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Can a Small Business Migrate Smoothly To OpenOffice.org v3?
Pay The Piper writes "As an IT Support Technician in a small corporation, I've been tasked by one of my managers to determine the feasibility of transitioning our small 40 or 50 person office from Microsoft Office 2000 to Open Office 3.0. What are some of the problems I may run into as far as document cross compatibility? Has the Open Office suite evolved to a point that permits easy transition from Microsoft's suite? Besides the obvious 'free vs. expensive' argument, what are some of the pros and cons of transitioning? Are there any reliable ways to view/edit/save a document saved in the OpenXML format through Open Office, or are my co-workers and I still going to be stuck in Microsoftland?" (Given that company-wide rollouts take some time to implement, this early look at the features of OO.o 3.1 may have some relevance, too.)
Microsoft Office 2000 to Open Office 3.0
I will say that although I have not had the joy of opening Office 2000 files with OO.o 3.0, I do recall there being some serious issues between powerpoint slides. Some weird rendering going on in OO.o for what reason I do not know. In my line of work, powerpoint is perversely pervasive--to the point of alarm for me. If this is true for you, do some testing before taking the plunge!
Are there any reliable ways to view/edit/save a document saved in the OpenXML format through Open Office ...
I regrettably give you the option of getting Novell's OO.o distribution (here) in which you can install an extension for OpenXML.
The best recommendation I can give you is to do this change only if you can assure that it will not hinder your ability to serve your customer or detract largely from productivity.
My work here is dung.
Short : YES.
Long : Yes, but you will have to tell the office whiners to STFU.
Honestly it's not that hard, it requires some retraining of habits. and requires users to not be raging Luddites.
If you get management buy in for it, the transition will take weeks before all the whining dies down. the only problem is when you get users that are not smart enough to understand what they were instructed to do because they did it the other way for the past 5 years.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I am inclined to say "No", but a better answer is "probably not". We all know those little offices, work processes stitched together by a global excel spreadsheet with countless obscure VB Macros... touch one little thing and everything grinds to a halt. Hell, this happens when just upgrading to a new version of Microsoft Office. Imagine the pain of trying to get these things to work with OpenOffice's shoddy VBA support.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML But you could open directly the Office2000 .doc too...
Nice move btw!
I can't call that English
That entirely depends on how heavily you rely on odd-ball features in office.
For example do you have Word setup to access a database or something ridiculous like that?
If you are just doing basic word processing it is unlikely that you will run into any problems beyond the (marginally) different UI.
Do your documents utilize VB macros? If so, you may want to look at Novell's fork of OOo at go-oo.org which improve macro support. Otherwise mainline OOo should open all your MS Office 2000 documents with ease.
The interface of OOo is closer to MS Office 2000, than MS Office 2007's interface is. Training users should actually be easier than training users on MS Office 2007.
When I converted my mother to Linux I told her she'd have to give up MS Office. When I installed openSUSE 11 and OOo 3, she thanked me for giving her MS Office. It looked so similar, she couldn't tell the difference.
The only little bit of advice I'd give you, is to go into the program options and set the default file formats. While I praise ODF, and want the world to adopt it, if you're going to send documents out to the rest of the world, you'll have to save them either in PDF format (which OOo does natively) or save them in MS formats for everyone else.
When you're done, tell your boss how you just saved the company $400 a pop times 50 people, and ask for a raise.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Pick a sample of users - some tech-savvy, some not - who interoperate with others still using microsoftware. A pilot should bring out the most pressing points of contact and show whether or not the compatibility level is adequate.
Our office of 50+ transitioned back in the early 2.0 days with nary a hitch. A couple of people still have MS Office for specific compatibility reasons (certain spreadsheet macros, that sort of thing) but everyone else from IT to the receptionist has OOo. We spent approximately $0.00 on training, instead going with "here's your new word processor". People who need office suites picked up on it quickly and people who primarily do other things didn't really care.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
short answer: yes.
long answer: yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees (sorry Yahtzee!).
a friend of mine migrated to OOo a year ago and most of his employees didn't even noticed. he owns a small architecture office.
only the oddball document that doesn't open right in OOo, he opens and converts on his own notebook, the only one in the company that have MS stuff.
What ? Me, worry ?
As you approach planck-scale sized businesses, the smoothness of the migration breaks down.
About two summers ago, when I was working (as a stagier) in a company that's massively using StarOffice and truly were having difficulties (mostly in international files), OpenOffice 1.1 had been the "savior" thanks to its UNICODE interface. That's how I've met OpenOffice, and moslty its presentation module. (I can say, it's as good as PPT, and import works quite well; still it sometimes erases part of graphics in your presentation, which is not that cool!!). When I've installed some "recent" Linux versions I've remarked that they all had OOo bundled, so keeping OOo on my drive would probably be a good idea...
