OpenOffice.org 3.0 Wants to Compete with Outlook

jason writes "At the OpenOffice.org 2007 conference about a month ago there was a presentation on what to expect in the next major milestone for their Microsoft Office competitor. "The presentation mentions bundling Thunderbird with their Office Suite, and refers to it as an 'Outlook replacement.' This is all assuming that Thunderbird recently losing two of its main developers doesn't affect the decision, because I'm sure OpenOffice wants to ensure that Thunderbird will continue to progress before including it." This probably won't sway large corporations away from using Microsoft Office, but it could make it more intriguing for the smaller businesses that are looking to cut some costs."

Comments

Compete?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Outlook doesn't spread enough viruses as is?

Re:Compete?

[fat_mike]

I would point you towards the other posts below but I'm afraid you're to busy masturbating to OpenOffice.

Outlook doesn't cause viruses or spyware or adware or malware, users do. And so do self-important system administrators who look down on their users and consider themselves better.

Dilbert was funny when it was true.

Re:Compete?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hah hah, that never gets old. How many Fortune 500 companies successfully use Outlook, now?

Re:Compete?

[TheMightyTor]

What's interesting is that there hasn't been a big virus outbreak that relies on Outlook as an attack vector in many years. In fact I haven't had to deal with a 'true' Outlook virus\malware that actually was successful at spreading since Outlook 2000. I'm not saying it's the best client though. I am a big fan of Thunderbird, but an Outlook replacement it is not, for the corporate world, where you have to be concerned with meetings (calendaring), compliance, and data retention. So lets just stop the "Outlook spreads viruses" malarkey. It just isn't true.

You gotta be kidding.

[SatanicPuppy]

Jesus. How about they compete with Word first, eh? Calling Thunderbird an "Outlook Replacement" just shows they have no idea what people use Outlook for. Outlook Express replacement, sure.

The great thing about Office is all the damn pieces work together. Excel is friendly with Access, Access is friendly with Word, Everything is friendly with Outlook. To beat Office, you have to have an Office suite that works like that. Not just all the pieces in one package.

There is not one single thing in OO that doesn't have an OSS equivalent stand-alone application that is at least as good. Bundling a mail client with the rest of your apps doesn't suddenly make you competitive, especially when your whole user base could have already installed that mail client if they wanted it.

There are OSS projects that are actually making a push toward doing the things that Outlook does (like Kontact). But Thunderbird is still lagging behind Evolution imho, and neither of them play all that great with any of the groupware servers out there, open or closed.

I used to try and push OO on people, but I've completely lost faith in it. I keep thinking, maybe they'll get their crap together, but then they do stuff like this.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[SerpentMage]

I wish I had mod points left over...

I know exactly how you feel. I used to use Office 2000 since about 1999. Since then I have been waiting for Open Office to serve as an Microsoft Office replacement. What happened? I upgraded to Office 2007 a month ago. I as well have given up on OO. Maybe one day, but then I will be ready for retirement and won't care.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[ozmanjusri]

What's with all the vitriol?

OOo creates documents, spreadsheets, presentations and drawings.

It does so efficiently once you're familiar with it, often more efficiently than it's major competitors.

It saves your data in a format which can be opened by any other software that chooses to support it, and it costs nothing to install. If there's a document you're unable to create with it, chances are you don't know how to use it properly.

In spite of all this you're complaining, behaving like it whipped your dog. Why's that?

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Anonymous Coward]

You gotta be kidding. Compete with Word? Word is without a doubt the crappiest part of the MS Office suite, and far worse than Writer, WordPerfect, or even a 7 year old copy of Ami Pro.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[niiler]

First, let me say that your experience with OO will depend on what you use it for. As I use it mostly for writing papers for publication in scientific journals, quick spreadsheet applications (usually for classroom illustrations), and for "powerpoint" presentations at conferences, it works just dandy for me.

I do have to respond to your comment that "There is not one single thing in OO that doesn't have an OSS equivalent stand-alone application that is at least as good." I like the concepts of KOffice, and Gnome Office, but KOffice really isn't as functional as OO in any way, shape or form. It used to open faster than OO, but recently, OO has taken just three seconds from click to start on my computer, so I can't complain about that. Gnome Office is not integrated. Abiword is great for very small documents of limited functionality, but is no where near the abilities of swriter. Gnumeric is arguably equal with scalc, but then it doesn't have the same sort of interapplication communication with documents as scalc shares with swriter. As a long time simpress user, I have yet to find either a problem with it interoperating with powerpoint, or another opensource program that holds a candle to it.

So to finish, you are probably right in that OpenOffice has a long way to go in matching every type of functionality as MS Office, but I still can't say it has any real competitors in the OSS world at the current time. [Note to KOffice users: I have seen quite an improvement in functionality over the last couple of years, but you all need another couple of Google Summers of Code to catch up. - No flames intended, it's just my humble opinion.]

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[NJVil]

Absolutely. If I had mod points today, I'd throw one your way.

I have recommended OO to many of the students (especially the lower-income ones who cannot afford the Microsoft procetag) in the high school I teach in, and there have been a few adoptees. Most, however, complain of the lack of working features... sadly, perhaps the most trivial of which is the default save as .odt, which is unreadable by the school's myriad Word instances. Tables, fonts, and formatting also sometimes come out looking wrong. There are a whole host of minor, annoying bugs that plague Writer, which should be dealt with before going after Outlook... which few of today's teenagers (or for that matter, the teachers I work with) care about anyway since almost all use Yahoo or Hotmail or GMail anyway.

So, my point is, give me one great program I can use to get the younger generation hooked on. Don't waste time building up a suite of so-so programs that nobody will want to use because they're all just so-so. Sure the anti-Microsoft fanatics will use it, but it will not appeal to anyone else. Don't just give me an alternative, give me better than what's out there, and I'll gladly use it. I'll gladly advocate. In the span of a few years, many people switched to Google as their default search engine because it was better, not because it tried to do everything well. As of right now, though, I am not going to continue damaging my reputation as one of the few teachers in my school who knows anything about computers by continuing to recommend a sub-par Open Office.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[rucs_hack]

Jesus. How about they compete with Word first, eh? Calling Thunderbird an "Outlook Replacement" just shows they have no idea what people use Outlook for. Outlook Express replacement, sure.

To most people there is no difference, unless they work for big companies.

The great thing about Office is all the damn pieces work together. Excel is friendly with Access, Access is friendly with Word, Everything is friendly with Outlook. To beat Office, you have to have an Office suite that works like that. Not just all the pieces in one package.

I was rather under the impression that the integration of office components with each other and tightly with windows, while nice in theory, actually made it a horrible security threat. Applications that co-operated but existed wholly apart from the OS, other than running on it would be a good thing.

There is not one single thing in OO that doesn't have an OSS equivalent stand-alone application that is at least as good. Bundling a mail client with the rest of your apps doesn't suddenly make you competitive, especially when your whole user base could have already installed that mail client if they wanted it.

potentially a good point, but in fact it is not assured that people would know about alternative mail clients from OSS> Better it is offered as an installable component with the OO suite.

There are OSS projects that are actually making a push toward doing the things that Outlook does (like Kontact). But Thunderbird is still lagging behind Evolution imho, and neither of them play all that great with any of the groupware servers out there, open or closed.

Kontact is Linux only. While I wish many KDE apps would make it to the windows platform, most aren't, so kontact probably isn't a good comparison. kolab perhaps, as it is based on kontact, but I don';t think that's exactly ready to uproot outlook any time soon.

I used to try and push OO on people, but I've completely lost faith in it. I keep thinking, maybe they'll get their crap together, but then they do stuff like this.

If you've given up on it, then your not really a good source for an opinion on its usefulness. I use it and MS Office together, I have to for now, until all my templates are ported to my satisfaction. Openoffice is very nice MS Office has the edge on maturity, but I don't like the locked in nature of the document formats.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Most, however, complain of the lack of working features... sadly, perhaps the most trivial of which is the default save as .odt, which is unreadable by the school's myriad Word instances."

Gee, if only there was a way to change the default to save as Word format.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Alphager]

Kontact is Linux only. While I wish many KDE apps would make it to the windows platform, most aren't, so kontact probably isn't a good comparison. kolab perhaps, as it is based on kontact, but I don';t think that's exactly ready to uproot outlook any time soon.
KDE4 will run under Windows.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Fieryphoenix]

There was exactly zero vitriol in the parent posts, and, as well, they explained precisely what makes OpenOffice unsatisfactory for their needs. In spite of all this you're complaining, behaving like they whipped your pet software. Why's that?

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[seyyah]

Agreed. I run Linux and it's faster to open MSOffice under Wine than to open up OpenOffice (and that's without Wine already running). I still like OpenOffice - it's certainly more stable than running MSOffice in Linux, but it's certainly bloated.

I'm just wating for the day that KWord supports .odt properly. That's what I want to be using.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[SerpentMage]

Have you tried using OO for anything related to earning money? I use Office for two purposes; writing manuscripts, and investing. And in these two respects OO fails miserably! (And I have tried to use OO)

WRT to manuscripts I can't keep comments, styles, formating etc straight.

WRT to investing the OO spreadsheet is way to limited, and to extend the spreadsheet with custom functionality is absolutely painful! OOBasic bites, and their component architecture is anything but simple. OO extensions are a joke when compared to Microsoft Office.

So in the end OO is not usable except for extremely simple things. I am complaining because after eight years of using Microsoft Office 2000 OO is not close to the capabilities of 2000. Yet I have and use Office 2007, and that is the sad part.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Blakey Rat]

If they really want to compete in the corporate realm, they need a drop-in replacement for *Exchange* (or Domino among the less savvy corporations), not Outlook. I agree with you entirely that this, along with so many other things that OpenOffice does (lack of a good outline mode, lack of accurate word count, crummy chart rendering, lack of video in presentation tool) just shows how completely, 100% out-of-touch OpenOffice developers are with anybody who actually uses Office to get stuff done.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Anonymous Coward]

Minor correction: Many KDE4 *apps* will run (natively) under Windows (and OS X). The KDE4 desktop will not.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Blakey Rat]

It saves your data in a format which can be opened by any other software that chooses to support it, and it costs nothing to install. If there's a document you're unable to create with it, chances are you don't know how to use it properly.

To use an example from a previous OpenOffice discussion, let's say I want to use OpenOffice to translate a text from Japanese into English. I bill 'per-character' in Japanese, so to determine how much to charge the client, I do a word count in OpenOffice. And the results given for english are correct, but the Japanese results are entirely wrong.

Copy and paste the same text into Word, and the word count works fine the first try.

Now, you're right, that technically I didn't *need* word count to complete this task. I could have manually counted through all the words. You also don't technically need a good outline view, since you can manually select and drag huge blocks of text around the document. You also don't technically need video support in Impress, because you can just tell the viewers to close their eyes and imagine what it might look like. So I guess in that sense you're technically correct.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree whoever is in charge of openoffice product development at the high level is just an idiot.

get rid of java, match the feature set of office, get an access replacement and for god's sake make it smaller and lighter - other office suites are just a lot quicker.

Personally I use seamonkey, openoffice and a web based calendar app. We don't need an integrated email client, we need something that works well. Try coming up with something useful like a live document collaboration type feature (please not vnc based)

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[LameAssTheMity]

I've tried using OO for business dealings as well and been disappointed.

At least OO can use Microsoft's templates! (they look and behave a whole lot better)

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Blakey Rat]

To most people there is no difference, unless they work for big companies.

Well der. The point, to spell it out more clearly, is that the people who are developing OpenOffice aren't coming up with features that big companies want, and big companies are the ones holding the majority of Office licenses.

I was rather under the impression that the integration of office components with each other and tightly with windows, while nice in theory, actually made it a horrible security threat. Applications that co-operated but existed wholly apart from the OS, other than running on it would be a good thing.

Not enough of a security threat to bother any of the hundreds of thousands of companies that have purchased it. But more seriously, macros are completely reined-in, Outlook restricts everything, IE7 has as many security features as Firefox and runs in a sandbox in Vista to boot. (It's not part of Office, but I figured someone would bring it up.) And, frankly, it's been years since anybody has seen a macro virus, or another virus that uses Office to spread, and so even if there is still some security threat to these products more-so than to OpenOffice (which frankly I doubt), there's a sense of calm in that area right now.

Speaking of security, Office does have a nice feature where you can encrypt sensitive files before sending them out of the office to prevent your data being read by nefarious third-parties. Does OpenOffice have anything of the sort? (I haven't used it in a few years, and their website is so horrible it doesn't even have a basic page describing the features of the product, nor does it have screenshots, or basically anything you'd want to see before downloading it.)

Openoffice is very nice MS Office has the edge on maturity, but I don't like the locked in nature of the document formats.

I can guarantee if you go to a professional writer and ask:

Which would you rather have?
A) An outline view where you can instantly re-order your work, including notes and references?
B) A slightly more open document format?

There isn't a single one who's going to answer B.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried using OO for anything related to earning money? I use Office for two purposes; writing manuscripts, and investing. And in these two respects OO fails miserably! (And I have tried to use OO)

I routinely use OO.o Writer for manuscripts. I use GNU Cash for my investing, but I would be able to use OO.o Calc.

WRT to manuscripts I can't keep comments, styles, formating etc straight.

What does "keep straight" mean in this context. OO.o Writer has a perfectly usable style manager & it is easy to create new styles, apply them to sections, etc. I agree that the presentation of comments is better in MS Word. However, they are retained in OO.o Writer & might be good enough for some people. For articles, I tend to get only one to three comments per page. This is tolerable in OO.o. Also: There was a google sumemr-of-code project to add the comments-in-margin interface that MS Word has. So it certainly can be fixed & should be watched.

WRT to investing the OO spreadsheet is way to limited, and to extend the spreadsheet with custom functionality is absolutely painful! OOBasic bites, and their component architecture is anything but simple. OO extensions are a joke when compared to Microsoft Office.

I disagree. MS VBA also bites & MS keeps threatening to drop it from Office. OO.o does support some VBA if you really like it better. OO.o supports python, which is quite cool. The IDE still has a way to go, but I think that having a choice of scripting languages (including the one used by MS Office) gives OO.o a real advantage here.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Crayon Kid]

If you're using a word processor to edit manuscripts, you get what you deserve. You should be using something like LyX, which is more rigurous and oriented towards allowing you to write content first and apply/change style later, at your convenience.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Macthorpe]

OOo creates documents, spreadsheets, presentations and drawings. None of which are up there in terms of quality with what I can create using Office 2007.

It does so efficiently once you're familiar with it, often more efficiently than it's major competitors. But then, pretty much anything is efficient when you're used to it. It takes extremely bad programming to end up with a system that you can't get used to, and Microsoft has the money to pump into usability studies to make sure that Office doesn't end up that way.

In spite of all this you're complaining, behaving like it whipped your dog. Why's that? I didn't get that impression - I got the image of someone trying to promote a free software product, and then being told that instead of improvements to the existing lineup they're going to throw in a pre-existing mail client and pretend that it's even in the same league as Exchange. To me that sounds pretty frustrating.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Sentax]

This reminds me of when I tasked one of my employees to burn a powerpoint presentation on a CD and make it auto-run. I knew it was simple with PowerPoint and I mentioned that he install MS Office for this purpose and to ignore that he thinks OO can do the same and will do it equally, well 4-5 hours later I noticed he had been burning alot of CDs and is still testing this thing. He said he was having trouble getting the right components to copy to a computer that may not have PowerPoint installed so it would play the presentation. I asked if he installed MS Office and used that PowerPoint because I knew there was a simple "Create for CD" wizard in the file menu. He said no and insisted on not installing it because he is a hard core OO fan and thinks that MS Office is the devil. I made him install it and within minutes we had a burned disc and everything ran great.

This is where I get frustrated because he is fighting for a office suite that came about because of MS Office and everything he likes is a standard created by MS Office. He just doesn't get it. Since I work in the same department with him I want him to try things out for himself and not force him to use certain applications if he is so insistent on using something else. But in this case, when time matters and just getting it done is the main purpose, he needs to understand to use the tools that are already there and work.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer to write LaTeX in my preferred editor, using version control. However, this doesn't always permit collaboration with my colleagues. Since OP mentioned commenting, I'd imagine that interoperability would be important. While LyX's GUI makes it more accessible to new users, it still isn't going to convert many who exclusively use OO.o Writer or MS Word. And not all publishers accept the export formats from LyX. So, it is still good that OO.o Writer exists as the lesser of two evils.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[jkrise]

So to finish, you are probably right in that OpenOffice has a long way to go in matching every type of functionality as MS Office

The problem I think, is that Open Office approaches things from the wrong end. Linux enjoys more success and prominence because it approached things from the server end, not the desktop end. MS OFfice is a bloated client application that uses bloated undocumented protocols to talk to bloated, buggy, undocumented server apps. Which server apps? Active (Craptive) Directory, Exchange Server, Sharepoint, SBS, Dynamics CRM etc.

This probably explains why Lotus Notes has more success than Open Office, Sendmail / Qmail / Postfix / Sunbird / OpenGroupware and Thunderbird; despite Notes being crappier, bulkier and bloatier than the MS equivalents.

Zimbra was the best complete competitor to Office-Exchange; which probably explains why MS got its cronies Yahoo to buy Zimbra at an atrocious price point. Open Office is useless without a server replacement for Exchange and Sharepoint.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[blind biker]

There is not one single thing in OO that doesn't have an OSS equivalent stand-alone application that is at least as good.

Can you point me to an alternative to OO Write? I love the ease of creating formulas in OO Write, and the way the Macro system works. But if you show me a more stable opensource application that can do "at least as good", I am ready to convert.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[westlake]

The great thing about Office is all the damn pieces work together. Excel is friendly with Access, Access is friendly with Word, Everything is friendly with Outlook. To beat Office, you have to have an Office suite that works like that. Not just all the pieces in one package.

There are also an ungodly number of third party applications and plug-ins that more or less seamlesly integrate with Office or are designed for use within an Office environment.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Blakey Rat]

Professional writers should be using a system designed for actual writing like LaTeX rather than an office program like MS Office or OpenOffice.org. In fact, many do,

Maybe open source programmers should spend more time getting their programs to do X instead of just telling people "you shouldn't be doing X at all." Yes, Word shouldn't (according to some weird moral code in your head) be used to write a novel, that doesn't change the fact that it *is* used to write novels. And Excel shouldn't (according to the messages beams into your head by the martians) be used to do data processing with more than a few hundred rows, but here in reality there are thousands of spreadsheets with tens of thousands of rows that got the job done in less time than it takes to just install MySQL on a server.

I'm ripping this off of a comment I saw recently on Slashdot (sorry), but here it goes again:

This may surprise you, but most people don't want to learn a programming language to write a document.

and the ones that try to use MS Word or other word processors generally have fun trying to get pagination to work or automatic outlining to work right or many other problems that occur once you write more than a few dozen pages in Word.

I've never had problems with documents hundreds of pages in length. I'm calling BS on this as a Slashdot urban legend.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Anonymous Coward]

Duke Nukem Forever jokes never get old (they can only get old after it's released - boom boom!). Still, it's great to hear that we can finally get to play DNF within the next 3 months or so after 10 long years of waiting!

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[B3ryllium]

Cory Doctorow.

BAM! Hah! Disproved your entire post with one name. Extra points for me.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but with OpenOffice you have access to the SOURCE CODE!!!! LOLLOZ!!!ONETEEN

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Randle_Revar]

Actually KDE 4.0 will come out early (Q1) next year, although some people may have expectations of it that may not be satisfied until it reaches 4.2 or so. In any case, KDE 4 is definitely not vaporware.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[SerpentMage]

>I routinely use OO.o Writer for manuscripts. I use GNU Cash for my investing, but I would be able to use OO.o Calc.

Right.... GNU Cash is for investing... Right.... Ok, so I ask how am I supposed to calculate the price of an option based on its implied volatility with GNU Cash? Oops, you mean its not an investment tool? Or how about calculating the cost of a hedge where I buy X calls, and Y puts? Ooops...

OO.o writer is not usable for manuscripts because comments and edits get buggered up. If you want to write without edits, and comments, sure Writer is fine...

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[SerpentMage]

>I disagree. MS VBA also bites & MS keeps threatening to drop it from Office. OO.o does support some VBA if you really like it better. OO.o supports python, which is quite cool. The IDE still has a way to go, but I think that having a choice of scripting languages (including the one used by MS Office) gives OO.o a real advantage here.

Sorry, but with Excel I have the following options: VBA (which in 2007 is actually pretty good), XLL (pain, but you get a .NET mapper), UDF (web service on the server side), RTD (realtime data control), or COM... Excel is actually pretty good once you get through the different possibilities.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Anonymous Coward]

This may surprise you, but most people don't want to learn a programming language to write a document.

This may surprise you, but it is perfectly possible to use LaTeX without writing a line of code. See LyX, Scientific WorkPlace, or even AbiWord.

I've never had problems with documents hundreds of pages in length. I'm calling BS on this as a Slashdot urban legend.

Calling out slashdot bias but keeping your head in the sand doesn't help.

If you've never, ever run into problems, you must be a relatively new and/or infrequent user who hasn't had to fight with multiple versions of Word on multiple platforms, etc. And you certainly haven't had to use common extensions to Office that help screw things up such as Endnote and MathType.

MS Word can handle long documents, but even MS suggests that you use master documents & maintain backups to accomplish this task.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[SerpentMage]

How about edits with Lyx? Sure if you have the time to configure everything.

How about comments with Lyx? Sure if you have the time to configure and assemble everything. Writing a manuscript is not about just putting down words, but a process of edits, proofs, indexing, etc, etc... OO is a joke. Of course Adobe has this figured out so I am not saying Microsoft is the king of the hill. In fact I would argue Adobe is king of the hill here.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[The Spoonman]

In spite of all this you're complaining, behaving like it whipped your dog. Why's that?

Because those of us who know what we're doing are tired of listening to the majority of the IT field that's made up of incompetent amateurs who don't know what they're doing with technology, don't know what a business needs to operate, and feel that their failings are the only way things can turn out. The fact of the matter is, Microsoft products are superior to the OSS products. Period. When you have something that's worth looking at, we'll take a serious look. Until then, stop trying to think you're going to wedge Outlook out of the office by sticking in a half-assed replacement like Thunderbird. Even with all the nifty little extensions installed (which cause it to bloat more than anyone's ever complained about Outlook), it still can't do anything close to what Outlook can do, especially when tied to an Exchange backend. And, no, I'm not talking viruses. No one with a clue has gotten a virus in 15 years. If you're still dealing with them, you're a member of the group mentioned in my first sentence.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[swv3752]

And did you have a License for MS Office for that computer?

I have created an autorun slideshow by copying Impress to the CD. It is not hard, but it sometimes you have to approach the problem from a different POV.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Lotunggim Ginsawat]

Your opinion may be correct a few years ago, but not now. Now Microsoft Office interfaces with not only Exchange Server, but also SharePoint Server, Live Communication Server, Groove Server etc. Exchange Server is not only a small part of a tightly-knit Microsoft Office ecosystem that Microsoft has created in the past few years. Not only that, the ecosystem works very well with other parts of Microsoft products such as their server products and of course, Microsoft Windows.

Steven Sinofsky is not that stupid, he already sees the threat of alternative FOSS to his former division and he changed the game. Alternatives may exists for components in the Microsoft Office world, but having them work together the way Microsoft Office ecosystem does is impossible.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[ThePhilips]

WRT to manuscripts I can't keep comments, styles, formating etc straight.

I used to use hidden frames for comments in my documents. Reflowing/repagination in OOo works better than in M$Office, so I found the functionality (though bit awkward and not straightforward) yet performing better than M$Office counterpart.

As for styles and formating, I'm not sure what you refer to. OOo, unlike M$Office, can be configured to use only predefined styles from document.

WRT to investing the OO spreadsheet is way to limited, and to extend the spreadsheet with custom functionality is absolutely painful! OOBasic bites, and their component architecture is anything but simple. OO extensions are a joke when compared to Microsoft Office.

This is in fact major blocker in OOo for mass adoption. As soon as you try to automate/extend anything in the OOo and face the OOBasic thing, it all breaks down miserably.

In M$Office you can record couple of macros and then easily modify/combine them: VBA is dumb, but for primitive automation is fits OK. Automating - easily.

In OOo recording macros just exposes you to all the ugliness of its undocumented component model. Extending macro - or combining two macros - essentially impossible. That renders OOo unautomateable nor extendable as end user concerned. (Correction: bad wording. Component model of OOo is of course documented. It's components themselves which are undocumented. Best documentation I found to date was happily reporting that "and here we have a plugable components - go search documentation elsewhere" - and that was in about 5 places in OOo documentation. "Frustrating" at best.)

Until OOo would get itself decent user-friendly scripting language, one can forget about professional users adopting it.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[ThePhilips]

Until OOo would get itself decent user-friendly scripting language, one can forget about professional users adopting it.

And as long as professional users would keep away from OOo, there would be nobody to recommend OOo to normal business users.

Yeah, I know, OOo does 90% of tasks already. But getting something from last 10% - even for professional user - can be experience in frustration. In M$Office you can at least write macro...

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[swv3752]

Abiword or Lyx.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Anonymous Coward]

Right.... GNU Cash is for investing... Right.... Ok, so I ask how am I supposed to calculate the price of an option based on its implied volatility with GNU Cash? Oops, you mean its not an investment tool? Or how about calculating the cost of a hedge where I buy X calls, and Y puts? Ooops...

Just because GnuCash doesn't have some things built in does not mean it isn't an investment tool. Excel doesn't have them built in either. Like Excel, GnuCash is not a unitasker & can be extended. It is no harder to calculate a price for a commodity using whatever scheme you wish to in GnuCash than it is in Excel. You can build an external calculator in either case (or use an already existing third party calculator & to copy the results in).

These examples are further trivial in Gnumeric, OO.o Calc, and nearly any other spreadsheet if you don't want to use pre-existing third-party tools. I fail to see any ingrained advantages of Excel for these scenarios, other than your personal familiarity for the tool. That's not an insignificant factor, but it underminds the universality that you try to imbue your personal gripes with.

OO.o writer is not usable for manuscripts because comments and edits get buggered up. If you want to write without edits, and comments, sure Writer is fine...

I use comments and change tracking (which is what I assume you mean by "edits") in OO.o Writer. They never get "buggered up" (whatever you mean by that). As before: the only downside with commenting in Writer is that you must either hover over the comments or see ALL comments in a separate pane, which is not as good as MS's interface that has the documents and comments side-by-side (and visually linked to the section they comment on). But OO.o Writer will be getting even this "real soon now."

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[XedLightParticle]

I think I get a different file from many others when I download OOo...

- some complain about the styles not being consistent, I can't recognize that. In my opinion OOo is much easier to style documentwide, with possibility to create custom text fields, paragraphs, pages and what not. And at the same time OOo handles huge documents just perfectly, applying the styles of the master document to all its subdocuments, so if writing a book and you want to change some layout globally, just edit the styles of the masterdocument. It has been a great help for me when working in larger documentation projects, where one person cannot do it alone, and in the same situation the export to PDF is invaluable.

- and what's that with the programs not working together? It's not very well explained, but if what people mean is just the ability to show a database or spreadsheet or drawing in a document, in an editable manner, they should look at the "Insert" and find OLE Objects, it works like a charm for me.

- I've seen many other complaints that I don't recognize that I don't remember right now.

Anyway back to the actual topic, I believe we'll see Thunderbird changing shape a bit, you gotta remember who expressed their support of OOo not long ago. I know some people can't stand it for its interface, but if you compare Outlook with IBM's Lotus Notes, Outlook has a long way to go before it's production ready. IBM wouldn't mind making an open competitor to their own client, as long as they can sell the Domino servers to run the groupware/database features.

It's true that with OOo and Thunderbird's plugin architecture, you would soon see it supporting other groupware solutions, but there's a long way to go before they get better than IBM in that game.

But of course, it'll take a little while before Thunderbird can reach Outlook, as it is now, it is as said, only a competitor to Outlook Express. It would have made more sense if it could have been Ximian/Novell Evolution getting integrated with OOo, but I'm afraid MS wouldn't let Novell participate... MS have done much to avoid competition on Office already, just read the EULA of Visual Studio.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I can guarantee if you go to a professional writer and ask: Which would you rather have? A) An outline view where you can instantly re-order your work, including notes and references? B) A slightly more open document format? There isn't a single one who's going to answer B.

Hi, I'm a professional writer. You're wrong. When doing layout and organization of writing I tend to use professional tools such as Framemaker, InDesign, Quark, or LaTeX. When writing individual topics within that writing (nonfiction) I use a variety of tools and formats including Word, OpenOffice, Pages, TextEdit, vi, emacs, Crimson, SubEthaEdit, etc. Because I often exchange short documents 1-20 pages with people running all sorts of different OS's (Wind2K, XP, Vista, OS X, Linux, OpenBSD, Solaris, etc.) I much prefer to do so using an open document format so that everyone can view and edit the same document. Many people do not have access to Word and because of the nature of .doc the file is interpreted differently by each program, including different versions of Word. It is a lot easier for everyone to collaborate using an open format.

Obviously this is not a big concern for all writers, but your assertion that there is not a single professional writer who would disagree with you is just incorrect.

Well der. The point, to spell it out more clearly, is that the people who are developing OpenOffice aren't coming up with features that big companies want, and big companies are the ones holding the majority of Office licenses.

Actually, from what I've seen most of the development of OpenOffice is features aimed at large businesses and government institutions. The average person that exchanges files is seriously hampered by lack of open standards and usually has to use Word eventually. It is medium to large businesses that can effectively save money by switching to OpenOffice and those that have adopted it (including Sun and their customers) seem to be the drivers of new features.

Not enough of a security threat to bother any of the hundreds of thousands of companies that have purchased it.

Are you joking? MS Office has been a serious security problem for many MS customers, but because of the nature of the current market, sometimes security has to take a back seat. Just because people buy something does not mean they are unconcerned about problems with it.

Outlook restricts everything...

It doesn't matter. Because it has such large market share it constitutes a monoculture. That just makes it a huge target for hackers. Because it ties to proprietary protocols, is perpetuates that monoculture, which is good for MS, but bad for security of users. Most credible security consultants will tell you, avoiding Outlook will likely improve your security, and they're correct. Like it or not, the next widespread exploit that compromises an e-mail system will probably only affect Outlook users. Technical merits aside, that is the hard truth.

Speaking of security, Office does have a nice feature where you can encrypt sensitive files before sending them out of the office to prevent your data being read by nefarious third-parties. Does OpenOffice have anything of the sort?

