8 to develop a very large MS (2100 pages of text) for some time now. I've been continuing my reliance on this older wordprocessor for several reasons 1) it does work very well 2) I want to retain my increasingly large text in one file as it is arranged alphabetically and this makes it easy for me to search only one document to find what I am looking for (quickly sections I need to add to or revise, without having to open and maintain multiple files), and 3) it has an extensive character set that permits me to encode other languages (except pictographic languages, such as Chinese and Japanese), which I need to quote verbatim.
I've tried Word and some time ago OpenOffice to see if I could transfer these character sets over from WordPerfect. However, I found the former hard to use and to paraphrase the article it doesn't do well with manuscripts over 40 pages. The seeming inability to adequately handle "master document" indices that would its use in handling large files out of the question. The comments with regard the ability of Open Office to handle manuscripts with hundreds of pages seems hopeful, but I'm dealing with 2,100+ pages not hundreds.
Two nice things about OpenOffice I liked was that it runs under Linux, which I use for many things not Word Perfect, and that files that include graphics seem to be saved in a much more compact, space efficient way (although I find the interface a bit more awkward to use, perhaps because of long familiarity with WP 8.0.
As I add graphics the MS is getting quite large (presently about 233 MB) and it is taking an increasingly longer time to do periodic backups, I have given thought to upgrading my computer (a Dell xps M140), but I fear what I will discover about the new WordPerfect in a Vista environment.
Has anyone had experience with WP when making the jump to Vista? With all the graphics I'd like to incorporate, I expect the document to be 2 - 5 GB in size ultimmately.
Does anyone have comments from extensive experience dealing with very large documents using Open Office or the newer versions of Word Perfect running under Vista? I'd like to be open minded but the integrity of my work is paramount.
Has anyone had any success in translating the various extended character sets in Wordperfect to Open Office? When I last checked this was not possible, except via a (then, now?) expensive proprietary interface.
Are there other better wordprocessors that I should consider for incorporting lots of graphics into an already very big text file?
As for macros, I often process text using JEdit, which has extensive macro capabilities, in particular the ability to work on arbitrary windows (rows and columns) at one time, which is great when one has multiple lines of data that need to be placed into a new format interactively.
Suggestions from knowledgeable users would be appreciated. Real data dealing with file sizes and backup times, time to open and search/find would be especially informative.
Anyone heard of others dealing with even larger files?