So I kept both OOo and MSOffice2k on my drive. I'm not such an "active" office user, so the Office product I'm using should not be that important... Yet, I also knew that OOo supported cool things as PDF export; and that it never had such big issues when opening "everyday office files"...
Problems started when I've started to write my lessons (mostly in physics, so with a lot of graphics) as office files: my Word file was not properly opened on anywhere else then my PC! That was ... bad ... sad ... But I did not care much. Still, I had to someday!!
Than, one year and a half later, that day came. I printed those files as PS and then converted to PDF; hopefully that worked perfectly )suppose PDF is mostly optimized for vectoral graphics). Finally pushed by Word's double-crash in the middle of a work (and I tell you, it wasn't heavy work!), I decided to move everything to OOo... Anyways, even at the university I was used to installing (and sometimes compiling) and therefore using OOo's Windows, Linux or Solaris versions when nothing else was available (nothing including some real bad office apps).
So today I'm now with only OOo 1.1.0 on my PC. No office files on my drive (I know I don't have much Office files but they all have some specific importance, therefore their layout is important to me) are opened "very weirdly" for the moment (and I've remarked that Word conversion is better in the 1.1.1 beta, so that's a good point). Also, French spellcheck module (or plugin) seems to work as good as in my old Office product (but there's no Turkish spell checker available!! Evil or Very Mad); so that's somehow "something I can live with". One big issue: why doesn't OOo have Access??? (database module).
=Smidge=
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
What other answer do you expect here on slashdot? Hell, most of the time we're ready to tell you to drop Windows altogether and go with the blessed Linux. I'd rather do real world tests on complex documents. Particularly hear if someone is using any "smart" Excel sheets or other wierd things.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It's not that hard. As other posts say, there will be whiners who don't like change. "Why do we have to do this?" Blah, blah, blah. The reality is that within the organization you don't need MS Office at all. You will only need it for those times when you need to edit docs with others in the outside world. What we did was to make sure we had a couple of machines with Office on them as well as OpenOffice. Office was only used when it absolutely had to be, with all internal docs being OO. Most of the time we would export our OO docs to PDF's and ship those outside of the company. If we needed to ship out a doc to a law firm or some other such entity where it needed to be edited, we would convert the OO to Word and then ship it out, keep it in Word for the edits, and then convert back to OO at the very end (or not, depending). If the whole world used OO, you wouldn't even need to do that. But that can only come when everyone has already done what we've done and you plan to do. I say go for it and save some cash. You won't regret it.
Yes, for most things.
No for powerpoint. From what I've used, OO.org's Impress is simply not as good, has rendering issues, flickers, is a resource hog, is not smooth, etc. Powerpoint is way better.
Can you do office docs and spreadsheets? Yeah. If not using the aforementioned VB macros and whatnot, it's easy to use openoffice.org for stuff like "word" documents and spreadsheets.
But presentations ... blech.
As far as migration, in many ways OO.org does a better job with file formats than MS Office. In particular, I recently had to open a MS Office 2007 document(docx), and rather than getting the filter into MS Word, I just loaded in into OO.org. To put it plainly, I have no problem opening any files in OO.org.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
For very elementary stuff, open office is fine, but get into more advanced stuff, and you'd better check the support is there.
Look and see if vba automation has been used, if so, can it port easily, and who will do the port. Same goes for financial modeling in Excel, the same must be possible in the Open Office version.
You might actually spend more money moving to Open Office... so YMMV.. check everything.
You will not have outlook or OneNote so you will have to find different solutions for them.
The fact is not EVERYONE needs Office, but some people do. Which baffles me why a corporation wouldn't consider deploying OOo to everyone, and give MS Office to the people who depend on weird MS Office features. This way you save the most money while not slowing your business process!
If you are going from Office 2000 to OpenOffice.Org you will go almost effortlessly.
There may be a few small things here and there that users may gripe about, like obscure formatting issues, but nothing earth shattering.
If, as you say, you are going from MSO-2000 to OO.o3.x, then Microsoft Office XML should not be an issue as 2000 can't open that anyway.
Tell everyone to check their spreadsheets for numeric accuracy and functionality as some funtions and macros work differently.
After that, you have to sell it!! Tell them how wonderful it is. Talk about PDF export. Tell them they can have a copy for home!! Tell them they don't have to enter an endless stream of letters and numbers just to install it.
There is always going to be a cost if you're transitioning from Office 2K. The difference is instead of retraining to Office 2007 which has a completely new UI, your users will be retraining to OO which has a similar UI. As for OpenXML, I wouldn't trust the format yet. Use older Office formats or ODF for full compatibility with other applications.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I renamed the "OO.org Document" icon to "word". Set the defaults to save as ms .doc files. Works great.