OpenOffice does support encrypting documents, but that is not the main security issue with MS Office. For the most part, files are not intercepted and are sent via e-mail (which can be encrypted) or over a VPN. The main security problem with Word is the accidental inclusion of information. The default settings and UI of MS Word often lead to files being sent that contain leftover information from a different version of the file, upon which the version being sent was based. Using free tools I've seen companies recover information such as the complete text of multiple bids for work that have been submitted to competitors. The information is invisible to the user editing the file so thy naturally assume it

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[YU Nicks NE Way]

Zimbra was the best complete competitor to Office-Exchange; which probably explains why MS got its cronies Yahoo to buy Zimbra at an atrocious price point. I think the key phrase there is "atrocious price point". Do you think that the Zimbra team would have sold out at "an atrocious price point" if they were being even vaguely successful? What do you think that says about Zimbra's actual success?

It's good to see the FLOSS zealots are still busily administering auto-proctoscopies. It gives me peace of mind to know that some things never change.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Anonymous Coward]

How much do you guys get paid to post these?

I have been using OpenOffice professionally for the past 3 years without any real issues. I don't seem to have the same problem with formatting nor has calc presented any issues when doing capital outlays and other accounting tasks.

Although I primarily use OpenOffice on Linux, I find people complain about OpenOffice because it isn't exactly the same as Microsoft Office. This just denotes lack of the ability to adapt, which is no doubt inbred (haha) in most computers users these days.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[flydpnkrtn]

Kontact is Linux only. While I wish many KDE apps would make it to the windows platform, most aren't, so kontact probably isn't a good comparison.

One of the biggest things to note about KDE 4 is the fact that it will use Qt 4. They are working on running native KDE apps (and potentially the entire desktop environment) on any platform that Qt 4 runs on - ie. Linux, Mac or Windows.

This has the potential to be HUGE for KOffice, Kontact, et al. That was the biggest thing that kept me from throwing any of my time behind learning KOffice - up until this port happens it was yet another platform-specific Office program.

I won't get into the rant about OpenOffice.org and the bloat it seems unable to shake off...

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you just find all the three letter acronyms in your documentation to try to make a point?

The grandparent post argued about languages.

Your post convolutes VBA (a language which is in both OO.o and MS O), XLL (an extension mechanism (and OO.o has a competing methodology)), UDF (which MS uses for all user-defined functions (most of which are probably still in VBA)), RTD (a single spreadsheet function), and COM (an object model comparable to OO.o's UNO).

You list absolutely no technical advantages that the MS technologies have over the OO.o technologies. Do you have any?

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[einhverfr]

First, I have tried to use OOo for creating manuscripts. It worked OK. I wasn't too happy with it, but it handled the task about as well as Word.

I later converted the manuscripts to LaTeX, which does a *much* better job in this regard. And if you can't stomach Vim, there is always LyX (which is *very good* at manuscript creation).

Word processors are almost always the wrong approach to manuscript creation. Word and OOo, when used properly, are tolerable in this regard, but do not provide the flxibility that a real typesetting environment provides. Heck, proper HTML + CSS probably does better than Word or OOo in many of these cases....

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Chandon Seldon]

OO.o writer is not usable for manuscripts because comments and edits get buggered up. If you want to write without edits, and comments, sure Writer is fine...

What you're basically saying is this: You can't possibly use any tool but Word because you're attached to the exact implementation of two specific Word features. That doesn't mean that other tools are bad - it just means that you're inflexible.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Maxo-Texas]

While I agree that OO is not equal to MS Office yet, I can't understand why you are having trouble keeping comments, styles, and formatting straight other than that you are trying to use the product like microsoft office. It's not. It has a slightly different paradigm and you need to train/use it to internalize it (Just as you DID for microsoft office).

I can't comment on the spreadsheet- I do not use advanced features of spreadsheets.

I've been following OO since version 1. As of the 2.0 series, it can finally open all my most complicated word documents and is solid.

OO is a good product and it's not $500 a seat (which is what small businesses pay). It only gets better with each new release.

A lot of the features Word has added lately seem as useful as tits on a boar personally. That means the domain may be stable at last. If true, then OO will catch up.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[jackjeff]

I agree. Apparently you're one of the very few users who use the only advanced features of MS Office that make it impossible to replace for no one.

But personally I have never had to write a single line of VBA in my life. When I write a text, I expect the formatting to be all the same on all computers, I expect the text writer to be able to import at least ONE useful vectorial image format, or to be able to erase a character in the middle of somewhere without changing the format of the whole line (oh god i hate this bug/feature of word.. ), or not have to open 3 modal dialogs and click 3 times on OK Button to see the changes on the page I'm editing (for instance style dlgs).

Why do I hate MS-Office so much? Because I have used dozen of other products before I ever had to use office. The UI is painful and not intutive. The products are locked down. I have never had to use a feature that exists in office (like the powerful VBA) and what i'm interested about is producing a document of quality in a timely and reliable fashion, without being too much stressed. That's what MS-Office fails to produce everytime I use it.

I hate OpenOffice for the same reasons I hate MS-Office. I think it's even worse. The UI suck as much (it's a copy) but the software does not even have the excuse of having more powerful features such as VBA. In addition, it's even less reliable than MSOffice.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Anonymous Coward]

And what is the number of the bug report for that one? Or are you just yapping?

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[jp10558]

I personally have not written manuscripts, so I may be off base here, but in my limited (school, resume, etc) experiance - Word processors, be it Lotus Word Pro (my program of choice), Open Office, or MS Word - are only good for 4 things:

1) Writing MLA style research papers or Essays

2) Writing personal or business letters to textbook standards

3) Generating Outlines - perhaps for 1

4) Quick and Dirty envelope prints

Anything more complicated tends to really become frustrating, quickly, in those products.

For posters, anything with in line pictures or diagrams, etc require a different paradigm in my experiance. Scientific papers or textbooks often need better layout precision. Maybe manuscripts do as well? Certainly your formatting comments make me think something like HTML or LaTeX might be a better solution - something that *isn't* WYSIWYG.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[risk one]

Jesus. How about they compete with Word first, eh?

Yes, I'm sure they've completely given up on that one. What they're doing now is saying: "Well, Writer is finished, nothing could make that any better. Let's get Thunderbird in, call it an outlook replacement, and that'll be that." And you, lone soul crying in the desert, are the only person who sees that Thunderbird and Outlook don't actually share all the same features. Hundreds of people, whose day job it is to think about office software, just happened to have missed that one. If only they'd talked to you first.

An alternative theory, if you'll permit me, is that they are attempting to compete with Word. They know that to compete with word, they have to compete in the business arena. To compete in the business arena they have to compete with office as a whole. To compete with office as a whole, you need to present the following features: A word processor (check), a spreadsheet program (check), everything that an Outlook/Exchange combination offers. This is the grim reality of open source in the workplace in 2007. People don't need much from their word processor, people don't need much from their spreadsheet, but they will not accept anything but full feature completeness from their personal information manager. And we don't have that. We don't have a decent PI manager, and we don't have a decent server back-end. There are many solutions being worked on, both for clients and server backends, but none of them have reached the stage where the idea can be sold to management. If the new word processor doesn't have a nice zoom button, so be it, it's free, we'll get by. But if the new PIM software doesn't allow me to plan a meeting, allocate a room, and email the people involved in a single button click, screw that, we're sticking with Office.

So if any kind of workplace is going to switch to OO.o, it needs this functionality, and it needs to get it right. Really, really right. Righter than it's ever gotten anything before. So what's the plan of action? Incorporate Evolution? Evolution's a mess. Chandler? perpetually in alpha, and way too experimental. So how about Thunderbird? Very solid and stable codebase. In fact more secure and stable than Outlook has ever been. Calendaring, task management and what-have-you can be added through plugins (some already in progress), and best of all, it's mother has recently abandoned it, so it could do with a little support. In fact, since Mozilla has the Eudora codebase to develop into a new simple email client, it's not such a bad idea to let Thunderbird grow into a full fledged PIM. Personally, I'd welcome it.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Chandon Seldon]

OpenOffice is not simply an attempt to copy Microsoft Office. It's not supposed to act exactly the same - it's a different program. Before you call anything a "bug", make sure you understand what the program is actually trying to do - some of these things may be wildly useful features that you simply assumed were wrong because they're slightly different.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[aplusjimages]

Calling Thunderbird an "Outlook Replacement" just shows they have no idea what people use Outlook for. Outlook Express replacement, sure. That's being generous. I would say that Express still beats Thunderbird.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[inca34]

Don't use Word or OO for manuscripts. Both suck. LaTeX or TeX ftw! Don't mix formatting with content creation. Create the content, then do the layout and do it well. All numbering, indexing, tables of contents, and other dynamic referential data can be automated--later. Or, if format or layout dictates to some extent your content, do that first, then fill in content separately. Thinking and fighting with automagic "I fixed this for you" behavior from MS or OO is a waste of thought process when you're trying to decide what to say and how to say it. And yes, I'm a Knuth fanboy. Sue me.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[R3d Jack]

The worst thing about M$ Office is that the integration isn't all that great, and M$ has added very few truly useful features since the '90s. The OO problem is the scope of the project and the fact that integration isn't all that interesting. As far as killing Outlook, it will kill itself a release or two down the road. What a pig!

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your are just plain wrong. Zero points for you.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Anonymous Coward]

I can guarantee if you go to a professional writer and ask:

Which would you rather have?
A) An outline view where you can instantly re-order your work, including notes and references?
B) A slightly more open document format?

There isn't a single one who's going to answer B.

Professional writers will use decent, professional type-setting software like LaTeX anyway, so your question is invalid to begin with.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[knghtrider]

And, no, I'm not talking viruses. No one with a clue has gotten a virus in 15 years. If you're still dealing with them, you're a member of the group mentioned in my first sentence.

BUZZ wrong Spoonman. I'm NOT a clueless Amatuer, but I still have to deal with viruses. I answer to an agency above the one I work for, and IT doesn't get to set policies for things like, oh, say, taking work home on flash drives (used to be floppies, but now it's flash drives. I have to deal with the aftermath every time a users' files they took home to work on get corrupted because they have a virus on their home PC. I have to deal with them every time a friend of a friend (or cousin, or brother---you pick it.) who doesn't know more than how to turn the computer on, play solitare, and forward stupid e-mail chain letters gets infected by a virus.

While I haven't had an outbreak of a virus on any systems I was responsible for (exception: Coming in to an an environment where the IT guy was fired, and knew he was about to be because he was reading e-mails between his boss , her boss, and HR.) in about 8 years. That one was because I wasn't allowed to run Corporate AV--it was too expensive. Needless to say, right after we were infected in a 3,000 user company with Melissa, I was able to buy AV. I've had *attacks* by worm/viruses (from other Exchange servers I wasn't responsible for, yet in the same company) where the admins' responsible there disabled anti-virus software on users workstations because it made the workstations too 'slow'.

There are still companies who get virus attacks--mostly because their policies say that they have to test EVERY patch/update in an isolated environment before deployment. That's not being an amateur, but rather having overly cautious leadership. Personally, it's my opinion that somewhere between 70% and 90% of all Office users need nothing more powerful than the simple products in Microsoft Works. The rest are the power uses who actually do need the power provided by Microsoft Word.

I'm sitting here on my Linux desktop typing this. I have 5 tabs open in Firfox, Thunderbird is running, I'm editing a document in oO Write, and have GIMP open editing a logo design. I have a dual-core Intel processor, with 2GB of ran, and I'm only using 455M. OH..and Apache is running in the background because I have a couple of different websites I'm working on, and this is my development environment.

Speaking of Apache--it runs rings around IIS---in all aspects; deployment, support and usability. Best of all, it's supported on multiple platforms.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[rucs_hack]

I can guarantee if you go to a professional writer and ask:

Which would you rather have?
A) An outline view where you can instantly re-order your work, including notes and references?
B) A slightly more open document format?

There isn't a single one who's going to answer B.


You win a cookie.

Actually I know a few professional writers. Some use office, some use openoffice. Some use emacs and tex. My own major work, my thesis, is in MS Word because I have no choice in the matter. Plus its far far easier to take a word formatted thesis to a printer at the moment.

I know there are printers that use tex. I'm talking about the less expensive thesis printing services I can get to by train.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[lordSaurontheGreat]

The bulk of the MS Office user base doesn't use all those advanced features. You're a very small minority of power users. By bundling Thunderbird, they manage to kill the ancient MS argument against OO.o ("It doesn't even have an email client!") and thus make it more marketable to Joe Shmoe, who chances are has never even heard of BASIC and thinks that extensions are for hair, which comprises the majority of MS Office users.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Sentax]

Yes there was an available MS Office license for his computer to use but like I said, he insisted on using OO. Plus the wizard in PowerPoint used the free PowerPoint viewer software to put on the CD so it would work on a system without MS Office installed.

I've never tried Impress. Will look into it next time this happens.

Cheers

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your are just plain wrong. Beautiful. Just... beautiful.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[bigpicture]

Yep, there is not anything in this series of comments that I have not experienced. There does seem to be a huge lack of "vision" with the OOo developers. It revolves around the old adage, "when they say that something is good enough, it is usually because it isn't."

This is probably why KDE went their own way, and their "vision" seems to be pretty good, but it will remain to be seen if they have the resources and talent to pull it off. But they have, I believe, a 9 Office components that work well together "vision", instead of a mixed bag of things. That would be attractive, easy to understand, and common look and feel interface, some underlying things that would be common to them all, such as PIM information, how imported objects respond to changes in the original etc.

Back in the days of Lotus, WordPerfect, and the other assortment of stand alone office type programs, I had always thought that all these would one day be blended into one, at that time I actually thought it could be one program.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[niko9]

This might be a bit off-topic to the article posted, but in response to your post...

Given you write manuscripts have you ever given Lyx a serious look? I myself are far from being any sort of Linux guru but after reading about the basic philosophy of WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean) and trying the program for a few months, I have long given up on traditional word processors. Writing any sort of document in the Lyx tradition just makes so much more sense, even for simple business letters. Professional novels and scientific papers are written using Lyx.

www.lyx.org

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[blackcoot]

Maybe open source programmers should spend more time getting their programs to do X instead of just telling people "you shouldn't be doing X at all." --- i think you hit the nail on the head with this. unfortunately, the primary customer in oss is almost always the guy who got the itch to write the program in the first place rather than any representative sample of potential end users.

I've never had problems with documents hundreds of pages in length. I'm calling BS on this as a Slashdot urban legend. i've had endless troubles with pagination of documents that are *tens* of pages long (25 to be precise). every time i work on a proposal and start putting art in, i lose several hours fiddling around with graphic anchors so that pages have reasonable amounts of text on them. the collective heartburn caused by word during proposals has, in fact, become so severe that there are several of us that are seriously looking into using latex as an alternative.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[rmcd]

I'm an academic and a textbook author so I guess you could call me a professional writer. And you're wrong. My two objections to Word have always been that 1) the file format is fragile -- you can not expect to be able to reliably read a 10-year old document and 2) to my continual astonishment, Word simply doesn't work very well.

WRT #1, version upgrades are a nightmare, and I've seen colleagues lose days of work because of file incompatabilities. I know that if you're *very* careful this won't happen, but you shouldn't have to worry about this. And I want reliable access to things I wrote 10 years ago.

#2: The last time I used Word (2003) for a serious project I used styles for different-level headers and so forth. Everything was auto-numbered and auto-formatted and I was pleased and thought to myself that maybe Word was finally usable. Then I inserted a table of contents and doing this stripped the numbering out of all the headings and eliminated all of my bulleted and numbered lists! I simply couldn't believe it. The truth is that the only people I know *personally* who are happy with Word are people who do not use it's features very deeply. There appear to be plenty of people who use Word in a serious way and who are are happy, but I have yet to meet one personally. (And yes, I am at a big university and I am know lots of people :-)

So what do I use? LaTeX and Emacs. I adopted them both specifically when writing my book because I didn't trust Word. It took a long time to become comfortable with both, but it was one of the best decisions I've ever made. My book is published using TeX and I can use the compositor's files to revise the book. I find this works incredibly well.

I always tell PhD students: you are going to a professional writer so use professional writer's tools: LaTeX and BibTeX. (I *never* recommend Emacs, though I personally love it.)

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Allador]

I've had *attacks* by worm/viruses (from other Exchange servers I wasn't responsible for, yet in the same company) ... What does this even mean? Do you mean that some folks are sending emails with virii embedded through their mail servers which happen to be exchange?

Because you seem to imply that the Exchange server itself is infected and sending out virii, which is obviously nonsense. At most, the Exchange server might be misconfigured to be an open relay, but that takes effort on any version past Exchange 2000.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Allador]

To most people there is no difference, unless they work for big companies. Or anyone who works in any business. Or anyone who needs Calendering, Task Management, Contacts, or could benefit from integration of any of these.

Or anyone who uses a laptop, and needs their email client/tasks/contacts/calendar to work properly when they're not connected to a network, or who roam between different kinds of networks many times per day.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Allador]

It doesn't matter. Because it has such large market share it constitutes a monoculture. That just makes it a huge target for hackers. Because it ties to proprietary protocols, is perpetuates that monoculture, which is good for MS, but bad for security of users. Most credible security consultants will tell you, avoiding Outlook will likely improve your security, and they're correct. Like it or not, the next widespread exploit that compromises an e-mail system will probably only affect Outlook users. Technical merits aside, that is the hard truth. I think you're stuck in the past. There was a time, around 2000-2002 where this was the case, but it pretty much ended with the later service packs of Office 2000/Outlook 2000.

Outlook hasnt had problems with auto-running of scripts since early versions of 2000. If you're talking about people running virus executables inside zip files mailed to them, well, thats a email-client-agnostic problem.

I think your hard truth was hard in ~2000. Now its just an old truth.

The main security problem with Word is the accidental inclusion of information. The default settings and UI of MS Word often lead to files being sent that contain leftover information from a different version of the file, upon which the version being sent was based. This further supports my belief that you've not been involved with these products in several years. The problem you're describing is also an old one. Since one of the releases of 2003, when you save a file, it will complain if there is extra information left on old versions. And the 'Accept all changes' on change tracking will remove all old history of change tracking.

Most of the things you're discussing in your post are old issues, that arent very relevant today.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Allador]

I know some people can't stand it for its interface, but if you compare Outlook with IBM's Lotus Notes, Outlook has a long way to go before it's production ready. This seems like a contradictory statement to me. If the Lotus Notes UI/Usability is so atrocious (widely agreed with by its users), in what way is it so much more 'production ready' as an email client than Outlook?

Is it the dev/db features in Notes? I agree thats nice, but not really anything to do with email. About the only thing I've seen Notes do better wrt email client is in encryption. And thats only within the Notes environment.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Anonymous Coward]

Original poster said "professional" writer.

BAM! Hah! Disproved your entire post with one adjective.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[blind biker]

Abiword? Did you read my post at all? You can't do formulas with Abiword! The macros in Abiword are lacking, even compared to OO.o, and finally (I didn't mention this, but here goes) it doesn't export in .pdf.

But mainly: no formulas.

Lyx: good but it's annoying when I have to do things like superscripts or subscripts inline in the text (not in the separate formulas). I've considered TeX very seriously, but alas, it's not good when you have to change formatting frequently within your text. Oh, yeah, and the .pdf it produced was ugly. I know it has something to do with how the fonts are configured in Tex/Lyx, but I don't have the time to investigate. I have barely time to see my gf, due to the studying+work, so I should be excused for not spending additional time trying to convince Lyx to work as expected.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[ClosedSource]

"How much do you guys get paid to post these?"

So you disagree. Should we assume that you get paid to praise OpenOffice?

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Allador]

So how about Thunderbird? Very solid and stable codebase. In fact more secure and stable than Outlook has ever been. I have to strongly disagree with this, based on my own personal experience.

Thunderbird has a lot of little stability issues. Little irritating UI bugs. And then the big problem in that it is completely incapable of a seamless online/offline support.

I run Outlook and Thunderbird both, the former against Exchange, the latter against an IMAP server (doesnt matter why I have both at the moment).

If I'm busily doing email or whatever, and fully synched up with my email servers, and I pull the ethernet cord, what happens? Outlook may get cranky for 3-5 seconds, but then continues as normal. All my email, calendars, tasks, and contacts are fully available and work.

On Thunderbird, nothing works. No emails are available, no calendaring stuff, nothing. It seems that you have to always remember to manually synch before you go offline, otherwise nothing will work.

Then it gets flaky if you go into standby/hibernate, and when you come back you're on a different network.

Then there's the issue that I cant FREAKING DELETE an email without it automatically opening the next one. Who wants this? And there's no way to turn it off. There used to be a plugin that would hack around this, but it doesnt work with 2.x.

You cant sort by columns in email, then hit the 'J' key or whatever to go to the 'J's in that newly sorted column.

It seems to be impossible to send emails using just the keyboard, since you cant choose between TO and CC without the mouse (that I can find).

Despite having a smaller mail file than my Outlook OST file, if I've left Thunderbird along for more than an hour or so, it apparently must page out all the memory or something, as opening an email involves anywhere between 15 and 60 seconds of hard drive thrashing as it (I believe) reloads the entire mail store, which then triggers the A/V to scan that entire several hundred megabyte file.

Thats all I can think of off the top of my head.

As a converse, the only single fault I have outstanding with Outlook 2007 is that every once in a great while (maybe once a month), if the Exchange server is unavailable or I'm switching in and out of VPNs, Outlook will seem to get confused and hang the UI for several minutes. I see the same problem with Thunderbird, but Thunderbird is just alot more common for that to happen.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Bert64]

There has been a spate of malware recently that uses msoffice to spread, most of it exploiting vulnerabilities in the parsing of their poorly kludged together binary format... One of the MS advisories actually advises you not to open any word files unless you absolutely trust the source. So your statement about no viruses lately is completely wrong.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[osu-neko]

That's the problem with most open source software. It's usually 90% of the way there, so it gets hyped as a viable replacement -- but in any program you write, 90% is easy to do, it's that last 10% where the devils hide. So that last 10% never quite makes it into the FOSS solution, it's the kind of difficult thankless boring drudge work programming that you have to pay someone to write, but that last bit is the difference between being able to actually use the product for serious work and almost being able to use the product, if it weren't for that one essential feature you need that it doesn't have. Thus, casual users rave at the free software while professional users expense and buy the proprietary solution.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Matthieu Araman]

Sun is talking about thunderbird + lightning, which is aimed to be a better outlook replacement.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[DerPflanz]

Nonsense. I wrote both my bachelor's and master's thesis in StarOffice and OpenOffice respectively. At our company we use OpenOffice to write *any* document needed to get the project finished. Another use is creating invoices and other documents dynamically from a in house developed intranet application. It's all about what you are used at using. I probably will get screaming crazy using MSOffice, in the same way you 'can't keep comments, styles, formating etc straight' in OOo.org.

I don't get the complaints about OOo or Thunderbird. It makes documents, it reads mail. What more do you need? IMHO all these extras are not nearly as important as the core functionalities. It's all about content.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

think you're stuck in the past. There was a time, around 2000-2002 where this was the case, but it pretty much ended with the later service packs of Office 2000/Outlook 2000.

Please, I've seen at least 7 advisories this year on exploitable, unpatched buffer overflows in current versions of Outlook. I don't recall any that have been wormed, but if a worm is made to exploit an e-mail program and it spreads widely, you can bet it will only be affecting Outlook users.

This further supports my belief that you've not been involved with these products in several years. The problem you're describing is also an old one. Since one of the releases of 2003, when you save a file, it will complain if there is extra information left on old versions. And the 'Accept all changes' on change tracking will remove all old history of change tracking.

It may be an old problem, but it is still a current one. Change tracking is not the only way data is mined from doc files. Regular .doc recovery programs as well as programs designed specifically for the purpose can often recover deleted parts of files and in some cases unrelated deleted data from the user's hard disk. Finally, Word suffers from the same monoculture problem as Outlook as seen with the targeted industrial espionage utilizing buffer overflows in Word and Excel, from earlier this year. In fact, those attacks were discovered by users whose company had standardized on StarOffice and thus questioned why their colleagues within the company were sending them .doc files.

Sorry, MS Office is still a very real security concern.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[amorangi]

I don't know how you were rated as "5 insightful" - in fact there was zero explanation as to why OOO was unsatisfactory.
If you don't like OOO don't use it. If it fills your requirements then do so. Personally I have both OOO and Office 2007, but only use Office 2007 to open documents sent to me in that proprietary format and for Outlook, as I am used to OOO and it fulfils my requirements. I would love for there to be an alternative to Outlook - the only reason I use it is that Thunderbird won't sync with my phone (N95) - thanks a lot Nokia.
Office software is not really something to get excited over - people getting uppity over one alternative over another need to get out more.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[arkhan_jg]

Too right. I used thunderbird for years for my email, but I've finally given up and gone back to the beast at work. I use outlook 2007 to combine my emails, calendar and task list.

1) I can flag IMAP emails for follow up, and they show up in my task list (I'd like to be able to actually drag-and-copy an email into my task list, rather than just link em, but nothing's perfect)

2) I can list tasks by due date under calendar days. This is a killer feature for me.

3) I can drag and drop tasks into appointments on the calendar, and vice versa, as well as dragging tasks to later days and appointments around. This seemless mixing of appointments and tasks and days, and linking to emails, which are then synced with my PDA makes scheduling my days and weeks so much easier it's not funny.

We're in the process of moving from a linux based IMAP email server to an exchange system, so we can implement shared calendars and address books through outlook. 70% of my servers are linux based. If there was truly a viable alternative to exchange+outlook+outlook web access (and I've tried out over a dozen, including zimbra and scalix), I'd be taking it.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Maxo-Texas]

The moderation has been a bit strange on this one.

I looked into people's posting histories and nothing suspicious tho.

Still.. if I were a huge corporation, it would be worth my while to have a nice group of profiles to mod things up on a site like this. It wouldn't be hard- as a private individual, I maintain a couple id's here.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[spasm]

I use latex a lot (texshop for mac to be precise), and love it. It is perfect for any document where a) I don't have to collaborate with other people ("What are all these slashes and curly brackets? Can you resend this to me as a .doc file please?"); and either b) there's an existing class file which meets the needs of the project (eg many but far from all academic journals) or c) this is a big enough project for me to justify sitting down with 'the latex companion' and editing (never had to write one from scratch yet, touch wood..) a class file to get something that actually meets the specific needs of the project (eg my doctoral dissertation..).

For documents which fail a or (b and c), which is unfortunately about 80% of the documents I write, latex (and lyx) are, alas, useless, and openoffice is unfortunately pretty much the best thing out there.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[gumbi west]

What do you use that can, "keep comments, styles, formating etc straight." The only program that I know that does two of the three is LaTeX which does an excellent job of styles and formating.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Chemicalscum]

Have you tried using OO for anything related to earning money? Yes

At work my system has MS Office 2003 on XP at home I have OOo 2.2 on Ubuntu Feisty. I work on documents both .doc and .xls and also .ppt between the two systems. It works fine no more formatting problems as there used to be a few years ago. OOo is no longer slow compared to Office and now load up time is a little faster for OOo on my home machine but document loading is a little slower with OOo. The two systems have similar but not identical hardware, my home system is if anything marginally slower.

>p> In my opinion Writer is a better and more intuitive WP than Word 2003. As for Calc at work we have validated spreadsheets developed on Excel, they work perfectly on Calc. I have been been presenting with Powerpoint at work, .ppt presentations prepared using Impress at home for about four years now. In the OOo 1.x period I had some minor problems with formatting (OK I had the opportunity to clear this up using my work system before the meeting) but everything seems fine now.

OK, I am not using this for financial work. I am using it to help me earn my living as a research chemist. The documents are mostly short research reports together with filling in some government .doc templates and the spreadsheets are for calculating data in our work templates. My presentations are deliberately kept simple for personal preference and contain no embedded audiovisual stuff (animated gifs of rotating molecules is about the most geewiz graphics I use), they are scientific presentations after all.

So overall OOo 2.x has enabled my to take work home and to work productively on a Linux box that is Windows free.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[kklein]

What you're basically saying is this: You can't possibly use any tool but Word because you're attached to the exact implementation of two specific Word features. That doesn't mean that other tools are bad - it just means that you're inflexible.

And what you're basically saying is this: "Your preferences are wrong, and it's because you're stupid." It's the classic Slashdot rebuttal, and it is often modded as insightful, but it's not.

I don't purport to know what someone else needs to do his/her job. When a guy says OO.o doesn't cut it, despite trying, I tend to believe him. What makes you think you know what he needs?

Personally, I used OO.o for a year (Writer, to be precise) in grad school because I wanted to get rid of pirated MS Office, and I didn't have the $125 for the student version, and besides, I wanted more than the student version had... Why, I don't know, since I only would have used Word at the time. Anyway, I got quite good at Writer, and there are some great features in there (predictive input!), but ultimately, I had to call it quits and buy the $100 volume license of MS Office from the school.

What were my problems?

OO.o tables do not save correctly to .doc. If I needed to work on the document elsewhere, or was collaborating with someone, they had to be reformatted every time.

Making tables is an arduous process in OO.o. And being that I use a lot of statistics in my writing, tables are abundant. Word table formatting is quick and easy, and you can get them to look exactly as you'd like in a number of different ways (this has always been the best part of MS software--any way you can think of doing something probably has a way to do it).

Indent sliders don't snap to sane intervals. This is in violation of the UI metaphor: Those sliders snapped on electric typewriters. Last time I complained about this on Slashdot some pompous ass told me I was too stupid to use styles so I'd better just stick with Word. Except, I did use styles, and I use them in Word, too, and those sliders are the easiest way to set the indent in Word--why the hell should I type everything in when there's a damn GUI slider there? Why doesn't the OO.o slider work right? You can't get the same indent twice. It's maddening.

I have to work with other people, and they don't know or want to learn OO.o. This obviously isn't a problem with the software, but it is a big problem with using it.

I finally decided that getting things done was more important than being different. And this is what it comes down to, really, with a lot of FOSS. There are a few things that are improved by the removal of the profit motive (video software that plays anything, PDF writers --utilities like that whose proprietary counterparts are too worried about making money to be any good), but major applications don't seem to benefit. FOSS requires people to learn something new that doesn't do as much and isn't as compatible with the rest of the world's software. And that's why uptake is slow. Not because people are stupid, but because they are smart enough to know it's not worth it for them to switch. Until OO.o is better and more compatible than MS Office, this will be the case, and people will stick to MS Office in droves.

I value supporting FOSS projects in theory, but at the end of the day, I have work to do, and OO.o doesn't cut it. And I say that as the world's leading expert on how to do my job and live my life. That ought to be a satisfying enough reason for anyone.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Anonymous Coward]

You also don't technically need video support in Impress, because you can just tell the viewers to close their eyes and imagine what it might look like. So I guess in that sense you're technically correct. That sounds better than the typical Powerpoint user trying to use video in their slides... I think of all the presentations I've seen in Powerpoint using video, 95%+ of the presenters forgot to bring the video file with them (or forgot all about missing codecs). Therefore I've come to expect that I should close my eyes and imagine the video.

However you should note that video playback support in Impress is already in testing mode (using GStreamer I believe?). To have a proper implementation they really need to convert all video into a free video file format before embedding it into the presentation. If they make it like Powerpoint, they may as well not bother with the feature at all, because 95%+ of users will screw it up.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Chandon Seldon]

People who spend a significant chunk of their time working in a given piece of software tend to get attached to the details of how it does things, regardless of the technical merit of those design decisions.

Your complaints about OO.o are a perfect example of this effect. "Indent sliders don't snap to sane intervals"? Clearly this isn't annoying the crap out of the OpenOffice developers (who have to use the program to write any number of internal documents), so it's not a major problem with using the program - so it must be an artifact of your learned workflow.

Now, having trouble unlearning that sort of workflow artifact is a real issue. OpenOffice really will suck for you until you've gotten used to the native workflow for every single task that you do. Let me clarify: Until a Microsoft Office user adapts to OpenOffice almost completely, Microsoft Office really will be marginally better for them.

None of this means anything but the simple fact that OpenOffice, being different from what you have the most experience with, is harder for you personally. You can't get any sort of objective data about other people using the program from a biased sample of one.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Whitemice]

> Calling Thunderbird an "Outlook Replacement" just shows they have no idea what people use
> Outlook for. Outlook Express replacement, sure.

Man, you took the words right out of my mouth. The vast majority of people in Open Source in general SOOOO don't get groupware or what people who actually USE products like Outlook and Notes actually do [and need]. I was convinced of this after I saw the pathetic "Groupware Bad" [http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html] post relating to the launch of the now [effectively] defunct Hula project. Calling Thunderbird a replacement for Outlook/Notes, at least in anything like its current form, is ridiculous.

But the OOo people are being honest, they are calling it a PIM, and not a groupware client. But my reaction is.... so what? A basic install of GNOME or KDE already includes at least a half dozen decent PIMs. We just don't need another PIM.

I was subscribed to the OOo groupware project list for a long time before dropping off. I never saw a list of what people wanted or considered essential for integration between OOo and a groupware server. Just lots of "you have to be just like Exchange/Outlook" which isn't very specific/constructive/helpful. The bugger is that this requires a *SERVER*. There are several candidates (OpenGroupware, Citadel, etc...) and ample standards (CalDAV, WebDAV, GroupDAV, etc...) but no one coming forward and saying "it should work like this...".

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[aliquis]

And still it's a valid point for him staying with M$ Office, big deal.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[tacocat]

I recently got a new replacement computer at work -- 100% Windows. The differences from this one and the last one (same core Windows OS - XP) are: Most of the integration features that people like , integration features like email & Office, either don't work are do annoyingly bad default behaviours. I'm spending hours a day trying to find out where the little checkbox is to undo most of this behaviour. Overall, I think they are both a little flakey in that all this integration makes virus transmission all the easier.

So I'm a candidate of not making the mother of all applications to replace all the other applications. It's not a very good design concept because it loses the advantages that modular programing can offer. It be would be nice if we could figure out how to do this by plugging in through standardized interfaces the various applications that you want to use.

But that requires people to share and everyone is too busy trying to be their own Big Dog. I'm sure KDE has something that works nice for office tools, as does OO and many others. I would prefer it if they could be standardized into common interfaces so that I could simultaneously use either kmail, thunderbird, or pine as my convenience to pass application data to an email application. Similarly, use a common data interface for passing something from either OO or Excel into a table in Word, OO, KWord, et al...

I just find this as hype. Which ususally means that OO is going to start sucking really badly.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Chuq]

"Should we assume that you get paid to praise OpenOffice?"

Of course it's silly to assume that everyone who vocally supports MS is paid to ... but MS has a massive arsenal of cash behind it and if they wanted to do so, they could do and it wouldn't make a dent in their bank balance. How would OpenOffice's theoretical astroturfers be paid?

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[swillden]

OO.o writer is not usable for manuscripts because comments and edits get buggered up. If you want to write without edits, and comments, sure Writer is fine...

Those features work fine for me in OOo, on large, complex legal documents (100s of pages), even. Actually, I think they work much *better* than they do in Office, because when documents get large and complex, with multiple layers of recorded changes, Word gets really unstable. That's actually the *reason* I switched to OOo, because it could accomplish the job without crashing hourly. What finally pushed me over the edge was when Word (in Office XP) crashed hard just as it began to autosave, corrupting both the document file and the autosaved backup and destroying two whole days of work. Luckily, I had sent a draft to a colleague a couple days before and I was able to get him to send me that version, or I'd have been out almost two weeks of work. That experience convinced me to dump Word for OO.o Writer and I've never looked back.

Oh -- one other reason that Word is unusable for real, paying work -- Word's master documents just don't work. When stuff gets really big and complex, master documents are a lifesaver and they work flawlessly in OO.o.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[swillden]

LaTeX and Emacs. I adopted them both specifically when writing my book because I didn't trust Word. It took a long time to become comfortable with both, but it was one of the best decisions I've ever made.

It's worth pointing out that LaTeX is not only more powerful, more reliable and more flexible than Word, it also produces output that just plain looks better. TeX does what a professional typesetter does, and there are many subtle presentation issues that it handles beautifully which Word doesn't even consider. My favorite example is text "color". In a well-typeset document, a paragraph should be the same color, meaning the same amount of black ink compared to white space. You should not have one line whose justification requires a bit of extra space between letters, causing that line to be "whiter" than the one above or below it. TeX's hyphenation algorithm takes this into account, choosing where to break words so that all lines in the paragraph have similar color.

That's just one example, and there are lots and lots of other subtle formatting issues that Word (and Writer, and every other word processor) simply ignore. The differences are subtle, but taken altogether they do have real impact. If you look at lots of word-processed documents and then come across a TeX document, the TeX document will look crisper, more professional, and just plain *prettier* even if you don't know enough about typesetting to figure out why.

I always tell PhD students: you are going to a professional writer so use professional writer's tools: LaTeX and BibTeX.

Amen. For people who want to get started quickly, you might want to point them towards LyX. It provides all the benefits of LaTeX, wrapped up in an interface that is significantly more comfortable to those who are accustomed to word processors.

I *never* recommend Emacs, though I personally love it.

LOL. I do recommend EMACS, but I also warn that it has a very steep learning curve.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[MrCopilot]

You also don't technically need video support in Impress

Yes I do, now take that back.

I didn't know it until right now, But you are right, I need to stick a video on every one of my slides.

Hmmm, Opened it up, tried avi, nope. Tried mov. Nope, Tried mpg, nope. Man thanks a lot for bumming me out.

Debian machine old version 2.0 lemme see here...............need to get 144Mgbytes......67Mbytes used after installation ......Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y

Hang on a minute.........

......

More Like 12 Minutes..........

.......

48 actually,

2.2 lessee, hmmm nope.

I will try 2.3 on another machine, for now it is my mission. I will embed video in a presentation!

However, I will not purchase Microsoft Office to do so. See I usually use a video editor to make video slideshows. Kino, Lives, etc.. Seems to me to be simpler.

Honestly, I wouldn't buy Office for any reason. These tools should be free. They should be accessible to all. They should not fund the management at Microsoft. I say this as an IT professional and longtime MS user. Your contribution to the effort is noted. We'll be in touch after we implement the features you need. Um, no actually we won't look us up again when you need us.

Not to mention the slideshow can launch any file your system has a mimetype for including videos. You set it as in interaction, just in case someday you happen to be without your MS Office 67digit install key.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Chandon Seldon]

But it's not a valid reason for him to post that OpenOffice is unusable crap - and yet every Microsoft Office user who's tried OpenOffice for 10 minutes and had trouble with new ideas seems compelled to post exactly that every time there's an OpenOffice story.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Anonymous Coward]

>>And what is the number of the bug report for that one? Or are you just yapping?

Attitudes like yours turns people off to open source.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Whitemice]

> This probably explains why Lotus Notes has more success than Open Office,
> Sendmail / Qmail / Postfix / Sunbird / OpenGroupware and Thunderbird;

I don't understand what this means: "Lotus Notes has more success". You can't possibly mean that there are more installations of Lotus Notes than there is of Sendmail / Postfix? That's crazy; many shops that use Notes also use Sendmail or Postfix, and there are certainly way more sites that use Sendmail/Postfix than use Notes.

> despite Notes being crappier, bulkier and bloatier than the MS equivalents.

Why this need for perjoratives? Maybe lots of places find Notes useful? What is one man's "bloat" is another man's critical feature. As someone who works on the [to you, unsuccessful] OpenGroupware project I can assure you that there are lots of people who don't understand the difference between "groupware" and "PIM" because they believe no one exists who needs the features of a true "groupware" solution - it is all just "bloat" to them. They're wrong.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Trelane]

free PowerPoint viewer software to put on the CD so it would work on a system without MS Office installed.

I think you mean "it would work on a Windows system".

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Whitemice]

> So in the end OO is not usable except for extremely simple things

Have you tried using the Stylist and master documents? Because I maintain several complex multi-hundred-page documents with OOo and it is a breeze. Table of contents, indexes, etc... and generate automatically. It is great.

> OOBasic bites, and their component architecture is anything but simple.

Here I agree with you; 'programming' in OOo is a lost cause, but I chalk this up primarily to the fact that the documentation for advanced features is AWFUL AWFUL AWFUL!!!

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Trelane]

Out of curiosity, how would you export a PowerPoint presentation to Flash or PDF?

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Anonymous Coward]

>>Speaking of Apache--it runs rings around IIS---in all aspects;

In all aspects? There are so many pieces of software that I've used over the years that require IIS that I cannot count them. Sure I might be able to hack some kludgy workarounds to get them to work with Apache but then the app vendors wouldn't support me because I am running an unsupported configuration. IIS is really the only choice in those situations. And if IIS is the only choice then how can Apache be superior in all aspects?

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[eugene ts wong]

I doubt that it makes drawings more efficiently that Microsoft products. I really doubt it. Are there experts who could comment on this? I've really struggled to make decent images with OOo.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[gallwapa]

The same GNU Cash that couldn't accurately calculate my bank balance when I changed the sort order of the Debit/Credit fields? Sorting ascending caused it to end up with like a $-9,398 value.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[eugene ts wong]

There was an explanation of why it was unsatisfactory. He said that the software doesn't play well together. Whether it is true, and whether we agree to it or not, is a different issue.

1 thing that I don't like about OOo is that it is bloated. I don't want to upgrade my computer just to use new versions, and just to have access to OOo documents.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[rmcd]

Your comment about color is interesting. When I was talking with publishers I met with a few production folks from one of the big publishing houses. They looked at my sample chapters and one said that they were the best-looking documents they'd seen in a book proposal. Afterwards I asked others about this comment (which astonished me, since I did nothing special --- I didn't know enough to do anything special!) and I was told that they were probably reacting to the even grey-level of the text, what you're referring to as color. Now that this has been brought to my attention, I notice it all the time. TeX/LaTeX is amazing.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[eugene ts wong]

What you say about indents is true about Draw as well. You can move a Bezier point [or whatever it is called] from "here" to "there" and back again...oops, no you can't. You can only try, because it will snap to yet another point. It's rediculous.

Can somebody verify what I just said?

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[eugene ts wong]

I think that it is more accurate to say that OOo is good enough for the developers, and that the fact that it isn't good enough for us is irrelevant. It snaps to where the developers what it to snap, but who cares about us?

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[enmane]

Well, the fact that they don't have any idea what people use Outlook for is exactly why they are well suited to start this project.

They've had OO for years and they have no idea what people use a word processor, spreadsheet, etc for either - so why should they stop now?

I just reported a bug AGAIN that has been FIXED about 3 times that causes the document to create extra _5f entries in the XML if tables are used. This bug will render the document useless as the entries grow at an exponential rate and eventually corrupt the document in such a way that it can't be opened unless the file is unzipped and the offending entries removed.

How's THAT for a group of people beating the drum about claiming that they can take on MSO?!

In what GALAXY do these guys live in? I wouldn't trust them to code ANYTHING anymore. What's really got me going about these guys are the following,
1) Crappy coding
2) claiming bugs are fixed WITHOUT EVEN TESTING THEM! Seriously, they have a bug that is extremely repeatable and hoses the word processor and they claim it is "fixed."
3) calling requirements "enhancements" and postponing the work for YEARS
4) splitting up an integrated desktop environment under the guise of cleaning up "bloat" only to find that the individual apps now run slower and require more memory.
5) ADVERTISING THAT THEY'LL KICK MS's BUTT!

Please, stop the rhetoric and see that OO is at least a decade behind MSO.

Sure, they've got some nice features but guess what.... MS just added bibliography ability with 2007 - one less reason for me to use OO. Now, just give me an equation editor where I can "type" the equation in (like OO) and OO will have nothing to offer me. I'm just finished with these guys.

I feel like a kid with a workaholic Dad. Dad keeps saying "not today son, maybe tomorrow." Sooner or later, the son will see the reality for what it is... Is that "Cat's in the Cradle" that I hear?????

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Allador]

Please, I've seen at least 7 advisories this year on exploitable, unpatched buffer overflows in current versions of Outlook. I don't recall any that have been wormed, but if a worm is made to exploit an e-mail program and it spreads widely, you can bet it will only be affecting Outlook users. Interesting, because it looks to me like Secunia says differently.

Those links show zero unpatched advisories in Outlook 2002/XP and Outlook 2007. It shows one unpatched advisory in Outlook 2003 that is 3 months old. It's mildly bad, but has some extenuating circumstances around it (must forward to trigger, etc).

Also, since one of the service packs in Outlook 2000, its been trivial to force Outlook to render everything in plain text, which brings your vulnerability to pretty much zero.

Combine that with a typical security policy where people aren't running as local admins, and its not too much of an issue.

Real world experience shows this sort of thing to pretty much be a non-issue these days, and hasnt been for many years.

It may be an old problem, but it is still a current one. Change tracking is not the only way data is mined from doc files. Regular .doc recovery programs as well as programs designed specifically for the purpose can often recover deleted parts of files and in some cases unrelated deleted data from the user's hard disk. I think you're stretching what we're talking about here. Undelete programs that recover freed sectors on the disk has nothing to do with Microsoft, or MS Office, or Windows. Thats a very typical file system problem, that is well understood, and has nothing to do with office programs.

The well publicized information leakage problem present in older versions of Word, that came to light in several very public situations, is largely a non-issue nowadays, due to configuration and behavior changes in the software.

Finally, Word suffers from the same monoculture problem as Outlook as seen with the targeted industrial espionage utilizing buffer overflows in Word and Excel, from earlier this year. In fact, those attacks were discovered by users whose company had standardized on StarOffice and thus questioned why their colleagues within the company were sending them .doc files. Although I hesitate to even respond to the silly 'monoculture' meme, your particular incantation of it isnt very relevant.

All office programs have vulnerabilities, buffer overflows, remote compromises. It's par for the course for this type of software. The fact that most desktops in the world run 'some version' of MS Office doesnt magically grant extra vulnerability.

Even with complete remote, own-the-box with no user interaction vulnerabilities, this magical monoculture thing doesnt kick in. I've seen things like Blaster and other more targeted attacks sweep through large organizations. And you know what? The response and effectiveness of the attacks within the windows 'monoculture' is highly non-uniform. The only predictable factor is that the well managed groups tend to have no problems, and the poorly managed groups tend to have problems.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[DerekLyons]

I don't know how you were rated as "5 insightful" - in fact there was zero explanation as to why OOO was unsatisfactory.

Oh? Did you bother to read the message at the top of the thread? If you had, you'd have seen: The great thing about Office is all the damn pieces work together. Excel is friendly with Access, Access is friendly with Word, Everything is friendly with Outlook. To beat Office, you have to have an Office suite that works like that. Not just all the pieces in one package.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[gcauthon]

Did you RTFA? This is about using Open Office, or OO (WTF is OOO?), to replace Outlook by including Thunderbird within the OO distribution. You argue with the previous commenter but then admit you use Outlook? WTF! You really don't know what this discussion is about do you? This is about Thunderbird vs Outlook, who gives a damn what you open your text documents with?

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[tyrione]

Download 1.5.2 and answer your own "How about?" and then comment.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[zdarnell]

The actual name of Open Office is OpenOffice.Org, hence the 3 Os.

I don't know anyone who verbally says the .org, but its part of the name.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[ClosedSource]

"How would OpenOffice's theoretical astroturfers be paid?"

Well, I was pointing out the absurdity of such claims, not supporting them. Nevertheless, Sun could certainly afford to do it. IBM also likes to support most anti-MS projects. Also when you are part of a "movement" such as F/OSS, you could get "paid" by receiving approval from your peers.

Again, I don't believe this is happening, but you could make just about as good a case for OpenOffice astroturfers as you could for MS Office ones.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Repossessed]

I'm going to start by saying that I absolutely hate open office and MS office alike. And find both applications to be completely bloody useless.

That said:

A) .rtf, every word processor in existence supports it.

B) The one thing open office actually seems to do well is tables (of course, I haven't used either since a couple years ago, so there may be some regression/improvements).

C) Excel/access interfunctionality is kind of a joke, they have to reinput my information in this setup at work every few weeks, and it's not uncommon for a days worth of entries to suddenly vanish from a database. If openoffice does want to succeed in business, getting something like this that actually works might be a really good idea.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Anonymous Coward]

Poor you.

I think people use Outlook for email, actually.
But the apparent effect of Outlook is a worldwide virus bot network. I think that comes with catering to the dummy crowd just a little too much.

I'm no fan of Evolution or Kontact, myself.

But, please, this is Slashdot. Do not compare with Microsoft stuff. (yes, it's the articles fault.)

For long time Linux users, Microsoft software has not been an option for many years. Too many bugs, too many viruses, no source code, too little control, too many proprietary formats. too much DRM, too little trust.

Good luck with Vista and future releases out of your control.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[gaspyy]

Everything was auto-numbered and auto-formatted and I was pleased and thought to myself that maybe Word was finally usable

Well, you'd be lucky if you can get auto-numbering to work at all correctly in Writer.

I use OOo exclusively; I have a MS Office XP somewhere gathering dust because I can't activate it.
For most day-by-day small documents, Writer is OK, however, if you're planning to write something more, be ready for serious frustration.

I wrote a few scientific documents (~100 pages each). Getting headings to display the correct numbering, simply sucks. Formatting works erratically and it's simply a PITA to make document look professional. No matter how careful I'm with styles and how organized I am, it's still frustrating.

I was A LOT MORE productive with WordPerfect 5.1 (yes, the text-only, DOS-based, blue-background one), simply because of its Reveal Codes function.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Maxo-Texas]

Interesting down-modding. Makes me even more suspicious of astroturfing.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Maxo-Texas]

Keep in mind that Microsoft office is one of the three legs Microsoft is built on.

You literally have billions of dollars at stake here. If you had billions of dollars at stake, I think you would do what you needed to to manage the public impression of your product. In time, I could see offices full of inexpensive indian or chinese labor whose job was to manage slashdot and other sites.

I mean, heck, we recently saw Microsoft try to BUY the IEEE international standards approval very blatantly.

Open office is an excellent solution for the home user and small business. It isn't there yet for the large businesses.

However- my large business barely uses the sharepoint and other advanced features. OOo would work well for about 90% of our usage.

JUST last tuesday, we had a word document which crashed the entire machine everytime it was loaded (Win XP- fully patched). The cursor flashed quickly for about 70 seconds before the crash but it crashed every time the document was loaded. The fix? Load the document with OOo, and resave it as a .Doc. OOo handles corrupted MS Word documents better than MS WOrd does. You get a corrupted section header in your 85 page word document, you are in a world of hurt. Without OOo, the only recovery is to save it as html or text, reload it, and the redo all your special formatting.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[dbIII]

I am complaining because after eight years of using Microsoft Office 2000

You know where everything is and all the little quirks that apply to the things you do. Anything that is similar but different is bound to be a disappointment. Openoffice is for those of us that can't use MS Office in our sleep, don't expect identical behaviour and don't mind learning a different workflow. The way word deals with embedded images and seems to randomly skip them onto other pages or hide them has annoyed me since MS Office 95 and Excel's charting is fiddly for anything other than business graphics so that's why I was happy to move to Openoffice. As for powerpoint - I'm suprised web content development software did not bury it a decade ago.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[dbIII]

Yes but the poster above does not need to be flexable. They have found what works for them and don't really have a compelling reason to learn a new workflow.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[scuba0]

Hmm, I gotta ask what you are comparing it to. OOo 2.3 is not more bloated than MS Office 2003 or if you compare to the 2007 version it is like Notepad in comparison.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[scuba0]

I second that, why do people complain on OOo for not being able to use a locked format very vell? It is probably the same people thats promoting Microsofts new attempts with their "free" format. If you need something in common, use Latex or rtf. But something that would be better is to tell your friend or whatever that it is his problem that he cannot read .odf docs at all (that should be the bigger issue at hand).

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[ozmanjusri]

And if IIS is the only choice then how can Apache be superior in all aspects?

Vendor lock-in is a positive?

I suppose if you enjoy Ballmer's firm grip on your testicles it is. Me, I don't swing that way.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[aproposofwhat]

You bill 'per character'? WTF??

What sort of idiot client would pay per character, or per word (OK - newspapers with columns to fill with mindless garbage will pay per word...)

How can you live with yourself, with the constant temptation to fill your output with unnecessary and redundant (not to say excessive and overblown) verbiage?

If I were you, I would feel an incessant compulsion to expand my prose by the use of such techhinques as hyperbole, ellipsis (do you get paid for the ...?), repetitiion, redundancy and so on.

You also don't technically need video support in Impress, because you can just tell the viewers to close their eyes and imagine what it might look like.

Yeah, and you can't put a link to a video in Impress, and use the appropriate Firefox plugin, because that's beyond the ken of normal humans, innit?

:P

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Marcus Green]

I have used OO.org for creating 50K work plus documents for commercial purposes. Have you used MS Word for creating such documents for commercial purposes?

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[temcat]

There's nothing wrong with paying per character or word. It's as simple as choosing to do business with those who do not "fill their output with unnecessary and redundant verbiage."

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

So what do I use? LaTeX and Emacs. I adopted them both specifically when writing my book because I didn't trust Word. It took a long time to become comfortable with both, but it was one of the best decisions I've ever made. My book is published using TeX and I can use the compositor's files to revise the book. I find this works incredibly well. I always tell PhD students: you are going to a professional writer so use professional writer's tools: LaTeX and BibTeX. (I *never* recommend Emacs, though I personally love it.)

I can only heartily concur. When I started doing research (way back when, Office 97 was just out), about half of those in my corridor was using Word, and the other half LaTeX/BibTeX. Us LaTeX:ers didn't have any problems, but if I had a penny for every time that one of the Word crowd was shouting "WTF?" I'd at least have had a nice lunch. On at least two occasions Word, for all intents and purposes, crashed and took a whole thesis with it, backups not withstanding. In the end, about half of the word crowd sucked it up and switched to LaTeX, and the others lamented having too much invested in Word. Not one was happy with their original choice.

Now, for most of the work I've used Word for professionally, it worked just fine, as I just wrote short documents that weren't going to be professionally printed and that didn't contain much in the way of citations (or were going to be read for that matter). For everything else however, there's not much to beat LaTeX/BibTeX/Emacs (since the latter has so many nice addons that integrate nicely with LaTeX/BibTeX, such as reftex-mode, flyspell-mode, latex-mode, bibtex-mode, etc).

Word on the other hand is still not at the stage where what you'll see on one printer is what you'll see on another. You have to make sure that you go the pdf-route to be certain. And don't get me started on the handling of citations.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Maxo-Texas]

Actually, Master documents work in Word. Until the day they suddenly mysteriously don't. And then man are you in for a world of hurt.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Maxo-Texas]

Are there any ODT to Latex converters? Or can Openoffice export in latex format?

That seems like it would be cool. Quickly rough up in wsywig until the doc got too big, then export to latex and continue.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the downmods are a result of your stupidity. That's always a good alternative to "omg microshaft pays people to argue with zealots on splashmork!!1!"

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[R_Dorothy]

On Thunderbird, nothing works. No emails are available, no calendaring stuff, nothing. It seems that you have to always remember to manually synch before you go offline, otherwise nothing will work.

Sync On Arrival works for me on my laptop.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[martalli]

You are absolutely right. OOo cannot win direct comparisons on a feature-by-feature basis, but then it is free compared to the tune of $100-400 for various versions of MS Office. Probably the main feature MS Office has over OOo is the collaborative features that allow people who are not even in the same physical space to collaborate and share documents. However, easily 95% of people are using word processors and spreadsheets for fairly basic tasks. My office uses OOo exclusively, but we only need it for basic tasks, like writing letters and maintaining lists on spreadsheets. A local newspaper here (a small community weekly) uses it to write up their articles, even though they use a proprietary solution for the final layout, etc. It all depends on your needs. If you really need the features of MS Office, then buy it. There is no need to moralize about what is the right choice - just consider your needs. I guess I would moralize that if you are using open source, consider donating back to the project in some fashion.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[aliquis]

True, back when I tried staroffice for the first times what I liked about it better than word was that my diagrams, screenshots or whatever didn't jumped around in the whole fucking document. I hate when you move and image with whatever image properties they have in MS word and then it just jumps away and you wonder where it wen't and find it in the end of the document or whatever and have to drag it up again over a few pages ..

I think stuff jumped around less in staroffice. In latex they stay ;D

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Marcus Green]

"It's worth pointing out that LaTeX is not only more powerful, more reliable and more flexible than Word"

It's worth pointing out that A washing machine is more powerful, more reliable and more flexible than microwave oven.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[MrNaz]

Why's that?

Why did she do it?!

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[StarOcean]

Actually students also account for a portion of Office licenses (no where as big as big companies but still can't be ignored). Many university purchase student Office licenses in bulks and MS Office is the preferred suit a lot of the times. A lot of my profs stresses how much problem and headache they've had from students who use Open Office and submits something that is unreadable. They have mentioned a lot of the time the files looks different than the original Open Office version once they are opened with Microsoft Office. Most tutorials and labs are demonstrated with MS Office as well, also making Open Office less ideal. As an university student, I would rather use something that I know will be right than taking a gamble with my future. I am sure the consequences will becomes more severe once I start working.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Blakey Rat]

In situations where you would bill per word in english, you bill per character in Japanese and Chinese languages.

In any case, regardless of how you bill, there's simply no excuse for OpenOffice giving the wrong word count.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Whitemice]

> It's true that with OOo and Thunderbird's plugin architecture,
> you would soon see it supporting other groupware solutions,

It already supports GroupDAV for shared addressbooks
http://www.inverse.ca/english/contributions/thunderbird_groupdav_plugin.html

This works with multiple groupware servers including OpenGroupware, SOGo, and Citadel.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[DMUTPeregrine]

Bah, Who needs OO.o for that? You can embed video in a presentation using EMACS.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Anonymous Coward]

#17964. Mentioned in 2004, last modified slightly over two years ago and apparently still not fixed. Targetted for a "meh, whatever, we're actually ignoring this but pretending we're not" release.

All credit to this post (and a quick glance through the bug report).

Nice asshole attitude though. People like you are what's wrong with the open source movement.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[swillden]

It's worth pointing out that A washing machine is more powerful, more reliable and more flexible than microwave oven.

Your analogy doesn't work. While Word and LaTeX are different in many ways, they do actually have the same ultimate purpose: document production.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[swillden]

Actually, Master documents work in Word. Until the day they suddenly mysteriously don't. And then man are you in for a world of hurt.

That is exactly my experience.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[SatanicPuppy]

No, it's not. It's about Office vs Open Office...If all you need is a mail client, your needs are simple anyway.

Outlook by itself is no great application...It's Outlook plus Exchange that's hard to top. But they're completely missing the point there, and just putting in a mail client without coming up with a backend groupware competitor. I've got no problem with them putting in a mail client, but don't call it an Outlook competitor if it's not one.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[walt-sjc]

No, the OP said that he thought the integration of MS office components was great. It said NOTHING about OOo components NOT being integrated.

Again, there has been no factual information presented on exactly what is wrong with OOo.

As for your comment, OOo bloated? The install is significantly smaller than MS Office. I really don't get why people call OOo bloated when it is smaller than MS Office. These same people frequently claim that OOo doesn't have features X Y and Z. Do you want something small or do you want features???

I would never claim that OOo is a perfect clone of MS Office. I WILL claim that it is good enough for 90%+ of the MS Office userbase. With Very Rare exceptions (a handful of docs out of HUNDREDS) it has been able to import Word / Excel docs without fail. I have been using OOo since 1.0 for my day to day business use.

There are some valid criticisms of OOo. Lack of templates, clipart, weak presentation tool, but all in all it works very well, and works BETTER than MS Office for some things such as large documents.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Marcus Green]

From the perspective of Joe Q Non Programmer they may as well be as different as a Microwave and a Washing Machine. I'm a programmer by career and when I looked at LaTex I decided life wasn't long enough. Note how frequently the people promoting LaTex are PHd students. For a PhD student the complexity and learning curve of LaTex may be trivial, for the other 99.999 percent of humanity, some alternative is needed.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[SatanicPuppy]

You know, I'm tired of being told it's a problem with me when I think the software is crappy. I'd rather word process in Vi or goddamn Emacs than in Writer. I've used Wordperfect, and Claris, and Writer, and Abiword, and Word, and I just do not like Writer. period. I liked Wordperfect better, and goddamn that's saying something!

I'm not even that crazy with the word processing, and I still run into problems with Writer, and when I run into problems, given the limited nature of my needs, that's like a slap in the face.

Worst of all, I've tried to do OOo rollouts in office environments, and that is by far the most painful experience I've had in my working life. No one likes it better than what they were using before, and it doesn't matter what they were using. I tried putting people on OOO.2 when it came out, to replace their Word 97, and they hated it. Moreover, when I, in my arrogance, tried to tell them it was just an issue of learning the software, they'd pull up detailed examples of things it damn well didn't do, and I had to stand there like a retard trying to defend brand new software against EIGHT YEAR OLD OFFICE and failing.

Working with it myself is one thing. When I try to pitch it to other people, and they take it, use it, and find that it's so bad they'd rather buy 200 office licenses...They rightly think I have poor judgment, and that's flat unforgivable. Pitching OSS can be an uphill battle anyway against the MS zealots, so when I pitch something I want to sell them on the fact that its so good it makes the equivalent closed source product look like crap. If I pitch a crappy OSS product (like OOo), it makes the rest of my job that much harder.

I use GIMP, and I use Abiword, and in both of those cases, I notice a lack when compared with Photoshop or Word, but the lack is purely in extra features...GIMP and Abiword are stable, and responsive, and they do what I need them to do. OOo is a pile of substandard, bloated apps, and damn none of them make me happy.

So screw it. I'm done advocating OOo. I'm done using it. I'm sick of the space it takes up on my install disks.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[SatanicPuppy]

How would OpenOffice's theoretical astroturfers be paid?

They get secret access to the version of OOo that doesn't suck.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[goatpunch]

every Microsoft Office user who's tried OpenOffice for 10 minutes and had trouble with new ideas

I'm not sure that missing a vitally important feature that was availabe in Office 2000 counts as a 'new idea'.

OpenOffice is great. Thunderbird is great too. They're great free products that fill a need for some people but they fall so far from feature parity with even old versions of Office that suggesting them as a replacement for a 'power' Offic user is just a joke.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[SatanicPuppy]

I actually am a programmer, and a writer, and I don't much care for LaTex. Moreover, I work in a printing industry, and no one here knows what the hell it is, because they all either use Quark or some sexy proprietary layout/cms app like DTI.

If the "look" of your document is more important than the content of your document, then, by all means, use LaTex. If you'd rather be able to just put the words down on the page and let someone else format them for printing later, then there are about a zillion word processors out there that will do it fine.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[goatpunch]

By bundling Thunderbird, they manage to kill the ancient MS argument against OO.o ("It doesn't even have an email client!")

Outlook is a lot more than an email client. How do I create a task from an email in Thunderbird? In Outlook it's one click. How well does Thunderbird sync with my phone/PDA?

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Deagol]

I used to try and push OO on people, but I've completely lost faith in it.

Open Office is fine and dandy -- it's the people you should lose faith in. The issues with OO (or any MS Office competitor) are herd mentality (oh, noes! I need this to collaborate with everyone else!), or techno gluttony (.... but I *gotta* have pivot tables and spreadsheet integration to print out mailing lists!). Sheesh, people... reading all the corporate and personal ass-kissing of MS Office and Outlook/Exchange today, one might be led to believe that 15 years ago we were using stone tablets for intra-office communication. Or at the very least that when we had *other* office and email apps in the office (Word Perfect, Lotus-123, and Eudora or, the horror, 80-column terminals and text email clients), we were an order of magnitude less productive back then than we are today with the mighty MS Office Suite ruling the roost. That's simply not true.

The problem is not technical, but social. The herd will not migrate to better pastures (where "better" means personal freedom and flexibility, not the latest bells and whistles), but will *only* seek alternative when they are forced to abandon Office. Period. Same as with Linux on the desktop.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[goatpunch]

Note how frequently the people promoting LaTex are PhD students.

Perhaps that should have been: Note how frequently the people promoting LaTex are Computer Science PhD students.

I've known plenty of PhD and Masters candidates in non-CS fields, they all used Word on either a PC or Mac, without exception.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[gravis777]

I was about to make the same comment. Thunderbird is an e-mail client, not an Outlook replacement. Outlook does so much more than simply recieve and send e-mail to pop3/smpt servers. Right now, the only way to get tunderbird to work with Exchange is to enable IMAP support on the exchange server (strangely, also the same way you get the iPhone to work with exchange), which most system admins probably will refuse to do. No, Thunderbird is not even remotely similar to Outlook. Entourage is not Outlook. No, the only open source client I am aware of that is remotely similar to Outlook is Evolution, and it seems to be Linux only.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[swillden]

I'm a programmer by career and when I looked at LaTex I decided life wasn't long enough.

You should look at LyX. Most of the goodness of LaTeX without the pain. Actually, all of the goodness of LaTeX, but to get some of it, you have to learn LaTeX.

Note how frequently the people promoting LaTex are PHd students. For a PhD student the complexity and learning curve of LaTex may be trivial, for the other 99.999 percent of humanity, some alternative is needed.

As another poster pointed out, PhD students who are going into a life of research are professional writers. If you write for a living, then it's worth investing a significant amount of time in learning tools that maximize your efficiency and productiveness.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[testerus]

Are there any ODT to Latex converters?
Writer2LaTeX

Or can Openoffice export in latex format?
Writer2LaTeX is integrated since OpenOffice.org 2.0.4.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[LWATCDR]

Your comments on Writer is interesting. I have never had any real problems with Calc but then I don't do anything complex with it.
I wonder if any of the other FOSS spreadsheets might be a better match for what you want to do than even Excel. I don't know because I don't know exactly what you are doing.

I for the most part agree with you. OO is only good enough for average user. The good thing is that it is probably good enough for 90% of the people out there that use Office. For high end users I am sure it needs work.
My one question is why did you upgrade to 2007? Did it have a feature that you needed that 2000 didn't?
I know many people are not moving to 2007 because 2000 and 2003 are both pretty good.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Allador]

Thanks for the link!

When/if they ever make the plugin work with Thunderbird 2.x I can give it a try.

It is sad though that the plugin description mentions that the only reason its written is because Thunderbird doesnt behave as its supposed to in the first place.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[rainman_bc]

I used to try and push OO on people, but I've completely lost faith in it. I keep thinking, maybe they'll get their crap together, but then they do stuff like this. Me too, until I actually sat down to write a technical document and realized how much better Word really is from Writer.

Ever tried outlining your document in Writer? Word kicks the living crap out of Writer in that single feature alone. I get by without proper outlining, but it makes me so very angry. Then I remember about how much I paid for OOo and I stop being angry =D

FWIW though I have NeoOffice on my Mac now, and I'm quite impressed with it as a native Aqua app... Only one small frustration in it so far - I have a Might Mouse, and side scrolling in Calc doesn't work. Other than that, nice to see a native Mac port of OOo. Kudos.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Sentax]

Out of curiosity, how would you export a PowerPoint presentation to Flash or PDF?

Don't have the slightest clue, never thought of doing that actually, would be convenient for web viewing.

I think you mean "it would work on a Windows system".

Yes, given that I knew the target machine was a Windows system, it was not a concern to support different platforms.

Cheers

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Maxo-Texas]

The down=modding for a fairly mild comment that was actually informative (I looked at the posting histories and saw most had long posting history) was more of a "straw". I had been suspicious before.

What was suspicious was the speed at which so many of the pro-microsoft/anti-open office comments slammed +5 insightful. It was like someone had nothing better to do than sit around waiting to plus mod the comments. I've seen other hotter threads of similar age where the many posts reached +5 much more slowly.

And when I thought about it, if I had a 40 billion dollar company at stake, why yes I would have motive and could easily afford to keep a hundred people posting for mod points to manipulate a site like Slashdot. When ways to manipulate the modding system occured to *me* last year, I created other id's and tested the concept and yes, it does work. It takes a while but you can mod your own comments occasionally. I can't think of any way that slashdot can close that hole so I had not mentioned it until I see suspiciously fast pro-microsoft moderation occurring.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[R_Dorothy]

When/if they ever make the plugin work with Thunderbird 2.x I can give it a try. The lack of this plugin in 2.x is why I've rolled back to 1.5 - 2 didn't give me anything I needed and sync-on-arrival broke :-(

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[spasm]

I've used writer2latex (0.4 - haven't used the 0.5 release that just came out today yet : ) a couple of times when I've discovered I needed to incorporate chunks of a word or OO document into something else I was writing in latex. My experience was that it's a great effort, and simplifies the process a lot, but that you inevitably need to do varying amounts of post-conversion cleanup (particularly if using natbib or jurabib).

ie it's a valuable tool to assist when you need to convert something, but no way in hell would you deliberately start out a project with the idea of 'drafting it in OO and converting to latex later' unless you like makework.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Count Fenring]

Sadly, I must disagree. As a full-time Openoffice user, I have to say that the slider behavior is in fact stupid. Dumb as bricks dipped in lead paint. I base this not on any particular Office behavior: I haven't used office for anything since high school, and then I primarily used WordPerfect. No, I base this on the simple fact that arbitrarily sized indents are at worst useless, and at best something that you might want very occasionally. Regular indentation, however, is needed in, well, every document I've ever seen that uses indentation. Summary: It is a problem, and a legitimate one, that the indent sliders in Openoffice.org are nonintuitive, undocumented in their primary interface, and completely contra the standard behavior of similar widgets throughout Word-Processor-dom.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[ozmanjusri]

And when I thought about it, if I had a 40 billion dollar company at stake, why yes I would have motive and could easily afford to keep a hundred people posting for mod points to manipulate a site like Slashdot.

The good thing about this attack is that it's obvious to anyone with a bit of sense that Microsoft is gaming Slashdot and other tech sites now.

It also shows how much they must fear Open Office. The team there and at Thunderbird should be pretty heartened by this, it shows they're on the right track.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[rmcd]

It's clear you aren't a LaTeX user because you've got it exactly backwards. For many users, the main benefit of LaTeX is the ability to focus on the logical structure and content of the document, and not to have to think at all about appearance, which LaTeX handles automatically. The benefits of auto-numbering, robust cross-referencing, and sophisticated bibliographic handling increase as your document gets longer.

Every Word user I know spends a lot of time messing with formatting. Maybe they don't have to, but they do. A WYSIWYG environment encourages you to do that. You don't have to touch formatting in LaTeX. And I can assure you that someone using Winedt, Vim, or Emacs to create a LaTeX document is not thinking about appearance as they're writing. This is why it's so efficient.

You're right that if "If you'd rather be able to just put the words down on the page" then there are a zillion alternatives. But if you want to be able to put the words down in the context of a structured document, the alternatives narrow pretty fast, depending on what you're doing. In many technical fields (not just computer science, I assure you), LaTeX is either a standard or becoming one.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[eugene ts wong]

Actually, I was really just comparing it to itself. I honestly can't understand why it takes so much code to make it work the way that it does. Maybe they need to start making macros, instead. It would increase the install size on the disk, but it would also require less RAM overall, I suspect. It would be nice to be able to have less features. I probably need to look for another word processor.

If I haven't clarified, then let me know.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[eugene ts wong]

I think that the post that everybody is talking about is the top post.

To say that he likes Office because of the integration, implies that OOo isn't integrated. He doesn't go about proving anything. I don't think that anybody does. In a sense, we don't really have to, because we should be able to verify it on our own. Regarding integration and whatever, that's subjective. It's not factual information. It's an explanation, though. I said that an explanation was given, and an explanation was given.

I wasn't really comparing OOo to MS Office. I was comparing it to itself. It is so monolithic, in my opinion [and probably many others], that it takes an updated computer just to make it work at a decent pace to do basic stuff. I don't want features. There is enough.

It could reduce the bloat, by removing the autopilots and using macros for the exact same thing. In fact, using macros to provide the same features would prove to the users that the system is capable of handling complex tasks.

If I haven't answered you properly, then let me know.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[ThePhilips]

[...] it's that last 10% where the devils hide. So that last 10% never quite makes it into the FOSS solution [...]

I'd rather say it is particular to some FLOSS projects. But it is not systematic.

OOo is good example where you have huge corporate presence (most of the work is done by Sun full timers) and more or less complete disconnect from users and their needs.

But then you have something like e.g. Apache or Subversion or X.Org or KDE where users actually have a say - and project progress smoothly with only few not-show-stopper bumps here and there.

Many FLOSS are 100% ready and are in heavy use already. But OOo is simply not one of them. OOo got overhyped since it can *MIRACLE* read binary M$Office documents.

I personally have quite high expectation of KOffice which mostly works for me even right now. It is easy to start using KOffice, it is easy to start developing for KOffice. And KDE forums unlike OOo or GNOME forums are not overflowing with zealots - but rather pragmatical people - what definitely helps to find a solution for a problem one might have. If KDE 4.0/Qt4 would allow it to run on Windows, here you would have a real M$Office killer. For good.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[tehcyder]

That's actually the *reason* I switched to OOo, because it could accomplish the job without crashing hourly.

This cannot be generally true, or Office would not be so widely used. Companies may lazily stick with Microsoft, but not at the expense of getting any work done at all. It just doesn't make any sense.

What finally pushed me over the edge was when Word (in Office XP) crashed hard just as it began to autosave, corrupting both the document file and the autosaved backup and destroying two whole days of work.

Oh come on, if you work on a document for two days without occasionally saving, do you really think you can blame the software for that? What would have happened if someone had come along and spilt coffee over your machine or something?

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Dan100]

the file format is fragile -- you can not expect to be able to reliably read a 10-year old document

I use Office XP and it opens any of my (up to 15 years old) Word for Windows 2.0 or Excel 3.0 files from my school days transparently, and they include a lot of OLE, embedded bitmaps etc. Not sure how you're managing to hit problems - one of Office's strengths is its ability to read old documents.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[Marcus Green]

When I last looked at Lyx it required an X server under Win32. When I looked just now there appeared to be an "experimental" version for Win32 that did not require X. When I looked at it under Linux it did not look slick, professional or inviting. (Though possibly an improvement over hacking latex with a hammer chisel and bash prompt). Or I could consider the OOo range that has the backing of several multi billion dollar corporations behind it and around 100 million downloads and it mimics the interface I and a squillion other people are familiar with.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[swillden]

This cannot be generally true, or Office would not be so widely used. Companies may lazily stick with Microsoft, but not at the expense of getting any work done at all. It just doesn't make any sense.

I think most people don't work on the kind of large, complex documents I do. Otherwise, they would have to find something else.

Oh come on, if you work on a document for two days without occasionally saving, do you really think you can blame the software for that? What would have happened if someone had come along and spilt coffee over your machine or something?

You misunderstood. See, when Word crashes it sometimes corrupts the copy on disk. In this particular case, it crashed while it was doing an autosave, and corrupted those as well. On the occasions I have to work with Word, I not only save frequently, but every couple of hours I make a backup copy.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[swillden]

When I looked at it under Linux it did not look slick, professional or inviting.

Looks can be deceiving. It's an extremely productive tool.

Or I could consider the OOo range that has the backing of several multi billion dollar corporations behind it and around 100 million downloads and it mimics the interface I and a squillion other people are familiar with.

Depends on what you're doing. If you type an occasional document and aren't too picky about the output quality, then LyX is not for you. If you really care about the quality of the output -- meaning you want it to look like something you'd find in a high-quality book or magazine -- or if you need an extremely productive and reliable tool because you spend many, many hours writing, it makes sense to invest the time to learn something better.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[scuba0]

I know what you mean but compare it to any other Writer on the market and they are not any smaller them either (like StarOffice, Works, ...), not that it is an excuse for growing to proportions it doesn't need but it ain't very big?

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[eugene ts wong]

If we are talking about upgrading to whatever features are latest on the market, then perhaps you have a point, but I think that when innovators make that comparison, they fall into the trap of, "Well, we are the same size as the competition, so our users will only want to upgrade because of our new features, not our design improvements. Perhaps they only need a single simple design improvement, but they won't mind adding 100MB to the install.".

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[B3ryllium]

He's published. That's more than most bloggers can say.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[scuba0]

What I meant by it is that there is no less "bloated" writer so it is OK as long as they make it worth my while (it is still like a fifth or smaller than Office 2003). Most design updates that will come shouldn't bring the size up since there can be a lot of improvements in the code. I think the size to version 3.0 might go down a notch, I at least hope so.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[knghtrider]

What does this even mean? Do you mean that some folks are sending emails with virii embedded through their mail servers which happen to be exchange?

Sorry..that's exactly what I meant. Also, this wasn't Exchange 2000, but Exchange 5.5 and it was about 7 years ago. Although, some companies are still using 5.5--I just worked at one last year that still has an Exchange 5.5 server and is running on NT 4.0. The only thing running on Win 2K are the Citrix servers and their Database system, because they require Windows 2000/SQL 2000 and the Metaframe boxes won't run on NT 4.0.

The company way back then (mm..this was 7 years ago) had no AV running on the Exchange servers at all (except our division, so I got the Melissa warning quickly), and the desktop scanners were disabled in the other divisions because the company didn't install sufficient RAM in the NT 4.0 desktops--Power users got 128MB..everyone else got 64 MB, and most were expected to use a piece of software that required a minimum of 64 MB to run by itself, so of course the desktops moved at a snail pace. Without AV, it was palatable.

Luckily, the division I worked for had alternative funding (it was a partner with a city agency--and all the hardware was purchased with city money, because at the end of the contract, all hardware reverted to city ownership)--so we HAD Antivirus and 256MB in every desktop (You just have to love government money), but the other 6 divisions did not. One division got infected, and within a day every Exchange Server but ours was useless. I shut down the connections between the other servers and ours and helped with the cleanup for the other locations remotely. It was a disaster, but it taught upper management a lesson. Once cleaned, we put the connections back up--after buying AV and re-enabling it on workstations, with a policy in place to prevent it from being disabled (McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator). The infected divisions were surviving on MSN and Yahoo accounts for those who needed e-mail.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[eugene ts wong]

Thanks for clarifying. I think that you are saying that it's a market approach, where the others aren't less bloated or aren't much less bloated, so there isn't anything to worry about. I suppose that that is true. I just don't want to upgrade my computer. That's all.

Re:You gotta be kidding.

[wmac]

I wanted to use it in my Academic job (i.e writing papers etc) but very soon I gave up. The quality is miserable. I can not dare to use it for the paper I have wroked on for a few months. I prefer to pay for M$ and use theirs and don't risk my papers. I wanted to use it for my personal research notes but again I gave up. What's the point of installing 2 software for the same purpose and then switching back and forth between them? And sometimes you can not even export your work from one of them to other. The only useful thing is their Draw which I use for building diagrams, ideas etc. Mac

Small businesses are already using OOo and Tbird

[Anonymous Coward]

I know my business does. Packaging them will only make things easier.

Changing the names of the various apps in OOo would have a bigger effect. The number of times I've had someone think that Calc was windows calculator replacement, rather than a spreadsheet is far too high.

Patches

[Anonymous Coward]

This is good news. I hope that thunderbird continues as a stand alone client as well.

On a related note; I've always wondered why it is such a hassle to send (unmangled) patches with Thunderbird. It is the one thing that keeps me from using it as my primary client...

Re:Patches

[theshowmecanuck]

I wish open office would send incremental patches instead of making people download 70 to 100 megabytes when security or bug fixes come out. Slag Microsoft for being an abusive monopolist, but at least they know how to minimize the download sizes when patching. Maybe it is related to Open Office's architecture and how it has to load damn near everything even if you are just using one piece of it (slowing it down and sucking memory). That is, maybe they need to solve their performance issues first. I use OOO and don't have MS Office installed. But the patch thing really bugs me. Fortunately I have high speed internet. However I think there is still a huge number of people on dial up in the United States (if not a majority). Huge downloads like this basically prohibit those people from using the product. They will use unpatched pirated versions of MS Office, or something they can buy for cheap instead. And even if they can buy OOO on a CD they won't patch it until it is not a huge bandwidth burden.

Re:Patches

[Riba]

Right, how about rebundling the products more than every five years? It's a d*mn chore to download each and every incremental patch when you're installing in bulk. Compared to all OSS products that distribute the latest version and sometimes patches. Especially annoying with security patches as you'll be holding your breath hoping that nothing hits you while IE is mulling over microsoftupdate. Microsoft way of rebundling is releasing a new full version, which means you'll be inserting coins to get it.

Re:Patches

[theshowmecanuck]

I agree that re-bundling (I assume by this you mean one big download and install) makes sense for each major release, like from OO.o v2 to maybe OO.o v3. However for minor bug and security fixes... I still think it is ridiculous. I'm sure I'm not the first to say this (since it is, I think, so sensible), so the fact they still force us to do a major install for issues that should only recall a minor patch is probably an indication of a fundamental limitation of the product itself.

I would think that this would also be a consideration when planning on what office product to install at large companies. Full upgrades (as opposed to smaller patches) tend to cause more issues, and would be a negative point for OO.o.

Exchange

[sc0ob5]

When it can sync with exchange servers without having to use webdav I think it will be a contender, until then I don't think so. Still, nice to have it included in the office package I guess, but does it really make a difference?

Re:Exchange

[Anonymous Coward]

If an email client is going to compete with Outlook in a corporate environment, it needs to integrate with the email server similarly to Outlook, numbnuts.

Re:Exchange

[jimicus]

But Thunderbird is not a replacement for Outlook.

Outlook's shared calendar integration, while being a minor thing to most geeks, is one of the major features which get Exchange installed in businesses.

And Exchange requires Active Directory, which requires a domain driven by Windows Server rather than Samba, so even if you weren't planning to before, you may as well authenticate other systems through that. Then people start looking at other things like Sharepoint and third-party applications which expect a Windows domain, and before you know it you've got an entire infrastructure built around Windows.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is how Windows became a popular server platform in places where you might otherwise expect to see Unix, Netware or OpenVMS.

Re:Exchange

[Penguinisto]

And Exchange requires Active Directory, which requires a domain driven by Windows Server rather than Samba, so even if you weren't planning to before, you may as well authenticate other systems through that.

Not all that impossible to do - your auth can come through AD's LDAP connector, and if rest can be done like Evolution does... take scrapes off of the OWA service on Exchange.

Everyone makes it sound like Echange and AD are these magic thingies that no one will ever plug into. While I'll never claim it to be perfectly easy (and MSFT does their damndest to insure that), it certainly isn't impossible.

/P

Re:Exchange

[andre.ramaciotti]

Outlook's shared calendar integration, while being a minor thing to most geeks, is one of the major features which get Exchange installed in businesses.

Did you read the whole article? There are some proof-of-concept pictures and in one of them, there is Thunderbird with a calendar view. I don't think they'd just bundle Thunderbird with OpenOffice as it is. We're going to see big changes, problably, though imho they should bundle any other client mail (no, I don't like TB nor FF).

Re:Exchange

[vertinox]

When it can sync with exchange servers without having to use webdav I think it will be a contender

Like Microsoft Entourage? Oh wait...

(Yeah, to be fair, Entourage 2008 will have supposedly native MAPI exchange support and not webdav, but I'm not holding my breath. I'm just point out that "offical" Microsft "Exchange" application Engourage 2004 on the Mac only has webdav support unlike its brother Outlook 2003)

Re:Exchange

[Sentax]

And if it got to that point MS Office would change slight protocol things to it would break TBird Exchange syncing and they would have to roll out an update, it could go back and forth like the IM protocol fights with MSN and Yahoo.

Re:Exchange

[Sir Homer]

Zimbra is a pretty good alternative to Exchange, we have actually migrated *off* Exchange to Zimbra. With Zimbra you have groupware solution completely independent of Windows on the client and server side.

http://www.zimbra.com/

Re:Exchange

[jimicus]

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with Exchange and Active Directory - for what it's worth, it's probably the best solution to that particular problem on the market right now.

But I keep on hearing of stories like "OpenOffice volunteers believe their product can beat Microsoft on its home ground by including an email client" and all they do is demonstrate that the people who make these packaging decisions and think Outlook is used as nothing more than an email client have spent zero time working in the real world.

The world has moved beyond "I need a word processor, spreadsheet and email client so this product which can give me them all at the same time is better than that product which can only provide one item". It's now about solutions - which is a fancy way of saying "everything works neatly together and modules can be added when necessary. When modules are added, they integrate just as neatly as everything else". Where is the module to give OpenOffice shared calendaring features?

Re:Exchange

[m2943]

Why would you run Exchange on your servers? In fact, the natural direction for migration is first to migrate the servers to Linux, and then the client.

Re:Exchange

[Anonymous Coward]

It's now about solutions - which is a fancy way of saying "everything works neatly together and modules can be added when necessary. When modules are added, they integrate just as neatly as everything else". Which basically excludes MS Exchange on two counts. First, since it cannot communicate reliably with other servers and even with itself. Mail, especially, gets delayed frequenly and even lost with disappointing frequency. So, yes, maybe people want a solition where every thing "works" together, but the "works" requirements precludes exchange. Second, MS Exchange is anything but modular, it and Windows and AD are a nightmare architecturally and a byzantine tangle of seemingly illdefined monoliths that seep into eachother.

Re:Exchange

[HappyUserPerson]

What's wrong with webdav?

Re:Exchange

[Lotunggim Ginsawat]

At last, someone who has migrated away from Exchange Server!

Can you give some insight on how well integrated it is with multi-forest Active Directory setup, how well it interacts with Exchange servers from other offices around the globe that is part of the same WAN and whether it can replace Office Communication Server (important)?

Re:Exchange

[nacturation]

Companies can go out and install Scalix to replace Exchange. However, if they want all the cool features such as an Outlook connector they need to pay beyond 25 users (afaik, the connector is closed source). I've been considering moving to Scalix for our company but, right now, the pain of migration doesn't seem worth it. We have less than 25 actual human users, but their Exchange migration only works for the premium users (that's the 25 max) and we have many hundreds of accounts, groups, etc. One of these days I'll take a harder look but at the moment if it ain't broke, don't fix it. :)

Re:Exchange

[Allador]

How has it been? Do you all use the web interfaces primarily, or Outlook? How heavily do you use calendaring, and shared resources calendaring? How about task requests & reporting?

In some tests I had done, the Outlook Connector was buggy and not ready for prime-time, and the Zimbra Desktop was alpha level readiness.

Seemed to me though that if you could live with the web interface as primary, it could work for you. However, neither myself nor any of our clients can work from a web-only interface, so its been a no-go.

Re:Exchange

[Rich0]

If they can actually implement an exchange-like server system (maybe using something more open) they would have a shot at taking on Outlook.

Here's what the customers want. Any user can hit just a few keys and:

1. Find out what time a list of 5 people aren't busy, when one of a list of conference rooms is also available.
2. Send a request out to those people at the appropriate time and book the room.
3. When each request recipient hits one button the meeting goes on their calendar.
4. The meeting organizer can at any time check on who is or isn't coming.

It actually can be done better than Outlook does it. For one they could get rid of the tons of meeting request emails and put the requests and tracking in some other interface. The UI could indicate that requests are pending, and then you could quickly run through them. Acknowledged requests would not generate emails that the organizer has to look at - it would just all silently tally in the background unless the organizer indicated that they want to be bothered.

That single feature is the ONE big thing missing from an outlook killer. Deliver it and people will seriously consider your application. But, it is useless in the college dorm so nobody bothers to code it...

Re:Exchange

[Rich0]

Cause nobody makes a replacement for exchange? Sure, IMAP handles all of the mail features just fine (well, maybe the server-side rules processing is missing). But, I'm not aware of any solid products that handle the calendaring side of exchange.

I actually disagree with the grandparent. I wouldn't try to interface with Exchange - I'd try to replace it.

Re:Exchange

[Anonymous Coward]

And this is why Open Office, Linux, Thunderbird, everything and anything, won't ever compete with Microsoft.

Microsoft does office package, servers, infrastructure, everything, and they build it to integrate.

Whereas in the Linux world, everyone sits on their own little hill, and if they can't find a hill just the right shade of gray to their taste, they take an existing hill and build something that looks like it. People on the different hills talk almost the same language, but just enough that whatever hill A says and does won't necessarily make it compatible with whatever the people on hill B is doing. Yes, choice is good, but how about making one other *good* choice instead of many many inadequate ones?

As many have pointed out, the point is not to just make Thunderbird a Outlook replacement, it has to fit into the OO package just like Outlook does with Office. The ability to track documents from Word or Excel through Outlook for instance, as you send them out for review.

I applaud the idea and would welcome a replacement for Outlook, but Thunderbird ain't it, and it won't be for OO3. So saying that OO3 will try to make Thunderbird an Outlook replacement in time for OO3 is either unrealistically optimistic or some kind of outright lying, and I don't know what is worse.

Re:Exchange

[Anonymous Coward]

The MS stuff is always going to be better integrated simply because they "own" the stack and have a hierarchy allowing the integration to be mandated.

In open source, if there is no standard for how something should talk to something else the first thing done is either:

- have a fight about whose ideas are the best, normally leading to 3 or 4 different approaches and projects; or
- define a standard, which is normally sufficiently cumbersome to be unusable. This may lead back to a few iterations of point one.

Now - I'm not saying that is a bad thing - the dog eat dog evolution of OSS does lead to a lot of innovation and great ideas - frankly its far more interesting than what MS comes up with, but when it comes to integration OSS will always be whipped (IMO) by the likes of MS simply because of that hierarchy.

And in these little niches of tightly coupled integration MS delivers stuff that people want. SSO to an internal website is an easy enough example - IE + NTLM (or Kerberos these days) + IIS (And I know you can do firefox, and I think apache on win32 these days). Sure it can be done in other ways, but none of them are quite as easy as the MS approach.

Re:Exchange

[Anonymous Coward]

"Can you give some insight on how well integrated it is with multi-forest Active Directory setup (...)"

What part of "we have actually migrated *off* Exchange to Zimbra. With Zimbra you have groupware solution completely independent of Windows on the client and server side." didn't you understand? Integrating on "multi-forest Active Directory setup" and "interacting with Exchange servers from other offices around the globe" doesn't seem too much of "independent of Windows on the client and server side" to me.

All in all, your third question does have some merit (while the answer should be, of course, functionality-wise: i.e. it should not rely on Microsoft Office on the client side).

Re:Exchange

[kramulous]

It's not like I have a choice in our organisation. We've just migrated to exchange and I think it sucks. I now HAVE to use microsoft email clients. Given that I've been using TBird for years, I cry when I use entourage.

Although, one feature I like in entourage is that when an email comes in from "Viagra - Official Site" spoofing some address, that address is now always associated with that name. I love it when you then send out emails to that group and it is addressed that way, especially when recipients of those emails are the guys who said using the MS was the way to go. No, I will not change the address (it's going to be my silent protest).

Re:Exchange

[tftp]

Everyone makes it sound like Echange and AD are these magic thingies that no one will ever plug into. While I'll never claim it to be perfectly easy (and MSFT does their damndest to insure that), it certainly isn't impossible.

The problem is that in the business world possible (or impossible) does not matter. Available vs. unavailable is what matters. If you release a product called "A Complete OpenOffice Solution In a Box" (or something) then businesses may try it out. But development, coding ... forget it, IT departments have troubles with configuring even simple things. A coder would be better used to develop new products for the company, and not reinventing that same old wheel all over again.

At this point it seems like a complete OpenOffice server + client solution is on the threshold of possible, assuming that the developers will actually get a leader, sit together and figure out what it is exactly that they are trying to develop. Just like Microsoft did, and like every other professional team does. Answers to that are plentiful in this thread because the posters are users, and they tell what they want. A wordprocessor would be nice that loads within user's lifetime and doesn't screw up tables, for example. Or a spreadsheet that can't be crashed by whatever you throw at it. A word count that groks UNICODE as it is meant to be grokked. An API that builds on existing technologies because people are reluctant to ditch what they paid big bucks for. A GUI that is identical to what the users are familiar with. And so on - there are many *obvious* issues, and it won't even be impossible to solve all this. But as I said, it may be that the Bazaar model just hit the wall here - there may be not enough unifying, leading forces that are required for a cohesive product and for adherence to the design requirements. Developers must be controlled and shoehorned into the Grand Vision of the Boss, and that is contrary to F/OSS model - a heresy even. But that's what it takes to design a product.

Re:Exchange

[Anonymous Coward]

"They're going to need this Outlook replacement to function with Exchange properly"

not necessarily.

"they're going to have to come up with an Exchange server replacement with the ability to migrate people off."

http://www.open-xchange.com/header/home.html
http://www.open-xchange.com/index.php?id=440

There you go. There is Oextender as well, if you insist on the absolutely silly practice of using Microsoft platforms as servers.

Re:Exchange

[Chuq]

But, I'm not aware of any solid products that handle the calendaring side of exchange.

Me either, and that includes exchange.

Honestly, it can not handle the fairly normal business situation of managers who have assistants, and those assistants being able to book their managers into appointments. Sure, they can book it.. but the problem comes with recurring appointments, and then the manager wanting to change one of their own meetings (they don't have access) or they get a new assistant (they don't have access, or even worse, it allows them to change it but they don't have permission to update their managers calendar or the meeting rooms calendar).

Exchange is pretty solid, but some minor but common things that it just falls over on. Funny, that if an OSS solution was proposed which has these issues, it would be shot down in flames. But if Exchange has the same problem.. people (IT admins, etc) just put up with it.

Re:Exchange

[Lotunggim Ginsawat]

Multiforest Active Directory support is important, unless you have to manage 2 separate identity databases. If someone from Europe comes to our regional office here in Malaysia, he/she better be able to see all his/her e-mail/calendar/contacts (they are still using Exchange) as if he/she in their native workplace. Integration with AD and other Exchange servers is important.

Re:Exchange

[ghjm]

Are you aware of Exchange/Outlook delegates and "send on behalf of" permissions?

Re:Exchange

[dbIII]

If you have Exchange you have bigger problems and really have no choice other than MS tools and an entire ecosystem of third party apps (including shareware for mailbox recovery!) to make it functional in whatever setting it is in. Anything else trying to interact with it that is not associated with Microsoft in some way has to play catch up and is just going to break with each Exchange release. Those of us that use email instead are not in that trap even if we don't have built in calender software - but if you want it all together you are stuck with it.

The last Exchange servers I ran were 5.5 - it has improved since then - you can even back up mailboxes without bringing the entire thing down! Now cue the old Exchange admins who will describe some convoluted series of hacks to back up mailboxes which is unfortunately entirely useless in the situation of bare metal recovery - it was nasty software back then but is a lot better now, it just does not play well with others.

Re:Exchange

[dbIII]

Google already have a decent shared calender that works on pretty well everything and is easier to share across sites than Exchange stuff as far as I know. It's better to think of requirements one at a time instead of some big monolith that attempts to do everything centrally in some cases. The people with Exchange are pretty well stuck with the whole monolith, the rest of us can use email instead and whatever other bits look handy from elsewhere.

Re:Exchange

[Chuq]

Yes. The "sending email on behalf of their boss" functions works fine. "Booking a meeting on behalf of their boss" functions work fine. The problem is when a meeting is booked by the assistant, and the boss tries to move it, or if they have multiple assistants and another assistant tries to move it. Sometimes when they try, it will tell them they can't do it.. and when they click OK it will then delete it out of the meeting room's calendar, and delete it out of the meeting organisers calendar, while leaving the meeting visible in the recipients calendars. End result is the organiser thinks it has been cancelled/moved, when it hasn't.

We have a call logged with Microsoft about this, and they claim it is supposed to work this way. Yes, really. If anyone knows of a forum or something similar where Exchange/Outlook admins hang out and could assist, it would be much appreciated!

For those who aren't familiar

[NewsBot]

Open Office is an office suite application available free of charge for a number of different computer operating systems. It supports the OpenDocument standard for data interchange, which Microsoft has attempted to supplant with the OOXML format. (Do not confuse the Open Document and OOXML formats.)

Outlook is a personal information manager from Microsoft, and is part of the Microsoft Office suite. It is mostly used for email.

Re:For those who aren't familiar

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy karmawhoring Batman! Really, what are the chances the average reader on Slashdot doesnt know what Open Office and Outlook are?

Re:For those who aren't familiar

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who thinks Outlook is "mostly used for email" really hasn't ever used Outlook. Outlook is *much* more than an email tool. That was the point of the original article.

Re:For those who aren't familiar

[psychicsword]

You must be new here,
Anyone who doesnt know that uses digg.

Re:For those who aren't familiar

[BrentH]

If you think Outlook is used mostly for email, you're mistaken. The whole point here is that Outlook is NOT just a mail-client. The whole synchronized agenda thing is a central pillar and maybe more things that I don't know are in there. Managers and administrations are intertwined with all the features Outlook has, so please, stop the FUD that's only an emailclient.

Re:For those who aren't familiar

[logixoul]

from NewsBot's profile page:

Hi! I'm an automated poster, a project by the Rosenthal-Mecklenburg Foundation. Using state-of-the-art AI, I try to be just as relevant to /. discussions as regular posters. Email me and tell me what you think!

Re:For those who aren't familiar

[psychicsword]

So it is a bot that does what no one else will... posting relevant links.

Re:For those who aren't familiar

[Bert64]

It's the integration with all these other features that keeps people using outlook...
If your just talking about email, then outlook is actually one of the crappiest mail clients out there.

How will it improve Thunderbird or OOo?

[speaker of the truth]

Considering Sun refuses to incldue open source code into OOo without owning the copyright, this will be an interesting move. Although how will bundling Thunderbird help add functionality to OOo rather then simply installing the two separately?

One could say the same about any office product, but at the very least they share the "Recent Documents" and can launch each other's applications (which is quite a nifty side-benefit). I'm not seeing even that advantage to the Thunderbird bundling. Although I'm sure it will be useful for those not knowledgeable enough to be able to install both separately.

Re:How will it improve Thunderbird or OOo?

[dshadowwolf]

Considering Sun refuses to incldue open source code into OOo without owning the copyright, this will be an interesting move. Although how will bundling Thunderbird help add functionality to OOo rather then simply installing the two separately? True. However, the requirement for copyright assignments should have no impact. The FSF requires the same thing for all the different GNU project's and it doesn't stop them from being bundled with code that the FSF doesn't hold copyright to. (However, the FSF, to my knowledge, doesn't make the bundles themselves, so...)

Thunderbird would be a great idea

[DrXym]

It just needs to support MS Exchange. Easier said than done but there is a plugin already for Evolution which presumably could be used. I expect Sunbird would also have to come into it somewhere for the calendaring support.

Re:Thunderbird would be a great idea

[rizzo420]

we have exchange at work. i am a fan of MS office. it works great and OO.o isn't anywhere near as great as MS office. thunderbird is a great email client, but it is most definitely NOT an outlook replacement. it is anything but that. it supports email and the address book, but it doesn't have a calendar, to-do list, and i'm not sure if it did, it would support all the stuff that exchange can do. as someone above said, just tossing in different programs as alternatives to the various MS office pieces isn't enough. they need to integrate with each other seamlessly. outlook syncs perfectly with exchange, allowing me to see all my calendar entries, to-do lists, task lists, mail, folders, contacts, etc. on outlooks web access from any computer connected to the internet.

i would love to see an open source alternative to MS office, but the fact of the matter is that none of them work as nicely as MS office. i tried OO.o once. it was slow, laggy, and took forever to startup unless you had the little loader running when your computer started, which hogged resources. and people try to say MS office is bloated.

Re:Thunderbird would be a great idea

[bvdbos]

It's obvious you didn't digg any further then a first glance or you would have known there's tons of plugins among which is Lightning, a full-fledged calendar for lighnting. Lately it's been evolving rapidly with version 0.7 coming out pretty soon. Actually I think it's better then outlook, I rather use lightning then outlook.

Re:Thunderbird would be a great idea

[bvdbos]

Why support exchange? There's lots of other servers available...

Re:Thunderbird would be a great idea

[rizzo420]

i tried lightning. thunderbird kept crashing on me when trying to use it. does lightning sync with exchange or can you only use it locally?

i have been waiting patiently for sunbird to be released.

Re:Thunderbird would be a great idea

[DrXym]

we have exchange at work. i am a fan of MS office. it works great and OO.o isn't anywhere near as great as MS office. thunderbird is a great email client, but it is most definitely NOT an outlook replacement. it is anything but that. it supports email and the address book, but it doesn't have a calendar, to-do list, and i'm not sure if it did, it would support all the stuff that exchange can do. as someone above said, just tossing in different programs as alternatives to the various MS office pieces isn't enough. they need to integrate with each other seamlessly. outlook syncs perfectly with exchange, allowing me to see all my calendar entries, to-do lists, task lists, mail, folders, contacts, etc. on outlooks web access from any computer connected to the internet.

Thunderbird & Sunbird combined have almost everything Exchange offers. They just don't connect to Exchange servers. Thankfully the code is modular (e.g. it already has handlers for nntp, imap, pop3) so it should be quite possible to write the code. Especially seeing as code already exists in the Evolution plugin that could be utilised.

Re:Thunderbird would be a great idea

[cyber-vandal]

Word does not work great - it works okay. There are too many annoying bugs and ill thought out defaults for it to be called great.

Re:Thunderbird would be a great idea

[brusk]

Lightning works, but just barely (I say this as someone who uses it every day). It doesn't integrate with Thunderbird well enough (e.g., dealing with invites by email). It has a kludgy screen layout in TB. Its reminders don't fire reliably. Contacts are not well integrated with events, and the recurrence system has some problems. It needs a lot of fit and finish work. I say this as someone who LIKES it, and used to use Outlook. But I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't prepared to fiddle with extensions, risk losing data, etc. TB+Lightning is also definitely not an Outlook replacement, since it lacks many basic features such as mail and calendar archiving, journaling, complex task management, more than basic contact management, etc.

Here's hoping that OOo will help support TB and Lightning (with the Mozilla reorganization, the calendar side is up in the air), and bring the two closer together. Without stronger calendar support, there's no way to displace Outlook.

Re:Thunderbird would be a great idea

[deniable]

It's called embrace and extend. Look it up. You should also look at all of the features of Exchange including all of the Windows Mobile interaction. This is what the people who pay me want.

Re:Thunderbird would be a great idea

[Blakey Rat]

There's Exchange/Outlook, used by all companies that don't hate their users. There's Lotus Domino/Notes, used by the companies who do hate their users. Then there's whatever Netware was selling a few years back, if it even still exists...

So yes, by "lots of other servers available" you mean "up to two, if Novell is still selling theirs."

Re:Thunderbird would be a great idea

[bvdbos]

Lightning does do invites which arrive by email. As for the screen, and contacts with events, these are solved with 0.7rc1 which has been out for a few weeks already. Recurrence-problems? Not by my knowledge, which bug?

Re:Thunderbird would be a great idea

[bvdbos]

There's a lot of servers which lightning can connect to but (afaik) not exchange for now, due to the closed protocol MS has put on exchange. But several caldav-servers, communigate, webdav-servers, google, file-system, ftp etc etc do work.

Re:Thunderbird would be a great idea

[bvdbos]

There's webdav for calendaring, there's tons of caldav-servers, mail-servers, you have sogo (http://sogo.opengroupware.org/), communigate etc etc. If you look around instead of taking the one's you know, you'll learn a whole new world...

Re:Thunderbird would be a great idea

[DrXym]

Because it's one of the most popular servers in existence. And Thunderbird already supports most other servers via IMAP or POP3. In theory Exchange can support IMAP too, but the reality is most businesses do not enable IMAP and besides that's only a part of what people use Exchange for.

It would be a huge boost for OpenOffice and open source in general for there to be open and cross-platform Exchange compatible clients. Thunderbird and Sunbird would be ideal candidates to add that support. Evolution is another candidate if only the Win32 port was in anyway half decent. Would it be better if people didn't use proprietary protocols? Of course it would. But the reality is that they do, and that's the reality open source has to reach out to. OpenOffice might prefer open document formats but it still has excellent support for MS formats. Without that support, it's doubtful we would even be talking about it. That's where Thunderbird should be - giving excellent support to whatever protocol you choose.

Re:Thunderbird would be a great idea

[mkoenecke]

What I cannot understand: how exactly does anyone expect Thunderbird to compete with Outlook as a contact manager? Sure, I use it for e-mail, and I can see how calendaring and task management could be integrated nicely, but no one seems to be addressing Thunderbird's address book, which has zero usefulness outside of e-mail. Does anyone do anything useful with the Thunderbird address book?

Re:Thunderbird would be a great idea

[brusk]

It does invites, but AFAIK doesn't always handle updates to events properly (if a meeting is rescheduled, it doesn't know enough to treat the new invite as a revised version of the old one). I'm using 0.7RC1, and it's an improvement, though the layout is still kind of primitive. For example, tasks don't show up well on the calendar, nor do very short events, and the coloring of events based on categories still needs to be done (it's partly there in Sunbird). As for recurrence bugs... just search Bugzilla, there are a ton (72 when I search now) of open bugs for "recurrence."

Re:Thunderbird would be a great idea

[Lotunggim Ginsawat]

There are alternatives for all Microsoft Office ecosystem components out there. The trick is to integrate them. Which no one has figured out how to do yet.

Re:Thunderbird would be a great idea

[Allador]

Thunderbird & Sunbird combined have almost everything Exchange offers. Ummm, no. Not even close. When you say things like that you make it obvious that you're not up to speed on the topic and just speaking from some other motivation.

Thunderbird & Sunbird provide 2 major components that Outlook provides, calendaring and email. It provides NOTHING that Exchange provides, which is a shared collaboration server. Neither Thunderbird nor Sunbird contain a server component, just the clients.

As a primitive example, using only Thunderbird and Sunbird, why dont you setup a Location/Resource calendar for your meeting room, and have it auto-accept on a first-come, first-serve non-conflict basis. And then delegate scheduling rights to only a few people who can edit the calendar directly.

Re:Thunderbird would be a great idea

[Allador]

Actually there arent, at least not yet.

The Lotus Notes product is really overkill to only be used for email. And like another said, is generally only used by companies who hate their users.

Other than that ..... from my research the only thing that even comes close is Zimbra, and so much of Zimbra is still alpha.

There are a number of good collaborative server environments IF you're willing to be limited to a web interface for most of your functionality. But for many, a rich client support with online/offline capabilities is critical.

Re:Thunderbird would be a great idea

[rizzo420]

the only things thunderbird and sunbird (which last i checked wasn't even released yet, admittedly that was about 9 months ago) provide is email and calendar. they don't seamlessly fit in what outlook does when used with exchange. there's the journaling, task management, collaboration, etc. that is all used through outlook. if OO.o wants to provide a product that replaces MS office for the business user who isn't connecting to an exchange server, then yes, adding thunderbird is a great idea. but trying to say they're taking on outlook is just plain stupid and it could come back to haunt them when the first person tries, thinking that it'll work with exchange and they can't do their shared calendars and tasks and all that.

Re:Thunderbird would be a great idea

[Whitemice]

>Which no one has figured out how to do yet.

Ditto, this is the hard part. Funny the Open Source double-speak on these issues. Openness, standards, blah, blah... so enter CalDAV, GroupDAV, etc... and oh-man-that-is-too-complicated, nah we can't support that, whine, whine.... All the standards required to implement good groupware interoperability exist.

Re:Thunderbird would be a great idea

[Anonymous Coward]

And none of them do it as well as Exchange - which does it all in one package.

It may hurt the open source zealots' feelings, but the fact is Exchange is actually a damn good product and Outlook is these days a damn good mail client that both combined just does not have a realistic alternative, due to how well they talk to each other and the featureset.

Now you Open source guys have got to the point where I can use Ubuntu on my laptop day to day - but I still have to have a RDC to a Windows server for Outlook because the alternatives are shit.

You need to clone Outlook and you need to clone Exchange before you can win the desktop in the office. Until you do, you dont have a chance.

Visio would be better

[Helmholtz]

As many people have already noticed, people don't choose to use Outlook. Somebody else choose to use Exchange, and that means you're using Outlook. There's no way a third party could attempt to compete, since Exchange uses totally proprietary hooks and methods.

Personally, I think it'd be better to focus on something like a Visio replacement. Use Dia as a starting point, etc.

Re:Visio would be better

[keko_metal]

How about Kivio?

Re:Visio would be better

[ScrewMaster]

There's no way a third party could attempt to compete, since Exchange uses totally proprietary hooks and methods.

I believe MDaemon can serve as an Exchange replacement with their Connector plug-in, although I've not personally used it for that. MDaemon is hardly an open source product (although it is one of the better commercial offerings out there) but it does go to show that Exchange compatibility is not an impossible goal. If that's what you want.

Re:Visio would be better

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't know that program existed. Thanks for the link!

Re:Visio would be better

[epedersen]

If all you want is a commercial Exchange replacement, I believe you would be better of with Postfix (http://www.postfix.com). There is no connectors required. And it interacts with other exchange servers, as an Exchange Server. It is a drop-in replacement, that runs on Linux.

Re:Visio would be better

[jimicus]

If all you want is a commercial Exchange replacement, I believe you would be better of with Postfix (http://www.postfix.com). There is no connectors required. And it interacts with other exchange servers, as an Exchange Server. It is a drop-in replacement, that runs on Linux.

That replaces the SMTP transport part of Exchange. How about the group directory and the shared calendar support?

Re:Visio would be better

[Blakey Rat]

If all you want is a commercial Exchange replacement, I believe you would be better of with Postfix (http://www.postfix.com). There is no connectors required. And it interacts with other exchange servers, as an Exchange Server. It is a drop-in replacement, that runs on Linux.

It's a drop-in replacement for about 1/10th of the features Exchange has.

Try not to tell us about drop-in replacements for products until you have at least a vague idea of what that product does. Have you even used Outlook?

Re:Visio would be better

[bvdbos]

communigate does the job on tens of different platforms...

Re:Visio would be better

[XedLightParticle]

It works alright, and imitates Visio rather well, however I don't like either of them. They're too heavy and too arbitrary when it comes to measurements.

Dia hits a spot for me, it's light and could to some extend do light CAD like drawings. But Dia isn't there either, it's not always good at exporting files other than raster that can be used to put inside documents. And of course it cannot do what Visio for Architects can do, reverse engineer software and make nice class diagrams and everything, you would need yet another program for that.

So to put in some UML generated from code would need you to use one program to make a dia file, and then use dia to arrange it and then export it into raster, which rarely looks good. The windows version of Dia can export to .emf pretty nicely, but I'm a linux user, so what can I do...

So there's good attempts but none that does quite what Visio does, such an application in OOo would be nice.

Re:Visio would be better

[Tim C]

But I don't want an Exchange replacement, I want an Outlook replacement. I don't use Exchange, I use Outlook because someone else decided that the company was going to use Exchange.

Re:Visio would be better

[dhfoo]

dia2code does diagrams to code but I don't think it does the other way round. A good project for someone with an itch to scratch!

Cheers!

Re:Visio would be better

[Bert64]

Most people don't use exchange for the email component, if all they wanted was email then exchange is one of the worst choices.
It's not even the calendar or the group directory that's any good, they just want everything bundled together into a single package that works together.

Re:Visio would be better

[Niggle]

There are several programs that will do code->dia:
autodia http://directory.fsf.org/project/autodia/ is perl based and does a variety of languages.
SharpDia2Code http://sharpdia2code.sourceforge.net/ is written in C# and will do code->diagram as well as diagram->code. Seems to have been abandoned, but works OK (needs to be recompiled to work with .NET 2.0).
There are others.

The uncompressed dia format is easy enough to work with that several years ago I even wrote my own app to generate class diagrams from VB6 source code.

I don't know...

[Keyper7]

...bundling Thunderbird is a good idea in the sense that they won't try to fit more stuff in the saturated market of email clients. On the other hand, should email client and schedule integration be a priority? From my point of view, Microsoft is using Office as a tool to turn Windows itself into an all-purpose environment. Sun's efforts will probably be restricted to improve OpenOffice, and OpenOffice alone. They might risk turning it into a bloaty 300 Mb mess that people will ditch in favor of KOffice, Evolution or Office 2007 in the case of Windows users.

Re:I don't know...

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Yes, sure. I Ditched Open Office in favor of Microsoft Office 2007, because Open Office was too big at 300 Mb. Thats it.

Re:I don't know...

[Atlantis-Rising]

I've seen copies of Microsoft Office 2007 Portable at ~200MB, with Excel, Publisher, Powerpoint, and Word.

Re:I don't know...

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

ok 100 Mb. Thats a reason for ditching a free Office suite and using one that starts at $150? Does that make sence in any parallel universe?

At last...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hurrah! Having an office suite integrated with a mail client which talks standard protocols will be great! My phone has an excellent calendar application, but I can't use it, because everyone I work with insists on exchanging calendar information in proprietary windows formats. This means that we all have to carry a PC around with us in order to schedule our time effectively.

One glorious day, we'll be able to coordinate our schedules using something which fits in our pockets.

New Chart Engine, finally!

[bucky0]

For a lot of quick and dirty charts, I'll just take my data and throw it in an excel spreadsheet. I tried to do the same thing with OO, and it just never felt right or looked good at all. If someone makes a chart that takes up a new sheet in a workbook, why does OO decide to put the legend in 8pt font? Hopefully they add some options to flesh things out more.

Re:New Chart Engine, finally!

[iknownuttin]

That's been my hesitation to move to OO. All of my customers and vendors, for that matter, are on MS Office. I had a problem a few years ago and I haven't gotten around to doing a test case with a current version of OO, but I'm a little hesitant to send a document that I've authored in OO to a customer and have it look like crap. Impressions mean a lot.

Re:New Chart Engine, finally!

[Bert64]

If your worried about that, then you really should send your documents as PDF...
MSoffice has a poor record too when it comes to how documents will look on different versions and different configurations. It often works well enough inside a company when everyone has the same version because all the workstations are set up in exactly the same way, but as soon as you try doing anything remotely complex and opening it on a different version things start breaking...
Even something as simple as having a different default printer can completely screw the layout.
Also when it comes to opening older files, openoffice often does a better job than current msoffice versions.

How About A Complete Office System

[WED Fan]

How about a complete system?

Open Office System would include:

• Open Office Server
  • Exchange-like services
  • Office Collaborator - SharePoint killer
  • Calc Server - Spreadsheet Server
  • Office Project - Project Server
• Word, Calc, Database, Outlook-killer, Presenter
• Project

And, all of this would be compatible with MS Office, down to a UI switch that would allow the user to choose the MS style interface.

All of this would have MONO programmability for "macros". (Not the half-hearted programmability that MS offers, and sorry OO only pays lip service to.)

You do all of that, my org MIGHT think of switching.

Re:How About A Complete Office System

[thatonedude]

Indeed...once all this is created, my association might BEGIN to think about this as well but, even then, the amount of support options and online resources available for the Office suite would be hard to overlook.

Re:How About A Complete Office System

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should I care whether you think of switching? I just need to get one of your competitors to switch so that heir software costs will be lower. All other things being equal, they'll be able to have higher profits or a bigger R&D budget than you & will eventually win. You can quibble with this, but your sense of entitlement is deplorable. If you don't like it, don't use it. If you want to use it but it needs something, fund it. How does it help your association to just bitch about it when you're not a user?

Also: free/open source software tends to have a wider range of support options and online resources.

Re:How About A Complete Office System

[Anonymous Coward]

Also: free/open source software tends to have a wider range of support options and online resources.

• The Office Geek - You know the guy that reminds of you of the SNL skit. His response is usually, "Have you RTFM?", so we try...
• An open source forum - You get 20 replies of, "Just RTFM", and 15 more telling you about other solutions that a friend of your Linux using grandmother found, and 10 replies telling you that you should drop any system that wants to compete with MS. so you try...
• The Usenet - You find 300 ads for "Busty Teen Cheerleader Incest with Dogs" and a flamewar about VI and EMACS and the 2 actual replies that say, "RTFM", so you finally go back to...
• The manual - Checking to see if you missed anything you find, "This section to be completed soon", and "Please consult the xxx forum and KB for information about this topic, so, since you already tried the forum you go to the...
• KB - Only to find "This section to be completed soon."

Yeah, there are a thousand paths up Mount Fuji, and they all lead to the top.

All roads lead to Amber.

There are a thousand avenues of support for OSS, but they all lead to some jackass that says, "RTFM" and the TFM that was never completed, because coders don't give a shit about end user docs.

Re:How About A Complete Office System

[PinkPanther]

There are a thousand avenues of support for OSS, but they all lead to some jackass that says, "RTFM" and the TFM that was never completed, because coders don't give a shit about end user docs.

You are a complete troll, however for the benefit of anyone else reading, my experience with paid support for F/OSS products has been very solid. At worst, it is as good as most commercial product support. At best, I've had some of my support cases turned into direct product enhancements, some with patches available within a day or two of the case being opened (in one case I had a source patch sent to me in under 3 hours).

Just because the software is free doesn't mean that the only avenues to support have to be free. I didn't choose the software for its price (though it was a consideration point), I chose it because of its openness (flexibility within our environment) and the flexibility of the support options including the paid support we ended up going with simply because it was a cost-effective approach. We spent less on licensing & equivalent amount on support as a commercial product and ended up with a solution that met all of our requirements (something no commercial vendor would do), will grow with our requirements, and we know that the product cannot be taken away from us (cannot be bought up by a large commercial vendor, as happens in MANY commercial product scenarios...even if the purchaser is considered a "good guy").

Re:How About A Complete Office System

[Lotunggim Ginsawat]

FOSS main advantages for those PHBs, more often than not, is the cost. They did not give an ass whether the software is open-source or not, unless they have their own developers. If they found out that they are not saving money, closed-source will still be chosen despite being inferior as long as they are cheaper.

Re:How About A Complete Office System

[Seraphim_72]

All of this would have MONO programmability for "macros". (Not the half-hearted programmability that MS offers, and sorry OO only pays lip service to.)

Except you are limited to VBA while OOo will allow you to work in php, python, jython, C++, Java etc. I want an Office without microsoft in it thank you. What is lip service about that?

Re:How About A Complete Office System

[ealar dlanvuli]

Copying the look and feel is how we got into this mess. If your main software goal is to be "just like some other product" you're already doomed to loose.

As for .net interoperability? Never. I however would love to see python interoperability. Then you could have your .net from IronPython.

However, .net is not a platform I want to see OO bank on. Microsoft will patent slap mono so fast if it lost serious marketshare it wouldn't be funny.

Sean

Re:How About A Complete Office System

[moosesocks]

I feel like an "Exchange-Killer" would be better suited to a different project (of which there are already many).

We really just need one unified set of standards for doing all of the things Exchange does, and we all need to agree upon it. Then we can move forward in replacing it. (Also, the idea of an enterprise-grade mail server written in Java scares the pants off of me)

Even a sharepoint-killer would ideally be a separate project with some sort of standard in place to allow it to communicate equally-well with all applications. This hypothetically already exists in the form of WebDAV, and just needs a nice interface.

If OO wanted to do some serious damage, they'd target the education market. I imagine that they're very eager to move away from Microsoft, given their budgets.

At the university level, OoO would be an instant blockbuster if it were "good enough". If you also haven't noticed, college students and professors aren't the most financially-robust demographics....

Re:How About A Complete Office System

[Allador]

Also, the idea of an enterprise-grade mail server written in Java scares the pants off of me. Why? Enterprise grade java stuff tends to be pretty fat (ie, memory consumption), but also tends to be very stable, very secure, and well designed.

I'm just curious what aspects of Java would bother you in that scenario.

If OO wanted to do some serious damage, they'd target the education market. I imagine that they're very eager to move away from Microsoft, given their budgets. Not really. MS software is very very inexpensive for educational institutions. Order of magnitude cheaper than retail in many cases. The pricing is so advantageous there that MS often wins because its so cheap, then its just easier to go with the defacto standard and stick with windows and microsoft.

At the university level, OoO would be an instant blockbuster if it were "good enough". If you also haven't noticed, college students and professors aren't the most financially-robust demographics.... Higher ed institutions get MSDNAA, which is basically like a free MSDN universal for students and teachers, but at almost no cost.

Re:How About A Complete Office System

[moosesocks]

I know that MS is cheap for schools. I used to work in a K-12 district and do agree that they get a very good deal.

However, it's still a lot of money when you add it up. Even if they're only paying $20 per seat, it still adds up when you're fitting out an entire lab or upgrading to a new version across the district.

Likewise, Exchange server is expensive no matter which way you spin it.

Re:How About A Complete Office System

[Allador]

I've only worked with HIgher Ed, not K-12. But the costs for the software in higher ed was literally so low as to not be material.

And at least in my experience there, Exchange was pretty cheap, especially amortized across all the exchange users in the school or school district.

But I've also seen departments in uni where they struggle to find funds to put a new computer in front of people every 5-6 years. Where literally $20 makes a big difference. I wonder though how much of that was mis-management or the management just not prioritizing IT, and how much was actually tight purse strings.

In any case, I cant argue with what you've said, as I've never been involved with K-12, but what I've seen the funds are even tighter there than in higher ed.

Re:How About A Complete Office System

[Dunkirk]

My money says that, once Google gets it all put together, they'll release appliance servers of ALL their apps (not just search) for corporations to drop in place. Would Gmail, combined their calendaring, their chat server, and their online document and spreadsheet apps be enough to get people to switch? Every time I think about stuff like this, I think I ought to invest. Guess I should have done that a few years ago...

Re:How About A Complete Office System

[dasunt]

How about a complete system?

• Open Office System would include:
• Open Office Server
• Exchange-like services
• Office Collaborator - SharePoint killer
• Calc Server - Spreadsheet Server
• Office Project - Project Server
• Word, Calc, Database, Outlook-killer, Presenter Project

And, all of this would be compatible with MS Office, down to a UI switch that would allow the user to choose the MS style interface.

All of this would have MONO programmability for "macros". (Not the half-hearted programmability that MS offers, and sorry OO only pays lip service to.)

I always wondered what the incantation was for "summon Redmond lawsuit".

Re:How About A Complete Office System

[WED Fan]

• The Office Geek - You know the guy that reminds of you of the SNL skit. His response is usually, "Have you RTFM?", so we try...
• An open source forum - You get 20 replies of, "Just RTFM", and 15 more telling you about other solutions that a friend of your Linux using grandmother found, and 10 replies telling you that you should drop any system that wants to compete with MS. so you try...
• The Usenet - You find 300 ads for "Busty Teen Cheerleader Incest with Dogs" and a flamewar about VI and EMACS and the 2 actual replies that say, "RTFM", so you finally go back to...
• The manual - Checking to see if you missed anything you find, "This section to be completed soon", and "Please consult the xxx forum and KB for information about this topic, so, since you already tried the forum you go to the...

KB - Only to find "This section to be completed soon."

Yeah, there are a thousand paths up Mount Fuji, and they all lead to the top.

All roads lead to Amber.

There are a thousand avenues of support for OSS, but they all lead to some jackass that says, "RTFM" and the TFM that was never completed, because coders don't give a shit about end user docs.

You know, I've seen regular closed projects look like this. SharePoint 2.0 documentation was notorious for the ".get gets the value of . .set sets the value of ." A buddy on the SharePoint team in Redmond told me that internally, they considered SharePoint 2.0 to be the beta of the product.

That said, yeah, I mostly attribute the RTFM attitude to OSS proponents.

Re:How About A Complete Office System

[g2devi]

As far as Project replacement, the only open source competitor that even comes close to MS Project (that also reads MS Project files) is OpenProj:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/openproj/

There are only two problems with it:
1) It uses an attribution license (hope they eventually wise up and switch to a better FOSS license)
2) It's a bit slow -- they *really* need to switch from Java runtime to GCJ compiled Java.

On the plus side, since it's Java, it's available on all platforms that OpenOffice is available.

(I know about GanttProject and have used it, but it still has a way to go.)

Re:How About A Complete Office System

[WED Fan]

2) It's a bit slow -- they *really* need to switch from Java runtime to GCJ compiled Java.

Here, Java is the kiss of death for contract projects. We've had enough experience, my boss's boss will review a proposed solution, if the contractor says, "We'll do this in Java", the big man will yell, "Next!"

I overheard some contractors who had just learned of the anti-Java bias and one pops up in the hall way and says, "let's do it in Mono. We've been intending to break into that." I have a feeling they had planned on Java and switched at the last moment.

Re:How About A Complete Office System

[DigDuality]

It's called Alfresco http://www.alfresco.com/

Re:How About A Complete Office System

[PinkPanther]

Agreed, but this is where the good PHBs vs the bad come in. The bad will often make poor decisions regardless of the issues involved. The good ones will choose The Right Path based upon more than just the immediate view of revenues/expenses.

In the past, my PHBs were happy to select the path lesser taken because our team was able to explain, in business-oriented terminology, why the choice of software was being made (we didn't even bring up the F/OSS issue other than mentioning that the licensing fees were $0) and how this particular selection gave us the most flexible set of options for future growth (i.e. build upon it ourselves, outsource the same work to others, potentially get the work for free as the community builds the platform, etc...).

Re:How About A Complete Office System

[tftp]

I always wondered what the incantation was for "summon Redmond lawsuit".

None of the stuff on this list would warrant a lawsuit; at least I don't see any sensible grounds for one. MS could, of course, sue if its trademarks are infringed, but OO has its own names for the components, and MS is silent so far. An "OpenOffice Server" would seem to be perfectly legitimate.

Re:How About A Complete Office System

[eepok]

THIS post has it right for one main reason -- GUI. People are dumb and reluctant to change because change confuses them. A different UI -- or hell, one menu bar in a different place will make then curl up into a fetal position. If you make it look like office, to the "T", then organizations who need to save money (like schools) will actually adopt OO.o. Otherwise, it will simply never happen.

Re:How About A Complete Office System

[Allador]

I believe that the multi-language support you're referring to is through UNO, right?

Office has the same situation with COM. You can automate any of the office products via COM from any language that can bind to COM. And thats pretty much everything.

The only thing you're limited to VBA for is the built-in embedded scripting language.

Re:How About A Complete Office System

[dasunt]

If it was successful, it would be a serious blow to one of Microsoft's core revenue streams. While it may be legal, I would not expect it to go unchallenged, either legally or by some other means.

Re:How About A Complete Office System

[Anonymous Coward]

And besides the ability to use any language with COM bindings, with VSTO, MSO programmability can be done with any .NET language.

Exchange

[segedunum]

This issue is a whole lot more complex because of Exchange. They're going to need this Outlook replacement to function with Exchange properly, and then to ensure that it has a reliable and working future, they're going to have to come up with an Exchange server replacement with the ability to migrate people off.

sun and thunderbird

[bvdbos]

Sun (among others) has been offering recourses to put into tunderbird and sunbird/lightning for some time now. Lightning is maturing very fast and already a lot of offices can use Thunderbird and Lightning as an alternative to outlook. With the co-operatioon with the rest of openoffice, it's a MS-killer for sure.

Re:sun and thunderbird

[moco]

I have been following lightning's progress with real interest because I will need to implement a calendaring solution soon. Right now it is quite usable for an individual calendar, but it does not play well in teams. I tried using webdav, the result was that you don't get predictable results when two people are editing the same calendar.

It is maturing really fast indeed. The problem is, i haven't seen the "exchange replacement" it will be integrating with.

Not what we want

[markdavis]

Apparently the OpenOffice team is not listening to what users want. Most of us don't want a "bundled" Email client to add to the bloat.... we already choose the Email client we want to use. I don't want an IM client, web browser, or music player bundled into it either!!!

This is what they should be concentrating on:

1) Faster. Fast loading, faster opening documents, faster saving documents, faster menu response.
2) Smaller. Higher efficiency. Smaller downloads.
3) More stable. Better code. Less crashing.
4) More compatible. With more types of files (for example, docx, wp, svg)
5) Better documented. End user docs, help, and developer docs.

Re:Not what we want

[iknownuttin]

Apparently the OpenOffice team is not listening to what users want.

It was once posted here on /. (I can't find the post - it was months ago) that FOSS developers write code for themselves not for the end user. Then I see an article about a FOSS project trying to compete with MS.

I guess the guy who originally posted that comment meant to say that some FOSS developers write code for themselves and not for the users.

Anyway, my point is that I'm not so sure that every FOSS project is really that interested in market share. Those that really are do quite well: MySQL, Mozilla, Apache, PostGre, etc....

Maybe the OO guys should talk to them.

Re:Not what we want

[niiler]

I agree with most of what you've said, although I'd like to comment on some points:

1) Faster. Fast loading, faster opening documents, faster saving documents, faster menu response.
2) Smaller. Higher efficiency. Smaller downloads.
3) More stable. Better code. Less crashing.
4) More compatible. With more types of files (for example, docx, wp, svg)
5) Better documented. End user docs, help, and developer docs.

1) Currently I'm starting up in about 3 seconds using Vector Linux 5.8 with a custom built OpenOffice 2.3. So start time is not an issue. Save and load time are, although I think these may be related to the zipped/XML type format that is used. I have no experience with Office Open XML for comparison.

2) This probably is desirable, although the last time I downloaded it took about 5 minutes. For those without superfast broadband connections, a smaller package would be nice.

3) I haven't had crashing problems with OpenOffice in two or three years. At this point, it just works.

4) Docx is theoretically supported by Novell's OpenOffice, but I've heard bad things there. I suspect that since it is theoretically "open", that OpenOffice will support it sooner or later. As a former WP fan, I would also like this support so that I can import my dissertation. Finally, I'm also with you on SVG.

5) The documentation does leave much to be desired, although it's getting better by leaps and bounds. The really key issue here is that the OO.org website sucks. I'll be the first to sing the praises of the program, but their web site looks bad, and is poorly organized. Even when you know what you are looking for, you can't necessarily find it unless you have inside information.

Re:Not what we want

[Anonymous Coward]

It was once posted here on /. (I can't find the post - it was months ago) that FOSS developers write code for themselves not for the end user. Then I see an article about a FOSS project trying to compete with MS.

Sun Microsystems (ever heard of them?) write OO.o - they have something like 50 full-time employees hacking away on it, and I believe IBM have pledged a further 25. It may be released under an open-source license, but pretty much every aspect of it has more in common with commercial software and development practices.

OT, but - I've always wondered what kind of state GNOME and KDE would be in if they had this kind of man-power donated to them (KDE in particular has accomplished, imho, *miracles* with it's shoe-string budget. It's hard to believe that KOffice, say, has just *1* full-timer working on it [and he works exclusively on the database component]). Oh well - a man can dream :)

Re:Not what we want

[Blakey Rat]

Sun Microsystems (ever heard of them?) write OO.o - they have something like 50 full-time employees hacking away on it, and I believe IBM have pledged a further 25.

I don't have much experience with Sun software, but I can guarantee that anything IBM makes intended for the end user is going to suck, and it's going to suck hard. This is the company that sells Lotus Notes to their customers, and tells them with a straight face that it's better than Outlook. IBM knows nothing about usability or giving people what they want; all they do is produce something that's almost entirely broken, then selling consulting services at $250/hour to fix it to the "mostly broken" state.

Re:Not what we want

[punkrockguy318]

1) 2.3 seems to have some great speed improvements. I'm running the gusty build on a AMD sempron 2600+ and writer opens in about two seconds.

Re:Not what we want

[bvdbos]

That's why thunderbird (which Sun is putting recources in) is modular through extensions. Those who want thunderbird to be just a mail client with no extra's, they can have to base install. If you want htings like calendaring, you have addons for this.

Re:Not what we want

[z0M6]

Faster! Faster! Faster!!!

You know there are other alternatives. I'm actually quite fond of koffice. You should give it a go. Using Qt, instead of implementing drawing capabilities yourself, seems at least sane and it's a lot faster.

Re:Not what we want

[Anonymous Coward]

6) Much better usability. E.g. try to define new color in Impress. This GUI is horrible.
7) Quality templates out of the box.

Re:Not what we want

[Bert64]

But in the case of OO other people can and will fix the mistakes IBM make...
Aside from that, IBM adds credibility and a marketing budget to the project.

Re:Not what we want

[zooblethorpe]

But in the case of OO other people can and will fix the mistakes IBM make...

I find myself thinking the opposite might be the case -- IBM might help fix OOo mistakes that have been on the books for far too long. Reference my previous post about how IBM's Lotus Symphony offers some substantial improvement over OOo in terms of basic functionality (word / character counts). I sincerely hope that IBM's involvement means that some of these *very* longstanding OOo deficiencies are finally dealt with.

Cheers,

Re:Not what we want

[markdavis]

Don't get me wrong, I love most of OpenOffice and promote it fiercely. But load time on older machines is still an issue. And it just uses too much RAM and CPU on much of what it does. And although it very rarely crashes, it still has lots of misc bugs and malfunctions. Base needs a LOT of work, too... some reporting functions can suck 100% of the CPU for long times, which is just not acceptable.

My main point is that there is enough to keep hundreds of developers busy for years, just fixing, improving, and documenting what is there, without adding in the kitchen sink.

Wrong prority!

[ecbpro]

Please this is so wrong, who needs yet another mail client?
How about first finish cleaning up the OOo code?
Then make Impress make slides look nice! Graphics output is so ugly I have to be ashamed when I use Impress, drawings in Powerpoint look so much nicer. Why cant they make good anti-aliasing of curves? What is really stupid is that when I export my slides as pdf they look really nice! Oh boy... but no, first they want to add a mail software into an already really slow office suite, THANK YOU!

Re:Wrong prority!

[skeeto]

Don't you know the rules?

"Every application grows until it can read e-mail."

OO is just going along the predicted path.

Re:Wrong prority!

[Anonymous Coward]

There should be 10 initial priorities for OO.o 3.0:

Bugfixes
Compatibility
SPEED
SPEED
SPEED
SPEED
SPEED
SPEED
SPEED
SPEED

The biggest complaint I hear about OO.o is that even on high end hardware, it's slow as hell. So you lose the home market because people at home don't buy fast machines anyway, but their office suite is slow as hell on it. Then you have the business market. Not only does it get dinged for speed there over and over again (The point of the computer is more productivity per man hour. That's all about SPEED), but the compatibility with Office modern and legacy formats KILLS it.

As much as I hate to say it, they DO need to match Office feature for feature. But not by adding a mail client. They need to start by having every document creating feature perfect, having every typical feature built in, having 100% picture perfect compatibility with every Microsoft format to allow drop in replacement, and making that all FAST FAST FAST. Sure, there's no innovation, but people want a product they can USE today, not a product that makes them feel all warm and fuzzy because it ain't Microsoft.

Competition with Outlook can come later after somebody else builds a picture perfect, easy to install, easy to administrate competitor to Exchange. People aiming to replace Outlook are aiming for the decoy; Exchange is the real target to replace. For now, do what you do right now well before you even think of trying to take on additional functions.

Re:Wrong prority!

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever tried keynote? it makes Powerpoint look like it was designed by 3rd grades with blunt crayons.

On the other hand, I have seen Impress presnetations that look fantastic, but it takes skill and knowlege. Powerpoint has lots of templates available to make it easier for the graphically incompetent to make a presnetation.

But going to the next level and bringing in a powerbook with keynote... I dont care what you are pitching, if you are using windows and Powerpoint and I follow you with my mac and keynote. you will lose big time. It looks way better which translate to "this guy is on the ball and a leader" in executives heads.

I laugh at you guys still working with toys like power point.

Re:Wrong prority!

[Anonymous Coward]

Graphics output is so ugly I have to be ashamed when I use Impress, drawings in Powerpoint look so much nicer. OOo should use Apple Keynote as a source of inspiration. PowerPoint looks like moldy dogshit by comparison.

Re:Wrong prority!

[moosesocks]

Better yet. Stop trying to copy PowerPoint. It sucks.

Seriously. It's downright awful. For that matter, OOo should stop trying to be Office 97 altogether. They need a ground-up innovative approach. Or maybe they should just consider stealing Apple's ideas instead.

Keynote (Apple's presentation app) absolutely trumps PowerPoint in virtually every respect. Powerpoint 2007 got a lot better (probably the biggest improvement of the Office apps in 2007), but it still carries a ton of bloat and cruft.

Apple's other new product, Numbers (their Excel replacement) is also one of my favorite pieces of software to come along in a long time. The UI is fantastically elegant, and actually presents you with the sort of options you'd want in front of you when managing a spreadsheet. In Excel, I find myself doing "Format -> Cell -> Select a tab -> Change an option -> Ok -> Repeat" all the time, because half of the program's most commonly-used functions are hidden behind tabs in a dialog box accessed via a menu item! Numbers puts the most commonly used spreadsheet options on the toolbar (gasp!). I'll rarely add a PivotTable or WordArt (blegh) more than once per spreadsheet (if that). However, apart from data entry itself, I most often adjust alignment, font, merging, wrapping, and borders when I'm working with a spreadsheet. The fact that Office doesn't present these options prominently boggles the mind.

Re:Wrong prority!

[Matthieu Araman]

You're missing a point.
Having people working on thunderbird/ligthning doesn't slow down openoffice developpement at all.

Re:Wrong prority!

[ecbpro]

Yes Keynote is an excellent presentation tool. If there was a Linux version I would immediately buy it!
I must say that otherwise I like using OOo (I found it to be more compatible to Powerpoint than different versions of Powerpoint to eachother). Linux now has cairo to make nice drawings, why don't they use it in Impress? If I new how to program I would do it myself.

Client side isnt the issue

[nurb432]

Its the server side that needs to be addressed. All the current OSS replacements have their issues in an 'enterprise' environment.

Re:Client side isnt the issue

[dbIII]

So what exactly is the problem with Sendmail and all the rest in an 'enterprise' environment? Exchange gives you email plus a calendar that is a bit behind the one you can get from Google and run on apache but it is at least all in one chunk I suppose.

I hope this is a first step towards increasing....

[blind biker]

...stability and performance of OO.o.

But somehow I doubt it.

Thunderbird has calendar?

[nurb432]

And group scheduling, public folders, notes, etc ?

If not its replacing Outlook express, not outlook. And there are tons of decent competitors at that level now.

Re:Thunderbird has calendar?

[realdodgeman]

The only real Outlook competitor I know of, is Evolution. Most other email clients are still on the Outlook Express level (though many are much better).

Re:Thunderbird has calendar?

[nurb432]

On the KDE side, Kontact is also a competitor. Its less integrated then evolution, but using kparts, it 'feels' like a single application, for the most part.

But both evolution and kontact have their issues. Id like to see something like kolab become useable for the server side to go with them. ( citadel is close, but stil quirky )

Re:Thunderbird has calendar?

[mrtexe]

Evolution is not currently good on Windows.

Re:Thunderbird has calendar?

[Randle_Revar]

Yes, it has a Calendar, it is called Lightning (TB integrated Sunbird). If Caldav/iCalendar supports group scheduling, public folders and notes, then Lightning does or will.

Re:Thunderbird has calendar?

[nurb432]

Well, thats a good start then. I wasnt aware of 'integrated' sunbird.

Re:Thunderbird has calendar?

[Matthieu Araman]

Sun has been contributing to lightning for a while with success, dedicating developers to it.
That's very good because instead of restarting from scratch, they are using an existing product and open source community.
At this time, lightning is not yet complete but it's getting better and better.

Re:Thunderbird has calendar?

[zooblethorpe]

Evolution is not currently good on Windows.

More's the pity. I'm stuck on Windows due to client-demanded software that has no *nix version and cannot run under Wine. Evo would be welcome indeed. Ah, well...

Re:Thunderbird has calendar?

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM Lotus Notes with Lotus Domino server?
"The Notes client is mainly used as an email client, but also acts as an instant messaging client (for Lotus Sametime), browser, notebook, and calendar/resource reservation client, as well as a platform for interacting with collaborative applications. People who support the Notes client regard the easy interoperability of all of these roles as a major advantage in multiple-application business environments."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_notes

http://www-142.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/notes

IBM demostration of Lotus Notes 8:
http://download.boulder.ibm.com/ibmdl/pub/software/lotus/lotusweb/product/nd8/demo/shell_popup.html

User demo of Lotus Notes 8 on Linux desktop:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-qK34CzKjM

Re:Thunderbird has calendar?

[phoenix_rizzen]

That's the beauty of Kontact. Each "module" is actually a separate application. All Kontact adds is a GUI wrapper around all the separate apps.

If you want to use the full e-mail, schedule, addressbook, todo, RSS reader then you can fire up Kontact.

If you only want to check your e-mail, then either fire up Kontact, or just KMail. All the data is the same.

If you only want to check your calendar, then either fire up Kontact, or just .

And so on. You can easily move from using a few of the individual apps on their own, to the full-blown Kontact. Or vice versa.

It's quite nice to work with, and something I wish Evolution/Outlook/etc did.

Good luck competnig with OUTLOOK

[JackMeyhoff]

Without any kind of SEAMLESS intergeneration with ACTIVE SYNC you stand ZERO CHANCE of prying Outlook from my hands. Sure I use Open Office but dumped Thunderbird after giving it more than a fair chance.

Re:Good luck competnig with OUTLOOK

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no need to shout.

Re:Good luck competnig with OUTLOOK

[Provocateur]

He's in the basement. He can't hear you.

Re:Good luck competnig with OUTLOOK

[dbIII]

He's in the basement. He can't hear you.

He's in the basement with a knife, fork and spoon young Eloi!

outlook clone

[edxwelch]

outlook is not a well designed product. There are many usablity issues, basic feature mistakes and bugs. I hope they don't do a feature-for-feature clone, like they did for word, because they can do much better.

Re:outlook clone

[Allador]

Can you talk about any of these in detail? I'd like to see them.

I regularly use the two biggies, Outlook against Exchange and Thunderbird against IMAP, and you cant put them in the same ball park as far as usability. Thunderbird has several more years of baking to get some of that fit and finish worked out.

What would you like to see in Outlook? I've only got one real complaint at this point, and it revolves around an occasional network burp that hangs up the app for a bit.

Re:outlook clone

[Anonymous Coward]

Thunderbird is a fairly poor IMAP client. Outlook, while it may be great with Exchange, is a terrible IMAP client.

Re:outlook clone

[javajeff]

What do you consider a good IMAP client? I think Thunderbird is likely the best while Outlook does a decent job with IMAP. What else is out there that is better?

Re:outlook clone

[edxwelch]

Outlook hides important data, like the full email address and the list of people in a group. If you accept an appointment quickly you will never be able to find it again, because the email is deleted, and filed somewhere in the calender.
Can't recognise urls... like if you paste http://.../ as text into a email most other programs convert it to a hyperlink. Even when it does recognise it can't handle spaces in urls. Pasting images into an email embeds them as uncompressed bitmaps. Extreemly hard to search for keywords in mails. Should just be able to search all emails with one click, regardless of what folder they are in. ... and if I used it more I could make a much bigger list

Re:outlook clone

[Allador]

Thanks for posting.

Some of the things you mention are configurable (auto-delete of accepted meetings), some things are present in the current version (instant search of entire mail store, auto-hyperlinking of http references, though spaces will break).

Some of these irritate me too, but only very mildly (names instead of emails, embedded images in html mails).

Anyway, thanks for responding!

OO.o Exchange Client?

[Doc Ruby]

To replace Outlook, OO.o would have to connect to MS Exchange for all kinds of shared databases, including calendars, distribution lists, contacts, as well as email. If OO.o can do that indistinguishably from Outlook, with the client code in GPL, that's excellent news. Not just for using OO.o, but for using Outlook.

Because there are several GPL projects out there working on replacing Exchange with something running (much better) on Linux. Their main problem is the Outlook/Exchange protocol. If OO.o offers the client side code for that protocol, then "inverse engineering" the Exchange server side protocol code would be much easier.

I hope all those "Exchange killer" projects get to use the OO.o code that way. And that at least one succeeds in producing the server code under GPL. Because then it'll be available to all those projects.

Re:OO.o Exchange Client?

[dbIII]

No it wouldn't. You go for system integration and not catch up and sticking to the side like a leech. You can have something else that does the same thing - but if you use Exchange you are stuck with the entire ecosystem that comes with it. There are many things that are much better in any feature but it is the collected mass of the thing that sells, and it's a bit of effort to set that up with other parts which really has to be done in one hit.

Re:OO.o Exchange Client?

[Doc Ruby]

I'm not really sure what your post means, semantically. But lots of orgs are stuck with the Outlook/Exchange/Office "ecosystem". If they could replace Exchange they would, especially if no one noticed, because Exchange is about as popular as it is an awful app platform. They'd keep Outlook because all the users know how to use it, the main "switching" impediment in any org. They can't replace Exchange because the Outlook/Exchange protocol is secret/obfuscated. If OO.o can offer that protocol code, that's a boon to the Exchange replacements. And thereby also a boon to OO.o being an Office replacement.

I can't dispute your reasoning because I can't decipher it. But I don't see how it can dispute what I just said.

Re:OO.o Exchange Client?

[dbIII]

To put it a better way after sleep: it is better in the long run to replace the entire mess with something that offers the same features than to attempt to design components one by one based on little information.

There is still a place for components that work with Exchange but they have to play the game of "catch up" and will often disappoint.

Re:OO.o Exchange Client?

[Doc Ruby]

But what about the reality, where people are going to keep Outlook for many years (if not decades), regardless of how bad it is, because that's what they've already got? And the "component" design of replacing Exchange is already largely underway, except the hard part of the proprietary and covered up Outlook/Exchange protocol - until perhaps now, with that code supposedly appearing in Thunderbird?

In other words, how does the completely hypothetical "better" approach you're talking about look when compared to the actual reality that I'm describing?

Re:OO.o Exchange Client?

[dbIII]

You do it as part of a lot of other changes in infrastructure and not in a stable situation. Outlook is almost extinct in the company where I work simply because there is little reason to use it if you do not have Exchange - there are many other more capable email clients if that is all you use it for.

Well....

[Acecoolco]

Open Office is nice and all, and I LOVE Firefox... However, Thunderbird is.. well... no good... Ive tried it, and hated it... It downloads mail fast and all, I just dont like the layout, and some ways the program handles things. Josh

Re:Well....

[Randle_Revar]

Just because you personally don't like the layout, doesn't mean it is no good. It means that it is no good *for you*. Like all software Thunderbird has some issues; however, it has no fundamental, fatal problems.

Re:Well....

[Allador]

The online/offline support is pretty fatal. I should be able to pull the ethernet (or turn off wifi) at any point and Thunderbird should continue to work just fine, and give me full access to my email, calendar, tasks, and address book.

At the moment, it doesnt work at all. I have to manually synchronize the system before disconnecting, and even then its flaky.

And Here is Where the Math Does Not Add Up

[SerpentMage]

>Thunderbird & Sunbird combined have almost everything Exchange offers. They just don't connect to Exchange servers.

That's like saying. Heck I have a car that drives on Hydrogen, but the problem is that there are no Hydrogen gas stations anywhere. Gee, that sort of defeats the purpose no?

>Thankfully the code is modular (e.g. it already has handlers for nntp, imap, pop3) so it should be quite possible to write the code.

That's like saying. Heck a hydrogen car is not a problem, you just need to create some tanking stations anywhere you drive so that you don't run out of hydrogen. Again sort of defeats the purpose no?

>Especially seeing as code already exists in the Evolution plugin that could be utilised.

That's like saying. Heck there are gas stations and they could be used to sell hydrogen. All we need to do is provide the equipment.

Gee at the end of the day, even though it's worse, its simpler to drive a gas guzzling vehicle. Sad yes, but that's reality...

Re:And Here is Where the Math Does Not Add Up

[sneezinglion]

>Thunderbird & Sunbird combined have almost everything Exchange offers. They just don't connect to Exchange servers.

That's like saying. Heck I have a car that drives on Hydrogen, but the problem is that there are no Hydrogen gas stations anywhere. Gee, that sort of defeats the purpose no?
So what you are saying is we should give up. Why try?

>Thankfully the code is modular (e.g. it already has handlers for nntp, imap, pop3) so it should be quite possible to write the code.

That's like saying. Heck a hydrogen car is not a problem, you just need to create some tanking stations anywhere you drive so that you don't run out of hydrogen. Again sort of defeats the purpose no?
No, grandparent was pointing out that ease with which one could create the code.

>Especially seeing as code already exists in the Evolution plugin that could be utilised.

That's like saying. Heck there are gas stations and they could be used to sell hydrogen. All we need to do is provide the equipment.

Gee at the end of the day, even though it's worse, its simpler to drive a gas guzzling vehicle. Sad yes, but that's reality... No, Your analogy is not worth the bits it is stored with. :) grandparent was pointing out that there is already code to utilize an exchange server. That is nothing like needing to provide equipment. It is more like saying the pumps we have are fine, we just need to replace the nozzles with brand X and then we have pumps! Yaay! Stop being a defeatist. At the end of the day, if we listened to defeatists, we would never make progress on anything. Sad yes, but that's reality.

Re:And Here is Where the Math Does Not Add Up

[DrXym]

That's like saying. Heck I have a car that drives on Hydrogen, but the problem is that there are no Hydrogen gas stations anywhere. Gee, that sort of defeats the purpose no?

No it isn't. Not even slightly. I don't even understand your point.

That's like saying. Heck a hydrogen car is not a problem, you just need to create some tanking stations anywhere you drive so that you don't run out of hydrogen. Again sort of defeats the purpose no?

Your analogies really suck.

That's like saying. Heck there are gas stations and they could be used to sell hydrogen. All we need to do is provide the equipment.

Gee at the end of the day, even though it's worse, its simpler to drive a gas guzzling vehicle. Sad yes, but that's reality...

They continue to suck...

For your information Thunderbird is a modular and well designed piece of code that uses abstraction and other techniques to enable it support NNTP, SMTP, IMAP & POP3. Each protocol lies behind abstracted XPCOM interfaces and the core is mostly agnostic to whatever is being used. Since code already exists in Evolution's connector I see no reason whatsoever that Thunderbird cannot make use of it. The same applies for Sunbird.

Bad analogies aside I get the sense that you think it's a waste of time to make Thunderbird / Sunbird support one of the most popular mail servers in existence. Supporting Exchange makes OpenOffice a far more attractive proposition to business. It might even allow many businesses to seriously consider dumping MS Office entirely.

Re:And Here is Where the Math Does Not Add Up

[SerpentMage]

>No, Your analogy is not worth the bits it is stored with. :) grandparent was pointing out that there is already code to utilize an exchange server. That is nothing like needing to provide equipment. It is more like saying the pumps we have are fine, we just need to replace the nozzles with brand X and then we have pumps! Yaay! Stop being a defeatist. At the end of the day, if we listened to defeatists, we would never make progress on anything. Sad yes, but that's reality.

No I am not a defeatist. What I am is somebody who tries to pick problems that I can win.

The essential problem with hydrogen is getting it to the consumer. So no matter how good the car, technology, etc is, unless it gets to the consumer its a dead duck.

The problem and this is what the way up poster talked about is get OO right and stop thinking that by integrating one more piece then the masses will come. It is not about technology and Open Source people are not getting it. There was somebody who down the list pointed out a situation where he wanted an autorun CD of a powerpoint presentation. With PowerPoint a couple of minutes. OO not even possible.

OO is not solving the simple problems.

Here are two simple things that I would want to see in OO.

1) Get a decent extension model framework where it is easy to program. UNO is not it. I tried it and it was scary.
2) Remove the data limits and work on being able to manage large pieces of data. Office 2007 has addressed this partially, but I would love to see it addressed in a major way.

Re:And Here is Where the Math Does Not Add Up

[SerpentMage]

>Your analogies really suck.

You are missing my analogy. Hydrogen is what we want. It's clean, plentiful, etc, etc. Yet hydrogen is getting nowhere? This reminds me between the battle of OO and MS Office where OO is hydrogen.

My point is that it is not about the technologies, but about the infrastructure surronding the technologies. Until OO gets this it will be an uphill battle.

>Since code already exists in Evolution's connector I see no reason whatsoever that Thunderbird cannot make use of it. The same applies for Sunbird.

Ok, so let me get this straight. A business should use code from another Open Source product to solve their problems? Don't you see the problem of that argument? Yes you say, "Oh somebody could write that code." Well, that is my point entirely. That code is not written, it is not available, therefore it is not a solution that a company can use.

The reason why people stay with MS Office is because it works! Even on the Mac there was this recent statistic that Microsoft Office is one of the most popular pieces of software. This should be a warning shot to the OO people.

Re:And Here is Where the Math Does Not Add Up

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Get a decent extension model framework where it is easy to program. UNO is not it. I tried it and it was scary.

Can you, perhaps, give constructive criticism? WHAT was scary & why? I've heard (and run into) gripes over both MS COM & OO.o UNO, but you seem to be spreading FUD against UNO due to some personal bias or as a conflict of interest (your other posts demonstrate a lack of understanding of the products & a strong bias against OO.o). How about some concrete examples?

Re:And Here is Where the Math Does Not Add Up

[Anonymous Coward]

It is funny that you say it ISN'T about technology, and then give a single missing feature example:

There was somebody who down the list pointed out a situation where he wanted an autorun CD of a powerpoint presentation. With PowerPoint a couple of minutes. OO not even possible.

My boss wanted his presentation to be auto-run on the web. It was trivial to export a flash presentation from OO.o Impress. It is not even possible in PowerPoint.

What's the point? My boss now has both products.

Due to cost, EVERY MS Office user can choose to be an OO.o user too. OO.o doesn't need to do much to win users.

Re:And Here is Where the Math Does Not Add Up

[Allador]

For your information Thunderbird is a modular and well designed piece of code that uses abstraction and other techniques to enable it support NNTP, SMTP, IMAP & POP3. Each protocol lies behind abstracted XPCOM interfaces and the core is mostly agnostic to whatever is being used. Okay, not trying to be a jerk or make this personal or anything, but ... you keep saying this like it means anything. What you're describing is programming 101 stuff for any multi-protocol handler. Its just not exciting, is fully expected, and is par for the course.

There's alot more to a collaborative PIM product than just a good protocol handling abstraction layer.

I guess what I'm saying is that the reasons you're using for why Thunderbird+Sunbird are good Outlook replacements are not very good reasons, at least IMO.

where's the innovation?

[Anonymous Coward]

why do i keep hearing that cry from the open sores crowd yet every article about oo is about them trying to take business from ms office by implementing features already in ms office? why can't they innovate instead of imitate?
 
what should i expect out of a bunch of whiners who still can't face the fact that their operating system is not innovative, it's a rip off. so is their big graphics app and their office suite.

No real competition

[plusser]

I think that the problem with Open Office is that Microsoft Office has no real competition, hence it can afford to ignore everybody else.

The problem is very simple, when it comes to using Operating Systems there is very effective competition to Windows, namely Unix, Linux (and its many variations), BSD and MAC OS. While many of these systems are low cost to own, they do provide Microsoft with an incentive to provide a better operating system.

However, Microsoft Office has no real competition. Some people will say "but what about Open Office", but the problem is that while it may be free, there is no incentive for anybody to develop program other than for the simple joy of it. Unfortunately developing a office tool today is not like developing an operating system, as you have to offer dictionaries, grammar tools, paper formatting and tool integration to support every country in every region of the world; something you either buy or pay for a lot of work to be done. The problem is that the commercial alternatives to Microsoft Office have all but died out (Word Perfect etc..), hence the market share for Microsoft Office is probably greater than that of Windows.

The solution is that somebody needs to take Microsoft on where it hurts, i.e. offer a proper Office suite that costs less than Office. Unfortunately the only company that is any position to do this is Apple, but having been hurt by Microsoft when Explorer was withdrawn for Mac OS after Apple launched Safari, I doubt whether they would even attempt to tackle this problem as Mac without Office would be a problem for interoperability with documents in the future. There is of course Star Office, but that is just a commercial version of Open Office.

So the solution is that we get total bloatware and zero innovation. While I have not used Office 2007 yet, I suppose that like 2000, XP and 2003 there is little innovation over 97, which was actually quite a good piece of software.

For your information, I do use Thunderbird as my home email client along with Open Office on my Home PC. But believe me, if I was running a small business, I would have no option but to pay the "Microsoft tax", even if I was not using Windows.

I personally think that the only reason that Microsoft does not sell Office as part of the operating system (which for many people it could be described as, especially when it comes to Outlook) is that not only do they make most of their money from Office, but if they did they would suddenly find being themselves being prosecuted for anti-trust by the EU and US.

Re:No real competition

[Blakey Rat]

So the solution is that we get total bloatware and zero innovation. While I have not used Office 2007 yet, I suppose that like 2000, XP and 2003 there is little innovation over 97, which was actually quite a good piece of software.

You should try it. I seriously think they've broken new ground with 2007; usabiity is increased dramatically. And 2003 introduced the new note-taking tools and online collaboration that's pretty slick.

Of course, that's kind of irrelevant to this discussion, as OpenOffice still doesn't even really match the featureset of Office 97.

Re:No real competition

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that the problem with Open Office is that
 
the problem with open office is that it's a fags office suite.

Re:No real competition

[HappyUserPerson]

I think that the problem with Open Office is that Microsoft Office has no real competition, hence it can afford to ignore everybody else.

This is something I hear a lot. Why does "Microsoft Office has no real competition" have anything to do with "the problem with Open Office". You identified some actual problems with Open Office: "[lack of] dictionaries, grammar tools, paper formatting and tool integration to support every country in every region of the world," which, I might point out, that some of the non-OO alternatives solve handily.

Speaking of "no real competition":

Some people will say "but what about Open Office", but the problem is that while it may be free, there is no incentive for anybody to develop program other than for the simple joy of it.

You're very dismissive of Open Office, but there are plenty of people here who will say that it's good enough for them.

The problem is that the commercial alternatives to Microsoft Office have all but died out (Word Perfect , etc..)

This is clearly wrong. Word Perfect, after many years of neglect and changing hands several times has retained Word Perfect diehards (like Lawyers) and gained market share through OEM bundling. You can buy Corel WordPerfect Office X3 now for $280 or a $150 upgrade. It's not important to all OpenOffice users, but based on my experience with the OEM version of WP which came with my laptop, WordPerfect is faster and more compatible than OO. I see that the business edition has many more essential Office features (like an Outlook replacement).

Unfortunately the only company that is any position to do this is Apple...

Ummm... IWork (Pages, Keynote and Numbers)?

There is of course Star Office, but that is just a commercial version of Open Office.

I don't understand why this doesn't count. It even includes a high quality licensed spell check engine.

Re:No real competition

[suv4x4]

So the solution is that we get total bloatware and zero innovation. While I have not used Office 2007 yet, I suppose that like 2000, XP and 2003 there is little innovation over 97, which was actually quite a good piece of software.

My advice is don't assume lots of things before testing. I gotta say, Office 2007 is the greatest advancement in Office since 97, and it's amazing.

It truly makes the job of OO much harder since now OO suffers on four fronts:

- not fully compatible with the majority of document files (MS Office, unfair I know, but a fact)
- no good integration between the apps in the OO suite, no Exchange alternative, no OneNote or Visio alternative etc.
- the features in the existing apps often pale in comparison with *needed* and *used* functionality in MS Office
- (2007 adds:) OO has now compared to 2007, an outdated and harder to use interface, even more essential features missing, and outdated graphics engine which makes documents look like something made in a 16-bit app.

Re:No real competition

[I'm Don Giovanni]

"I think that the problem with Open Office is that Microsoft Office has no real competition..."

Here's where you're wrong. Microsoft Office does have competition: itself. To be more precise, each new version of Office competes with the previoius version and needs to have features that intice users to upgrade. Office 2007 is the biggest upgrade since Office 97 (you were wrong again to say that Office 2007 has "little innovation" over Office 97).

OO.o, to put it bluntly, is primitive compared to MSO. Office 2k7 blows OO.o both in features, integration, and UI. OO.o can't has no answer for Outlook (Thunderbird is a joke), no answer for OneNote, no answer for Visio. Excel makes Calk look like a toy, and Word and PowerPoint do the same to OO.o's corresponding functionality (to a less extent than Excel).

OO.o isn't even up to the level of Office 97, and that's a fact.
That's why OO.o isn't "competition" for MSO. But as I said, MSO is competition for itself.

Re:Small businesses are already using OOo and Tbir

[Anonymous Coward]

You got modded funny, but it's a real issue. I've been using OpenOffice forever, and I still get confused when I see "OpenOffice Calc" and "OpenOffice Math". WTF, man? I want to do a mathematical calculation. Don't give me this shit.

Yeah, outlook

[Aaron Isotton]

Openoffice 3 is scheduled for release in September 2008 (http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Roadmap#Ongoing_OpenOffice.org_3.0). You may like Outlook or not, but there's /no way/ /anyone/ writes a replacement for it in less than a year.

People are /not/ using Outlook because it is such an incredibly cool mail client (which it isn't); they use it because it integrates mail, contacts and calendars with each other and with Exchange. I mean, you can take Thunberbird, add conversation capabilities and polish the UI a little more and then you'll have the *mail* part of Outlook, but you do *not* have the whole thing.

The MS Office universe is as successful as it is because of the following:

- Word, Excel and PowerPoint are a "classic office suite" and are nicely integrated with each other

- Outlook integrates mail, contacts and calendars with a server (Exchange) and is interacts nicely with the other Office apps

- Access is a crappy database which causes more problems than it solves. Not much to see here. Most people would be better off with excel sheets they mail to each other.

The Status of OpenOffice is IMHO the following:

- Writer is pretty much equivalent to Word. Some things are actually nicer, others are worse. It definitely needs some polish though (there are hundreds of minor nuisances). And they should definitely get rid of the retarded light bulb shaped assistant. It's even more stupid than clippy, but at least it's not animated.

- Calc is close to Excel, but not as close as Writer is to Word. It's usable for most things Excel is used for, but not a replacement yet.

- Impress sucks. It's not even close to PowerPoint. It's usable for presentations consisting of bulleted lists, but if you want anything more, oh my.

- Base vs Access - I have almost no experience with Base, so I can't say much about this. But the concept is the same as Access, so I guess it sucks at least as much.

- There is no replacement for Outlook.

- The integration between the individual programs is *years* behind what MS Office has to offer.

What they *should* do instead of trying to push Thunderbird as "Outlook replacement" is this:

- Polish Writer some more. I use Writer almost daily and have the feeling that it has the potential to be *better* than Word in most tasks. They should *not* try to be bug-by-bug, stupid-feature-by-stupid-feature compatible to Word; people who need that kind of compatibility are not going to switch anyway. Maybe bring it a bit closer to a DTP program (more and more exact controls for layouting and styling, especially for longer and/or structured documents).

- Work a bit on Calc. I mainly use both Excel and Calc for things such as "making lists" or "summing numbers" or maybe to write a small macro, so I don't really care.

- Do something *really cool* with Impress. PowerPoint is far from perfect and presentations are getting more and more important every day. I know I can do "everything" using LaTeX and Beamer, but sometimes you just want to do something *quickly*. And Impress disappoints me every time.

- Get rid of Base. Both Access and Base are crappy concepts anyway. Databases should run on a server.

Then they could still write an Exchange replacement, and only *then* Outlook can be truly replaced.

Just my 2 cents.

Re:Yeah, outlook

[Randle_Revar]

Sunbird/Lightning takes care of the Calendar part. There are plenty of Exchange replacements, unless you mean they must support mapi, which is less common (but not non-existent).

Base may still be a bad idea but HSQLDB is better than Jet (I don't know how it compares to Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine). And just as Access can connect to MS SQL server, Base can connect to MySQL, PostgreSQL and Oracle.

Re:Yeah, outlook

[caseih]

I disagree with the idea of eliminating Base (and Access). As I type this I'm reminded that *all* of the OO.org pieces, except Writer, are badly named. Base? I digress.

Two things are glaringly missing in the OSS world when it comes to business software. 1. and Access replacement, and 2. an Exchange/Outlook/ActiveSync replacement.

Now Base is nowhere near an access replacement. But it does start down the right path. And that is the idea of building front-ends to SQL servers, or a local SQLite database. Now I know with ODBC Access can also front-end real databases. But very few people do that. And then they wonder why they can't avoid data corruption when more than one person uses access at a time. With Base, I can talk to a PostgreSQL server, for example, and multiple people can use Base just fine. Base still sucks, of course, and in my opinion isn't much more than a glorified table viewer. But I sure hope it matures into a real product.

All in all, I think the office space (no pun intended!) is pretty discouraging. There's no way to break the MS hegemony at this point; it's become a complete monopoly. Other packages only half-heartedly compete, including OO.org. It's not like it's impossible for Sun or anyone else to build an Office competitor. It's just that MS has so thoroughly and completely decimated the office market that everyone is afraid to compete. Of course the file format lock-in makes it very hard too. If it's not 100% compatible (which is impossible given even OOXML specs), then it can't be used in many circumstances. At one time the situation was different. We had a number of office suites. But witness what happened to WordPerfect. Totally killed by artificially lowering prices. Sun would probably be crushed outright by MS if they tried to really devote the time and attention to OO.org that it deserves.

OSS, in theory, is immune to this. But right now there's so much fracturing among OSS developers that we never will see an Office killer. Sun's own schizophrenia regarding OSS and even their position with regards to MS is, in my opinion, killing MS. Maybe it's time to either fork OO.org, or work on a different, cleaner, code-base. Maybe KOffice.

Re:Yeah, outlook

[weicco]

You forgot MS CRM and SharePoint Services and integration between those two, office apps and Outlook.

Quite frankly I don't see what's so big deal with Thunderbird when it is just a email client. I've always used Mutt instead of TB in *nix systems and will do so in the future.

Databases should run on a server.

There are some valid use cases where database must be on client, offline use for instance. But Access.. I'd rather chew my arms of! Luckily there are some really nice free tools like SQL Server Express and Firebird. So there are valid uses for client-side databases but not for Access :)

Re:Yeah, outlook

[Anonymous Coward]

It's usable for most things Excel is used for, but not a replacement yet.

Am I the only person on Slashdot who actively prefers OO Calc to MS Excel? Admittedly most of my spreadsheets are simple affairs with only a handful of simple formulae, but I do have a couple that do some pretty nifty maths for me.

The formulae syntax and pre-defined function library may differ, but I use both apps rarely enough that I need to check the documentation to do anything non-trivial anyway.

The single biggest and most obvious difference between OO.Calc and MS.Excel to my eyes is that MS.Excel has an interpretation of the words "cut", "copy" and "paste" that is totally unique among GUI-based applications. I still don't understand exactly how the clipboard works in Excel, but I can usually figure out how to make it do what I want with a bit of fiddling. Cut/Copy/Paste in OO.Calc on the other hand do exactly what I expect them to do, ie exactly what they do in every other GUI-based application.

Am I really the only person who feels this way? It seems so glaringly obvious to me I can't understand why this bug in Excel (I'm hesitant to call it an OO feature) is not more widely discussed.

Re:Yeah, outlook

[Tim C]

Sunbird/Lightning takes care of the Calendar part. There are plenty of Exchange replacements

My chances of using an alternative mail client as long as it is truly a drop-in replacement for Outlook, including contacts and calendaring (or can be made so with plugins/extensions): 100%

My chances of convincing the business to replace Exchange with anything else, let alone something that isn't 100% drop-in replacement and utterly transparent to the users: 0%.

This isn't about Exchange replacements, this is about Outlook replacements. For me to rid myself of Outlook (oh, happy day!) I either have to find something that supports all Outlook's features and requires zero work from the systems department (and is zero cost), or move to a company that doesn't use it. As annoying as Outlook is, that last option is a little on the extreme side.

Re:Yeah, outlook

[Trillan]

Agree with most of this, but databases should be run on a server? Come on. There's no reason for the vast majority of databases to be on a server. In fact, most databases these days couldn't, because they're used embedded in your cellphone, your car, or a simple program on your computer. Most databases are not used by multiple users. Odds are you are carrying at least one database in your pocket right now.

Big multigigabyte or massively concurrent databases should be on a server, though.

Re:Yeah, outlook

[WuphonsReach]

Get rid of Base. Both Access and Base are crappy concepts anyway. Databases should run on a server.

Production databases should run on a server.

But Access brings a lot more to the party then just tables and data storage. In a easy-to-manage file, you have queries, reports, forms and the ability to write a spot of code. Want to make a backup of a table and all of its data? Copy-n-paste the table. Which users can easily grok. Need to muck with everything, pack the MDB into a ZIP file or make a copy, just in case. I have yet to see server-level database GUIs that are as easy to work with.

General office users want to know *where* their data is. With a MDB file, they can treat that blob of data just like a Word or Excel file. And it's better that the data is in a MDB table then on a sheet in an Excel file. In general, the MDB is only used by a small handful of people (1-3) so keeping track of the "current" data set is simply a matter of storing the MDB in Subversion.

Access is also useful for cases where you need to archive data, along with the queries and reports used. I prefer not to have job data from 5 years ago cluttering up our SQL Server. By offloading that data into a MSAccess database, along with a few queries and reports, it's available should we ever need to work with that dataset again down the road. Since each job has a different data layout, it's not like we can create one historical table to store all of that data.

Basically, MSAccess fits a very important niche in the business world. And I have yet to see anything come close to competing (Lotus Approach might have... and I haven't looked at OOO Base in a bit).

Office encryption

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of security, Office does have a nice feature where you can encrypt sensitive files before sending them out of the office to prevent your data being read by nefarious third-parties.

But be extremely careful in relying on this, particularly if you use it with multiple versions of the same document & the same password. PDF describing poor RC4 implementation is MS Office. I'd rather use PGP/GPG.

Does OpenOffice have anything of the sort?

It can. ODF are zip archives that contain the XML and supporting files used in your document. OO.o can password protect the zip files. Again, public key encryption is probably a better tool.

I can guarantee if you go to a professional writer and ask:

Which would you rather have?
A) An outline view where you can instantly re-order your work, including notes and references?
B) A slightly more open document format?

There isn't a single one who's going to answer B.

I'm just out of academia, where it is publish-or-perish & so I can name many people who must write as part of their jobs & very many would prefer B.

I don't think the target audience of these suites is professional writers, though. Professional writing is not a big niche. The fact that B is important is evident in MS's attempts to standardize OOXML.

Great idea

[Wowsers]

That's a great idea, have two applications that don't do everything very well, merge them into one, then you can say there's only one package that doesn't do things very well.

OpenOffice is good if you don't want to pay Microsoft prices for Office, which should suit the casual user. Thunderbird still has many irritating 'features', and it comes bundled with a Usenet reader (which should IMO be unbundled) - it is not a master of email or Usenet so turn it into master of email.

does OO handle MSWord bullets yet?

[dankelley]

Although this is a bit off-topic, I'm wondering about whether OO has the basics right yet.

Every few months I download the latest and greatest OO, and try to load up a random MSWord file. I have never seen OO handle bullets correctly. And this is for MSWord files created on a whole host of Windows and OSX machines, probably with different locale settings, and also using a variety of MSWord releases.

Not one single time has OO represented bullets correctly as, well, bullets.

So, this is a question to my /. brothers and sisters -- have you experienced an OSX version of OO that handles MSWord files properly? (Please note that I'm speaking about OO here, not NeoOffice. I want to stick to software that's in the mainstream and that therefore will be updated quickly, not a side project that follows a possibly outdated branch.)

Excel for investment? _you_ must be kidding

[Flying pig]

If you are investing at the level that OO Calc is too limited, then all or some of the following are true:

• A copy of Office Pro costs less than your hourly billing rate, and you have no interest in this debate, so why are you posting?
• You should not be using Excel at all. You should be using a proper financial modelling system connected to a relational database, e.g. Business Objects with various add ons. Again, for the level of investing that this necessitates, the cost is unimportant to you.
• Either you employ somebody else to do this stuff anyway, or you have to adhere to corporate policies, and so your desktop is locked down by IT and you don't have a choice of tools.

Alternatively of course you are just someone playing at investing. In which case your opinion is not particularly valuable. Given how expensive professionals have been getting it so wrong lately, anyone who trusts the financial models of an amateur without access to proper business modelling tools and data...deserves to buy a share in this wonderful toll bridge I just bought that links England and Wales.

Re:Excel for investment? _you_ must be kidding

[SerpentMage]

> A copy of Office Pro costs less than your hourly billing rate, and you have no interest in this debate, so why are you posting?

Why am I interesting in this debate? Because I had to buy Office 2007! I was holding out for the longest time, hoping that OO would finally allow me to do what I want. The days of Office pro being less than an hourly rate is long gone, just like the dotcom bubble.

>You should not be using Excel at all. You should be using a proper financial modelling system connected to a relational database, e.g. Business Objects with various add ons. Again, for the level of investing that this necessitates, the cost is unimportant to you.

I advise that you actually look at the tools that investment banks use. They in fact use Excel! Sure there is back end stuff, but traders and quants like Excel because it lets them very quickly come up with ideas and strategies.

>Alternatively of course you are just someone playing at investing. In which case your opinion is not particularly valuable. Given how expensive professionals have been getting it so wrong lately, anyone who trusts the financial models of an amateur without access to proper business modelling tools and data...deserves to buy a share in this wonderful toll bridge I just bought that links England and Wales.

I find it amazing that instead of actually doing a constructive argument you mock me. I could just as easily mock you since you did not even know that professional traders use Excel. Are you a quant? Do you follow the market?

Re:Excel for investment? _you_ must be kidding

[DamnStupidElf]

I advise that you actually look at the tools that investment banks use. They in fact use Excel! Sure there is back end stuff, but traders and quants like Excel because it lets them very quickly come up with ideas and strategies.

Amazing! If I put $77.10 in a bank account every month for 850 months at %1 annual interest I'll have $95296.08, but if I just put $77.10 in my mattress for 850 months I'll have $100,000!!!

Re:Excel for investment? _you_ must be kidding

[speaker of the truth]

Those damn bank fees really suck.

Re:Excel for investment? _you_ must be kidding

[Whiteox]

lol
Well done!
Hey! Have MS fixed that bug yet?

home and academic users dont care about outlook

[voss]

They use outlook express or thunderbird or webmail or AOL clients. Many home users dont even both to configure standalone email clients anymore their
webmail clients are "good enough"

I dont understand this obsession about overtaking microsoft office in businesses.

If you ask what most people would like to see in Openoffice.
Speed is not the problem for most openoffice users. On my reasonably new desktop writer opens within 3 seconds.

1) Desktop/Web publishing (a replacement for Publisher) the most common activity done by people at home other than writing letters.
2) More polished Presentations(more clip art, more templates, better designed wizards)
3) better compatibility with Office

Re:home and academic users dont care about outlook

[westlake]

1) Desktop/Web publishing (a replacement for Publisher) the most common activity done by people at home other than writing letters)

Forget Publisher for a moment. Where is the FOSS Print Shop?

Re:home and academic users dont care about outlook

[voss]

Amen

Re:home and academic users dont care about outlook

[Hymer]

"I dont understand this obsession about overtaking microsoft office in businesses."
Just FYI... A lot of businesses would love to use something else than Microsoft products.
The Problem with MS products is that they only work well with... other MS products... and they ONLY work on Windows.
So... anybody who tries to make a replacement for :

• Windows
  
• Exchange & Outlook
  
• SQL server
  
• .NET
  
• Office
  
• Visio
  
• Project
  

...is good for everybody except Microsoft.
btw. it may be commercial...

--

No, it is not Microsoft bashing... this is MONOPOLY bashing...

Re:home and academic users dont care about outlook

[westlake]

Amen

Print Shop will do as a stand-in for every popular application that has been around forever, appeals directly to the home and SOHO user, and still has no FOSS equivalent.

Re:Small businesses are already using OOo and Tbir

[Provocateur]

Calc was windows calculator replacement, rather than a spreadsheet is far too high.

You're kidding, right? You're saying not one of them heard the obvious K in kcalc when you pronounced it? I say, move to another company, unplug that modem, get rid of all your worldly possessions, and found a priesthood. Better yet, move to another country where K is treated with the respect it truly deserves.

Good strategy

[mrtexe]

Let's review. Firefox comes out of nowhere and forces MS to upgrade IE. With better browsers, Google can create Gmail. Google rewards Mozilla by paying a huge amount of money for being the default search engine in Firefox. One problem. Thunderbird competes with Gmail. Perhaps not coincidentally, Mozilla now kicks Thunderbird out of the nest. The new entity, Mailco, takes the remnants of Eudora (Penelope) with it, clearing the decks for a Gmail vs. Outlook showdown.

Of course, if you want standards-based e-mail, you can't use Outlook. The IMAP implementation is horribly broken to goad users into using Exchange and MAPI. If you want personal computing based e-mail, you can't use Gmail (a web app reminiscient of being on a mainframe terminal). This is especially sensitive if you are in a business that might compete with Google, since it would be easy for them to do something untoward (regardless of whether they actually would).

Now OOo steps up to partner with Mailco and Thunderbird.

So maybe there is a future for standards-based e-mail in personal computing after all. I hope so.

you little beauty!

[pjr.cc]

All i can say is brilliant!.

Although, the choice of Thunderbird is a little annoying. I was having a chat not that long ago (actually the day OO 2.3 came out) with a friend and we both came to the conclusion we both use ms office because the number 1 thing we use is outlook.

Now, if OO 3 had a viable outlook alternative (notice the use of the word viable) then i'd never have to fire up outlook ever again. OF course, by viable i mean something that has at least the calender - i use evolution at work with exchange and it works "ok" when its not crashing, but if OO had its eyes on thunderbird and upping its functionality levels then more power to them i say!. My life would be complete!

I do use t-bird at home for everything, but its so hard to do that in a job given that lack of (useful) calendering. Now, evolutions outlook (owa) connector may be quite annoying really but there is work underway for a real connector to exchange for evolution and if that library (http://sourceforge.net/projects/openchange/) could be used in t-bird - then brilliant!.

Im of course getting ahead of myself, one step at a time eh?

Ill tell you what we want from Openoffice as outlo

[unity100]

ok replacement.

first, we need scheduleable TASKS, and we need them to be linkable with EMAILS and emails be THREADED, and also tasks linkable with events (meetings and whatnot) AND CONTACTS (emails and cards).

current thunderbird with lightning addon doesnt cut it unfortunately, it just can function as a "reminder" service, not a complete scheduler/planner/organizer/communication client.

Re:losing developers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rotsky'd!

Living it, mostly loving it

[Zigurd]

I have been using Open Office and Thunderbird as direct replacements for Office and Outlook for over a year now.

My main tasks are product planning, design, presentations, and documentation for software projects. For these tasks, Open Office is fine - no complaints about missing pieces, and the diagram editor in Open Office is sufficiently better than the diagram editor in MSOffice as to not require a direct replacement for Visio (though Dia is pretty good if you need something Visio-like).

Thunderbird isn't going to make Exchange Server users happy, but that isn't the point. If you use a hosted mail service, as many small companies do, and if you use a shared hosted calendar, Thunderbird, plus a few plug-ins, especially Lightning, is an adequate replacement for Outlook in that context. All, or almost all the functions of Exchange Server and Outlook have equivalents in Thunderbird plus plug-ins.

A year ago, when I started using Thunderbird, it was with some reservations: No Plaxo sync, iffy Webmail integration, Lightning was shakey, etc. In the past year I have found enough plug-ins to fill those gaps. As of now, people using Outlook without an Exchange Server would be better served by Thunderbird.

Some people depend on particular features of the Office/Exchange combination, and that can't be helped, but the 80% that use that software to edit documents and read mail can switch without pain.

For many organizations, the fact they can do all this without buying software, signing up for maintenance plans, and subjecting their budget to the continuous pressure on commercial software vendors to lock in and up-sell, is enough to make the OSS alternative more attractive.

Not convinced? You don't have to be. You probably have an obsolete PC laying around. Put a Linux distro on it and try it.

Re:Living it, mostly loving it

[Tim C]

Some people depend on particular features of the Office/Exchange combination, and that can't be helped, but the 80% that use that software to edit documents and read mail can switch without pain.

Do you have a source for that number, or did you just make it up? I only ask as 100% of the people I know who use Outlook do so for the Exchange calendaring features. For them Thunderbird really isn't a viable option.

Believe me I'd love for it to be, I hate Outlook with a passion (not that I'm overly keen on Thunderbird either to be honest, although it's the best GUI mail client I've used on Windows, that really isn't saying much)

Re:Living it, mostly loving it

[Zigurd]

I could have been clearer regarding group calendars: They are not a direct replacement for Exchange Server, and they don't integrate with, for example, MSProject as well as Exchange+Outlook does, but you can put an appointment into a shared calendar and subscribe to that calendar in Lightning. For people who use multiple iCal calendars (e.g. Google Calendar) Thunderbird + Lightning is the better choice.

can you be specific?

[m2943]

The great thing about Office is all the damn pieces work together

In what specific ways do you think Microsoft Office apps "work together" that OpenOffice apps don't?

That was ace

[empaler]

Also, what's up with having more than 8 bit colours? You don't need those extra bits to get the gist of a picture; the recipient of the 8 bit picture will recognize whatever is on the picture just as well as if it was 24 bit, right? Right?
(Good comeback :) )

ridiculous

[m2943]

These arguments about Microsoft Office, Outlook, OpenOffice, etc. sound ridiculously outdated. Come on, do you really think people will want to install, maintain, or run any of that bloated, complicated crap in the future?

OpenOffice is a good stop-gap replacement for people wed to old paradigms, and I'm glad its' there, but people: get over it.

Re:losing developers?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to be pedantic here, but you're a fucking asshole.

Re:Small businesses are already using OOo and Tbir

[Heabdogg]

The number of times I've had someone think that Calc was windows calculator replacement, rather than a spreadsheet is far too high I hear OO.o Base comes with a default query for them courtesy of ThinkGeek:

select * from users where clue > 0

Doesn't sound like Outlook

[Jugalator]

The presentation mentions bundling Thunderbird with their Office Suite, and refers to it as an 'Outlook replacement.'

That doesn't sound like Outlook at all. Well, maybe an Outlook Lite. MS Outlook tiest into a custom mail server (Exchange) to offer many many features not really available by just using a random mail client like Thunderbird with an Office suite.

oh please yes

[rucs_hack]

If KDE 4 works on windows I'll never use the windows interface again. The useability contrast between my linux/kde box and the vista machine we have in the house is so great its just not funny.

Two days of having to admin this machine and already I hate it, and I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, I even hoped I might like it, boy was I wrong. A KDE interface I could replace the vista one with would be awesome.

In an ideal world I wouldn't have windows, but I need linux and windows together for the time being. That time being years to come most like. At least I have five times the number of linux boxes than windows ones.

Re:oh please yes

[hairyfeet]

Off topic,but have you tried Astonshell? While I admit it isn't the same as KDE,it is a lot nicer than the fugly Vista GUI. And if you spend a few minutes to configure the sidebars to your taste it does seem to be a LOT more usable,at least for me.(YMMV) And they have a free trial so you don't have anything to lose.

http://www.astonshell.com/aston/.

Re:oh please yes

[CastrTroy]

What I really want on Windows is native multiple desktops. I've tried a couple of the bolted on solutions, and they get the job done, but seem to work quite slowly, and not be quite as good as multiple desktops on Linux, and Unix. This is a really old feature, and I can't for the life of me figure out why they haven't gotten around to adding this feature to windows yet. I'm not sure how much functionality adding KDE4 to windows will add. I haven't seen it yet, but if it works anywhere close to as good as it works on windows then I'll be switching to it instantly. On the other hand, if it feels like any of the other kludgy explorer/shell replacements i've seen on windows, it will be be a total flop.

Re:oh please yes

[R_Dorothy]

The best one I found was virtual dimension: http://virt-dimension.sourceforge.net/

Not quite as good as *nix but the closest I managed to get - combined with X mouse from Power Toys on XP it was the most usable I managed to get Windows before I got a job that allows me to use Linux on my workstation.

Re:oh please yes

[CastrTroy]

I'm currently using VirtuaWin. It works ok, but again not as good as in Linux. I think I remember using virtual dimension when I first started looking for multiple desktops on Windows. Have you tried VirtuaWin? Is there anything that is provided by virtual dimension that would make the experience better?

Someone said Apple!

[wuputah]

iWork is great. Sure, it only duplicates Word, Powerpoint, and Excel, and I'm sure it doesn't have every single last feature that Office has, but I think Apple is creating a strong competitor in iWork. Using it is certainly a lot less frustrating than using Office...

OO should stop...

[Fluffy_Kitten]

...trying to add more half-complete features and focus on solidifying the base product and its stability. Adding Thunderbird to the package will not only bloat OO, but will force distributors of the product (like Ubuntu) to use Thunderbird, when there are plenty of better standalone products like evolution out there.

Not an urban legend

[rmcd]

I agree with the general thrust of your comments except regarding the quality of Word. I'll repeat a comment I made elsewhere in this thread: In my experience Word simply doesn't work very well. I have tried maybe a dozen times over the last 10 years to use it for a project and every time when the project was done I kicked myself. I think the experience you have is highly dependent on what you're doing and how deeply you're delving into the features, and which features you're using. But for highly structured writing I find Word to be a disaster. This is an empirical result, not a theory. If it works for you, I'm glad to hear it.

Re:You REALLY gotta be kidding.

[Anonymous Coward]

How hard can it be to save the project as SWF, then refer to it's path in an autorun.inf file?!?! Your employee is a 7uz3r

Thunderbird??????

[Anonymous Coward]

Thunderbird compete with Outlook? Is this is a joke/troll? Do they mean Outlook Express???

Evolution anyone? That's the closest thing OO could integrate to be a competitor to Outlook.

Geez. Thunderbird is not going anywhere near any of my systems. Why do the whole KDE/Gnome thing all over again?

Chandler as a caution against hubris

[rmcd]

Lots of people have pointed out that Outlook is much more than an e-mail client --- it's really an Exchange client, and the killer app there is shared calendaring and, more generally, shared resources. This is far from trivial to implement. If you are wondering why, I'd suggest reading Dreaming in Code, which follows the Chandler project. (Chandler has often been touted as an "outlook killer".)

Love or hate Microsoft, the simple fact is that no one at the moment has a good response to Exchange and Sharepoint.

A simple misunderstanding

[Flying pig]

I'm sorry we have our wires crossed in this way. You said you used Excel for investing. Now you say you use it for trading. They are two completely different things. They are as different as sales and marketing, or as research and development, or as poker and Go.

I've been on enough trading floors to know what traders use, thank you very much. Trading is what it sounds like. It's trying to make money out of the market, treating it as a casino. As a result it is all about acquiring short term asymmetric information, for which spreadsheets are an ideal tool because they can be used quickly to analyse small data sets. I can't see a trader ever using OOo because in that business time is crucial and OOo would only be used if it could analyse faster and more effectively than Excel. Which it can't. No argument. I know one or two people who develop special tools for traders which can do certain things much faster than Excel, and on larger data sets, but they are not the norm.

Investment on the other hand is very different. Investment is the process of seeking to make gains by identifying companies which have a strategic advantage in their market or which are under priced for some reason. This means a lot of serious number crunching. At the banking level, of course, investment becomes about very large deals indeed and the financial tools are very sophisticated. This is where you get physics graduates developing economic models using tools like FEA. And this is what I was thinking of. The people I know of in this area are currently charging out at in excess of $900 per hour, hence my comment about Office costing less than hourly rate. Of course ideas are POCed on spreadsheets, I do it myself (though increasingly I find myself using Transact-SQL directly, reverting to pre-Excel days as my brain cells fall out.)

So no, I am not a trader and certainly not a quant (which in the UK is an Old English word for the female public region - check out a dictionary). I spend time trying to understand macro economics and the effects of things like global warming and try and put my long term assets where they are likely to increment in value faster than bank deposits. That's investment.

Re:A simple misunderstanding

[Anonymous Coward]

Investment is the process of seeking to make gains by identifying companies which have a strategic advantage in their market or which are under priced for some reason. Your definition, which would be used by a layman, tells me you have very limited financial exposure. First off, the word investment means different things in different fields. In finance, investment is buying securities, or other monetary or paper assets. Investment requires trading and the bulk of trades are not done on the stock markets.

Shifting back to the issue of Excel. When I worked for a forex trading company, we built an execution and order management suite for Excel using VB, at the request of our hedge fund clients. It had the following features:

- Live streaming executable prices in Excel
- Make real-time automated trading decisions from Visual Basic
- Download executed trades into Excel
- Realt-time mark to market positions in Excel
- Calculate real time P & L
- Send multiple order types (limit, stop, market) with different expiry conditions
- Send blocks of orders in batch mode from Excel

Office 2000

[JoshHeitzman]

I'm still using Office 2000 myself. I have previously used both Office XP and Office 2003 extensively at work and have found no reason to upgrade at home (I recently became voluntarily unemployed so now I'm only using Office 2000). I've briefly used Office 2007 at work, and that ribbon is good reason for me not to upgrade to it. I tried OpenOffice.org as well, but some very basic things about their Excel equivalent annoyed me to no end so I gave up on that.

At least 1/2 of problem is OOo API documentation

[zooblethorpe]

So no, I am not a trader and certainly not a quant (which in the UK is an Old English word for the female public region - check out a dictionary).

Dude, I'm sorry someone seems to have pissed in your cornflakes, but don't harsh outside your field. SerpentMage is clearly someone active in the field of finance, as in likely working for a financial services company, apparently on the buy side but possibly also / otherwise on the sell side. In this context, "quant" doesn't have anything at all to do with female anatomy, and your bringing up this unrelated meaning is pedantic and unhelpful (albeit slightly titillating -- and it's a shame that this region of the female anatomy is not indeed more "public" :). The word is short for quantitative analysis, or someone engaged in same.

And yes, as someone else who has been professionally involved in financial services for several years, I too can vouch that many traders, and analysts too, at major financial services firms make extensive use of Excel and its financial formulae and extensibility. Large amounts of number crunching might well be handled by other applications, but the results are often then shown in Excel. There's a reason Microsoft took the trouble to build in a sensible object model with an easy-to-understand API for its VBA. Contrast this with OOo's bizarrely organized API documentation, which really seems much more geared towards showing off the underlying architecture of OOo itself rather than towards usability. I commented on this phenomenon before, and the /. community seemed to agree to some extent.

Cheers,

My office experience with OO.o

[Mahjub Sa'aden]

My office's experience with OO.o (we use it exclusively on twenty or so workstations) is that it makes spreadsheets, and that it makes documents, and that it makes presentations. And that it does them fine. Most of the people in my office are aware that they're not using MSO, but don't seem to really care. No one is writing applications on top of databases or spreadsheets.

There are lots of things I'd like to make better about the program, of course. But for what we use it for, it's great. The problem is not OO.o. The problem is the paradigm these suites operate under. Why are we working with these old and busted concepts instead of making something new, different, and (especially) collaborative? Office suites are these one-person-at-a-desk things. Nobody actually works like that. Our in-house wiki is both easier to use and more useful than a whole bunch of separate documents. This is a clue that nobody seems to be picking up.

Decent count -- fundamental, but missing in OOo

[zooblethorpe]

To use an example from a previous OpenOffice discussion, let's say I want to use OpenOffice to translate a text from Japanese into English. I bill 'per-character' in Japanese, so to determine how much to charge the client, I do a word count in OpenOffice. And the results given for english are correct, but the Japanese results are entirely wrong.

Copy and paste the same text into Word, and the word count works fine the first try.

Thank you for bringing this up. This is basic functionality, people, and this very issue and related issues have been on the OOo bug list for freaking five years at least! And continually ignored!

I'm blooming well fed up with OOo's nearly complete lack of progress on fixing fundamental usability issues without so much as a comment on when they think they might get around to it (both issues linked above are vaguely targeted at "OOo Later"). For that matter, it took them several years simply to add the Word Count entry to the Tools menu, where everyone coming from MSO would expect to find it. And I'll say it again -- IBM's Lotus Symphony, which is ostensibly based on OOo 1.x code, already implements a proper word / character count that rationally handles mixed Western + CJK text. If IBM can come out with this, using the same blooming codebase, why in the devil's briefcase can't the OOo team? It's not like we haven't been pointing it out to them.

Feh.

Website & API docs terrible

[zooblethorpe]

5) The documentation does leave much to be desired, although it's getting better by leaps and bounds. The really key issue here is that the OO.org website sucks. I'll be the first to sing the praises of the program, but their web site looks bad, and is poorly organized. Even when you know what you are looking for, you can't necessarily find it unless you have inside information.

You hit the nail on the head here. As stated not too long ago, the OOo API documentation is most horribly organized...

Cheers,

How about some Palm/PDA support?

[Forkenhoppen]

I'll start considering Thunderbird an Outlook replacement whenever there's a conduit that allows me to sync with my Palm under Windows.

Re:Small businesses are already using OOo and Tbir

[VGPowerlord]

You're saying not one of them heard the obvious K in kcalc when you pronounced it?

No, he's saying that not one of them heard the obvious oo in ooCalc when he pronounced it. Maybe he needs to move somewhere with good boots and books.

Another note on the code being ugly:

[Anonymous Coward]

OOo basic is unusable too, if the trend here is listing bad features. One of the wonderful things in MS Office is that if there isn't functionality, it is possible, and easy, to add it in with a macro.

I've taught myself simple C, C++, most scripting languages, I can recognize assembly language when I see it. The only language I've ever not been able to work with has been OOo basic - the documentation is (as seems typical in OOo) poor, and reading a cell in Calc needs more patience than I have.

An open source office competitor needs to be trivially extendable so that reasonably technical people can solve their own problems quickly

I think this is why KOffice is starting to get more press - little things, like the menus being recorded in XML, that make it easy to make useful changes.

No, sometimes OOo really can be that painful.

[sgtrock]

Wellll, not quite. Take it from a hardcore OOo user. I've used it for my primary office suite for about 5 years in a company that is a pure MS shop. Generally, I do all my work while saving to .odf formats, then do a final export to .doc so people will be able to open it for comments and edits. While things have improved, there are still tasks that are much more clumsy than they need to be in OOo.

For me, the most painful thing that I've run into recently is partially due to the abysmal documentation that comes bundled with OOo and partially a clumsy implementation. The manuals that are located on the Website really used as the native help system. They are FAR better than the extremely limited and misleading information included in the help files. For example, compare and contrast the two sources for how to handle images.

Recently I was using OOo 2.2, then 2.3 to work on a short 30 page whitepaper (including the appendixes) for work. I needed to insert just two image files to illustrate a point I needed to make. This is a task I've done plenty of times and it's never as easy as it should be. This last time, for whatever reason, was more than usually painful.

It took me the better part of a couple of hours to place and size not only the images, but the frames that surrounded them. Time and again I'd click on the image and get just the image and not the frame that bounded it. I wouldn't notice, re-size or move the image, then wonder why I still wasn't getting the text to flow properly around it.

After much mucking around, I FINALLY got them both where I wanted them, then saved the file as a .doc. Imagine my horror when I opened the document up with MS Word and realized that all of my work had been for naught, BECAUSE OOo HAD DELETED THE IMAGES WHEN SAVING THE DOCUMENT AS MS OFFICE .doc!!!!!!!!!!

No, this wasn't a PEBKAC problem. I double and triple checked saving the document in Office XP format. I even saved it as .doc, then opened it in OOo just to make sure that it wasn't MS Office misinterpreting the image placements. Nope, still missing.

To say I was pissed would be an understatement. Oh, sure, I could have exported the file as a .PDF, but then how would my boss be able to make comments and pass it back to me? A read-only format just doesn't work in that case.

Besides, this is the first time that I can remember that OOo has failed me in such a fundamental way. Lord only knows why, because I sure don't. It does mean that there's no way that I can recommend OOo for even a pilot project here. This kind of basic functionality simply MUST work. First time, every time.

Will I open a trouble ticket with the OOo team? Maybe, if I can figure out a way to duplicate the problem in a file that's not full of company confidential information. This is a HUGE issue. I can't believe somebody didn't stumble across it during the beta cycles.

Re:No, sometimes OOo really can be that painful.

[Chandon Seldon]

Whenever you're working with non-native closed format export functionality, there *will* be incompatibilities. That's a fact of life that can't be changed. The fact that you've discovered a specific case (an image in a floating frame) where the export functionality is janky isn't a major issue, it's not even surprising.

When doing something one way is way harder than it seems like it should be you need to stop and try to see if there's a better way to do it. Maybe you don't really need the frame? Spacing around inserted elements is one of the basic things you can always do in OO.o, and you can even caption the image without inserting a frame around it.

It does mean that there's no way that I can recommend OOo for even a pilot project here. This kind of basic functionality simply MUST work. First time, every time.

If you can't recommend OO.o for a pilot project until it provides perfect export functionality for whatever weird combination of native layout elements you might cook up then you'll *never* be able to recommend it. I suggest the following instead: Do a pilot project of OO.o and ODF. That'll work perfectly.

Re:No, sometimes OOo really can be that painful.

[sg_oneill]

"Do a pilot project of OO.o and ODF"

I can't help being reminded of the 'workgroup' stuff out there that can't work with outlook , but hey it can tell you a horoscope. I just wonder how many of you guys actually have to deal with clients and get paid for it.

Don't get me wrong , I love OO , and use it exclusively, but when we are honest about its weaknesses, its much more clear where the work needs to go.

To badly mis-quote Linus Torvalds (My memory sucks, so this wording will be all wrong);- "A bad review is a bug report and should be treated as such". And thats why the whole world loves Linus.

Re:No, sometimes OOo really can be that painful.

[Chandon Seldon]

Don't get me wrong , I love OO , and use it exclusively, but when we are honest about its weaknesses, its much more clear where the work needs to go.

OO does have weaknesses, that's true. But when we're dishonest about how significant those weaknesses are, and about which things are weaknesses versus simply being different from one specific other office suite then we risk wasting time on trivia and getting drawn into the unwinnable game of being an imperfect copy rather than a high quality piece of software.

A bad review is a bug report and should be treated as such.

And some bug reports are stupid and need to be marked "Invalid".

I can't help being reminded of the 'workgroup' stuff out there that can't work with outlook

You mean like Lotus Notes? Yea, if it's not from Microsoft than no-one in the world could possibly use it.

Sorry, just because your workplace is stuck with a Microsoft Office centric workflow and an Exchange-centric communication infrastructure doesn't mean that everyone else in the world is doomed to that horrible fate too.

Re:No, sometimes OOo really can be that painful.

[sgtrock]

...The fact that you've discovered a specific case (an image in a floating frame) where the export functionality is janky isn't a major issue, it's not even surprising.

When doing something one way is way harder than it seems like it should be you need to stop and try to see if there's a better way to do it. Maybe you don't really need the frame?

I invite you to try it yourself. Just insert a picture from an image file using just the default settings. Go ahead, I'll wait.

....

Back yet? Good. Then you'll know that the default setting, and so far as I can tell the ONLY setting, for inserting an image from a file REQUIRES that it be wrapped in a floating frame with its own anchor. Please tell me, how the H E double hockey sticks am I supposed to explain the nuances of dealing with that to a company of 50,000 people?

If you can't recommend OO.o for a pilot project until it provides perfect export functionality for whatever weird combination of native layout elements you might cook up then you'll *never* be able to recommend it. I suggest the following instead: Do a pilot project of OO.o and ODF. That'll work perfectly.

Heh. Haha. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA! (wipes tears from eyes) Thanks, I needed a belly laugh. Oh, wait. You were serious? Well, let me explain in really small words, then:

It. Won't. Work. Satisfied?

No? Well, I guess I'll have to use somewhat bigger words and more complex concepts. I hope you can follow along.

First, what I tried to do was NOT some "weird combination of native layout elements", it was straight up insertion of a graphic image into a document. This is Word Processing 101, folks. Well, OK. Maybe Word Processing 201. It certainly isn't graduate level, pie in the sky sort of stuff. It's just day in, day out normal work.

Second, I work for a company with more than 50,000 employees. We don't look at pilot projects for desktop deployments of such a basic component unless we fully expect to deploy it across at least half the footprint. However, any such pilot MUST still be able to effectively trade files and data with the rest of the company, or the pilot will be deemed a failure by the people who can sign checks. We don't have the luxury of isolating small workgroups. Everything that we do is too interconnected.

Third, you may have noticed that I said I was working for a COMPANY, not a governmental agency. As such, we don't get to dictate what our customers and vendors use. Whatever they wish to use as a medium of communication, we have to adapt to. Now, granted, we spend metric boatloads of cash (that's a technical term, btw) on specialized communication applications and interfaces to do that for the more obscure stuff that our vendors want to use, and metric fleets of boatloads of cash (another technical term) for the more obscure stuff that our customers want to use. (Why the difference? Because the customers give us cash while the vendors expect us to give /them/ cash.)

However, if our theoretical and increasingly mythical pilot project is to stand any chance of success, the participating users absolutely /must/ be able to use their existing communications channels without modification. Asking vendors to make changes to /their/ ways of doing business just to accommodate us can make them cranky. Asking CUSTOMERs to make changes to /their/ ways of doing business just to accommodate us might make them look for someone else to give their money to. Therefore, if we can't produce documents that are at least somewhat close to what outside organizations expect, the pilot will be deemed a failure.

On a final note, you want to know what REALLY annoys me about this particular incident? I've done this sort of image insertion using OOo, then saving it as a .doc format for literally years and I've never seen this behavior before. What on earth got broken? And why on earth didn't anyone notice during the beta cycle??

Re:No, sometimes OOo really can be that painful.

[somersault]

I think you've highlighted why the world needs a good open document standard.. SGML maybe? :P

Re:No, sometimes OOo really can be that painful.

[goatpunch]

It took me the better part of a couple of hours to place and size not only the images, but the frames that surrounded them. [...] I opened the document up with MS Word and realized that all of my work had been for naught

If you have access to MS Word, how about just adding the images in MS Word? It should take a lot less than 2 hours, and should actually save the images in the .doc. Of course, this might put you on the slippery slope to writing the whole document in MS Word- that's the way that these things happen. This is coming from someone who has long hated MS products but who now spends many hours a day in Outlook, Excel, Powerpoint and Word (all 2007) and would find it extremely difficult to switch to anything else.

Re:No, sometimes OOo really can be that painful.

[goatpunch]

You mean like Lotus Notes?

While we're on the subject of terrible software...

Re:No, sometimes OOo really can be that painful.

[rainman_bc]

.You mean like Lotus Notes? I do not know a single happy Lotus Notes user. Not one. They're in the same boat as Groupwise users - waiting to get into Exchange/Outlook.

Sorry, but Exchange/Outlook is THE killer app... No one has been able to successfully compete with it yet...

That's why you have Linux/Unix shops running with Windows 2003 AD and Exchange 2003. it's a great combination when your desktops are running Windows.

Re:No, sometimes OOo really can be that painful.

[inline_four]

You are absolutely correct. I tried it and got pretty much the same results. If one exports to MS Word 97, you seem to get an image the size of the original, but the actual picture is a fraction of the size sitting in the top left corner. Seems to be some sort of sizing problem. I looked around on an OO.o users mailing list and found a relevant question posted in 2003 with no responses. Not very encouraging. Posted mine there as well. We'll see...

Re:No, sometimes OOo really can be that painful.

[sgtrock]

Actually, this is exactly what I had to do this time around. As I mentioned in an earlier post, though, is why did it fail this time and not all the times before? It's never been an issue for me before. What changed/got broken? That's the $64,000 question.

Re:No, sometimes OOo really can be that painful.

[ozmanjusri]

I invite you to try it yourself. Just insert a picture from an image file using just the default settings.

I'm having difficulty replicating your problem.

I'm using a fresh download of OOo 2.3 and unchanged defaults. Loading an image file works fine, as does exporting the document to .doc.

Re:No, sometimes OOo really can be that painful.

[Maxo-Texas]

So as an experiment, I took one of my 43 page documents with approximately 200 graphics, 30 tables, special formatting, indices and contents.

Here is my experience with OOo 2.3.

I loaded it from word, saved it to ODT, loaded it from ODT, and saved it to word.

It was now a 51 page document.
Examining the document, my TOC went from 3 columns wide to 1 column wide, 4 pages long. My index did the same. This took a few minutes to fix. I right clicked, edit index, set to 3 columns- it was wrong. I adjusted the page page margin by .1", it was correct.

One page had broken in a different location. I had to shorten the table vertically by 1/8" so it would break properly again.

A circular graphic with a custom wrap mask had a bad mask. This was a significant problem. The only apparent way to fix it was to repaste the circular graphic and redo the mask. I couldn't fix the one in the document.

Everything else was correct. Fonts, font size, page breaks, wierd fonts (Symbol, custom). My custom headings and footers.

I agree... it's not correct. It is not perfect.

However, if perfection is the goal, it is going to be difficult to reach since microsoft can and has changed to format of their programs and operating systems to break competitors in the past.

Zawinski's Law

[thenerdgod]

Subject Says it all. (Digg Up!)

Oh, wait, I suppose for maximum metahumorousness I should add: CLICK HERE TO SEND MAIL USING THIS POST

Re: Thunderbird integration with Exchange server

[adminstring]

For my (admittedly not-cutting-edge) workplace, OO with Thunderbird would be an acceptable email client if it could:

1. Interface with Exchange to display email that lives on the Exchange server, rather than downloading the email to the client via SMTP, and
2. Get a directory of internal email addresses either from the Exchange server or through Active Directory when used with Exchange 2000 or later, so people can send email within the organization by simply typing someone's name in the "to:" box, or hitting "to:" to look people up.

I assume that the first problem could be solved by using IMAP, and the second with some sort of LDAP implementation? I'd love to use OO more, but my users have proven that they can't remember people's email addresses, making directory integration that works similarly to Outlook's a deal-maker. (If I could replace the Exchange server with a FOSS substitute, that would be great as well!) Has anyone implemented something like this? I don't need to get anything up to the level of MS's latest package (sharepoint et al, which would be silly for us) but I would like to figure out how to get something working together about as well as Outlook 2000 does with Exchange 2000, as the users are happy with that combination.

Re:Outlook? Who cares. How about Exchange?

[Whitemice]

>All we need is a groupware suite thats GPL/BSD, is stable,

http://www.opengroupware.org/

> offers the basics like calendar sharing, addressbooks, appointments and

Yep

> integrates with things like Funambol.

Yep

> Integrating with Outlook clients isn't such a big deal anymore,

There is a commercial MAPI plugin (a real plugin, not some sync thing)

Other than the Outlook plugin it is completely free and Open Source, no gimmicks.

OOo 3 + open source Exchange killers == winner!

[IGnatius T Foobar]

I can't believe all the Microsoft shills that are on Slashdot these days! All sorts of 'softies whining about how OOo is missing this or that feature when the rest of us know that the 90/10 rule applies -- 90 percent of the users only use 10 percent of the functionality. And it's clear that OOo has far more than 10 percent of the functionality of MS Office.

I for one am quite happy to see that an Outlook killer is going to find its way into OOo. Truth is, you could already put a solution together yourself using existing components. Start with the base thunderbird package, add Lightning for the calendar, and then add the plugins for attaching to server-side calendars and address books (using vCard and iCalendar data formats, and one of various DAV or IMAP based protocols for connectivity). The server would be something like Citadel which provides many of the same features as Exchange + SharePoint, plus web access for the folks who are away from their primary computers.

The problem is that it can be difficult to integrate and maintain it all, particularly on a fleet of computers. That's why I'd be very happy to see the OOo folks put it all together for us. Just install OOo, point it at your Citadel or Kolab or OGo server, and get right to work. Even more importantly, it'll be a ready-made solution that'll work on all supported operating systems.

Re:You gotta be kidding.II

[Anonymous Coward]

I keep trying OO - been trying since I bought it as Star Office - I'm using Office 2007, with the works. OO just doesn't do it. And T-bird just isn't Outlook. Also, I'm hooked on OneNote now as well, so they'd have to replace that too.

I wish antitrust commissions get to the real thing

[Erikderzweite]

I don't get it why people complain about OOO's lack of incompatibility with MSO. OK, I do understand the complaints but it is by all means NOT an OOO's issue. They are doing good job instead trying to support closed, obfuscated and buggy format. So while the incompatibility issues are true, isn't it better to say that it's Microsoft's fault? They refuse to open their formats and protocols, they refuse to support open formats after all.

I sure wish that EU antitrust commission takes care of this mess. Incompatibility is important, so forcing MS to open their Exchange protocols and even format's specs would be the right thing to do and essential to create an Office-killer in the business world.

Latex, Bibtex, Subversion

[Elivs]

When writing large documents, eg. greater >100 pages, I prefer to use Latex, Bibtex, Subversion, and Kile.

Latex is brilliant for large documents. As it says, it lets you separate content from how its displayed. It produces beutiful results, especially for technical documents with maths etc. With the addition of PSfrag you can even put Latex formatting into your eps graphs and diagrams.

Bibtex is still my preferred reference manager. Most journal have style files for their preferred bibliography.

When I started using subversion with my documents it was great. With a networked subversion server I could get the latest version of my document anywhere. You could track changes, and see when you last worked on a section.Being able to find out what you changed in a particular chapter last month is handy. I now have a subversion repository that I has sub-directories for all my latex documents. I started using subversion while writing up my PhD and have used it to keep track of all my latex documents since. If your unfamiliar with subversion then kdesvn is a great GUI tool that integrates into KDE file management.

Kile is a good kde frontend to latex. I used emacs for 10+ years and loved it, but Kile's integration with the KDE desktop and its specialisation for latex make it a good choice of editor. Of course can use any text editor you want with latex, but choosing one designed for latex mark up and lots of shortcuts makes life easier.

WYSWYG editors like OOO and MSO are really only good for short documents. I've had to deal with these programs for documents >50 pages and they really become a pain.

Elivs

Re:Latex, Bibtex, Subversion

[Marcus Green]

In my experience OOO is rather good at long(ish) documents, e.g. 50,000 words or around 200 A4 pages. There is a world of people who need to create this type of documents but are never, ever ever going to use Tex or similar. Hmm, actually I'm one of them.

Re:ONE NOTE

[javajeff]

One Note is excellent. I used to create many txt files for quick notes and information that do not belong in full documents, but now I just use ONE NOTE. It is so easy to create a tab and put information there quickly. Furthermore, the tabs can be organized any way I like with two tiers of navigation. I can also embed pictures, sound, etc. One Note is a killer app, and more people will discover it. Companies can use it as a collaboration tool as well.

"want" vs. "need"

[R2.0]

"Most of us don't want a "bundled" Email client to add to the bloat.... we already choose the Email client we want to use."

I think you are missing a fundamental point. Whether or not users "want" Outlook functionality, a great majority of the "need" it. That's because most users are part of organizations that, for better or worse, have become addicted to Outlook functionality - meeting scheduling, sending documents for review, etc.

I am like you - I prefer to have single apps that simply call another app when that funstionality is needed. And I got away with it for many years, because I worked for a construction company where I was on field assignment - if I wanted to schedule a meeting, I just yelled down to the other end of the trailer. Then I changed jobs and went to work for a Very Large Non-Profit Organization, and am forced to use the aforementioned Outlook functions. Why? Because everyone else I deal with uses them. It sucks, but it's reality, and if I want to keep earning a living, reality is the situation I need to deal with.

Re:I wish antitrust commissions get to the real th

[DaveCBio]

No, it's not Microsoft's fault that they don't want to open their formats. I don't see why any company should be forced to if they choose to keep their data formats closed. It's an open market and if people think that's a bad idea they will use whichever product does what they want. I don't think any private company should be forced by government to open up their proprietary formats.

Not an option.

[SatanicPuppy]

This kind of crap blows my mind.

"Oh, well of course you had problems, you saved it as a Word document, you idiot. Instead you should use (insert open standard that no one can read because MS doesn't support it either). Oh, and by the way, tell everyone who needs to read your document that they have to install a new office suite, k thnx bye."

It has to work with Word. Period. It has to support it perfectly. There are a handful of places in the world where you can get by without Word compatibility, but if you want to be a serious alternative to Office, you goddamn well have to support it. You can't just tell people that they're stupid for using the "wrong" software when their software is compatible with the software of everyone they know, and yours isn't.

Yawn, more crap from IBM

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, IBM recycles their old Lotus crap and calls it "Open Office", just like Nutscrape recycles their old crap and calls it Mozilla/Firefox.

So is this "new" OO.o product going to be... hmmm, this is a hard one to guess... is it going to be a new and "open" version of Lotus Notes? OMG!! I must be psychic!!!

Yawn. It's really true: there is nothing new under the Sun: they all still wannabe Microsoft.

for #$%%'s sake, WHY THUNDERBIRD???

[ExtraT]

I will not be talking about weather OOo can stand it's own against MS Office - I have a different fish to fry.

Why the hell is THUNDERBIRD peddled as The Best Mail Client Out There?
I say, you want to make an Outlook killer, take something that can really kill. Like Claws Mail, for example. It's SUPER fast, very modular, easily portable to [insert your platform here] and has functionality that other mail clients are only dreaming about.

With EMACs

[blueZ3]

You can create a video presentation. At least, from what my EMACs-preferring co-workers say about it, I'm pretty sure there's a way to output ASCII art video from various open video formats. :-)

Apparently...

[Anonymous Coward]

people are just too lazy to go to their e-mail service provider themselves. Lazy bastards using e-mail based clients...