THL phish sticks
Your biggest griper will be a finance guy (like me). For him, just buy excel. Forcing him to use something other than excel is cruel and unusual punishment.
Instead of asking Slashdot, although I'm happy you did as OpenOffice always generates a good flameware, you should be asking your users.
In particular you should gather the people who're likely to have the biggest problems with migrating: accountants for example, often have massive and complex spreadsheets, not to mention VB macros. Create a focus group, or go around each of these people to see how they're using the software, then create a requirements document and test OpenOffice against it.
The advantage of a requirements document is that if OpenOffice doesn't 'fit the bill' at the moment, you'll be able to check newer versions (and even different office suites, such as KOffice) against it in future.
If OpenOffice meets the requirements of your users in theory, test them in practice. Gather anyone who's adventurous enough to try out OpenOffice alongside Microsoft Office and get them to give you feedback. Even if OpenOffice doesn't meet requirements now, check back in a year. Also, check on how other office suites, such as KOffice, are coming along. You may not be able to replace Office immediately, but that doesn't mean you should give up on trying!
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
your users are going to have to learn all the little new buttons menus etc, and will be bugging you 24/7 for several months, cursing you under their breath, and cursing management for doing something for no goddamn reason.
do any of them rely on excel pivot tables? on fancy VB macro scripts? do you want to tell your customers 'sorry our computers are down, we switched our whole system over to a new system without asking our workers if it would interrupt their efficiency or workflow''
if nobody brings out guillotines and makes voodoo dolls of management, it might be feasible. otherwise, no.
Your biggest hurdle is training. Getting people to learn the new software.
If your office trades documentation that has specific formatting that will be another problem unless you convert it to a standard like PDF. Then you run into the problem of people who need to edit those documents who are not using your software.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Go-OO is considered a development build/branch and should not be used in a production environment. It doesn't go through the level of testing and QA of OpenOffice.org for each release.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
"It is free, what do you expect?"...
I suggest that you also install Gnumeric, since it works a lot better with Excel spread-sheets than OOo Calc does.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
It depends on what you're doing with email and calendar. MS Office includes Outlook, after all, and if your office is using Outlook/Exchange as its email solution then you could hit a big problem in the transition.
OOo is a good replacement for the document preparation parts of Office, with a much less irritating UI than Office 2007, but email is a problem.
Dunx
Converting caffeine into code since 1982
There is that MSO 2010 Express that sounds like it will be free.
Being as you are moving from a version of Microsoft Office that is coming on 9 years old, you should be using mostly files whose formats are (mostly) well understood. Taking documents, macros, and the like from that old version should be fairly straightforward. If you were instead looking to move from a brand new version of MS Office to the latest Open Office your chances would likely be much slimmer.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
We tried migrating a company with 40 users maybe three years ago, to Sun's boxed version. It was a complete and utter failure. Maybe it's gotten better now, but I'd be pretty weary. There were a thousand and one little incompatibilities. Plus some of our people use Excel for things god never intended it to do.
One thing is we deal with the government a lot, which always has the latest version of Office. Keeping up with that using non-MS software is pretty hard.
I think if your office only does very general word processing and spreadsheet use, it might work. But a lot of people have noted the powerpoint issues.
Basically, if it doesn't just work perfectly, it's a support nightmare. When we tried the experiment, I remember we'd author something, send it off, it'd come back with revisions from a customer with real MS office, we'd open it and it'd be all messed up, and that would happen going the other direction as well.
I don't think I'm ready to try that experiment any time soon. It's not worth the money saved, yet.
Has the Open Office suite evolved to a point that permits easy transition from Microsoft's suite?
Maybe. It depends what you need from Microsoft's office suite.
what are some of the pros and cons of transitioning?
Pros: Choice of OS, and a format which is truly an open standard. For example, if some people find KOffice works better, or some people prefer Gnumeric to OO Calc, there's no problem -- ODF is supported by everyone except Microsoft.
Cons: Support with Microsoft Office will probably never be "bug for bug" complete. In fact, you may want to keep a copy around for comparison. And depending how competent everyone else is, it may require some training, which means the cost is not zero -- it's lower, but not zero.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Short answer: Yes
Long answer: It has been done by many even with Open Office 2.x. As long as you don't need MS Access shouldn't be a problem. 90% of Ms Office users use up to 10% of the available features. Even OO is overkill for many of them.
Advice:
- show confidence on the project
- provide excellent support during the migration
- quickly solve any existing issues that may appear
- leave a (legal) copy of Office 2003 installed on a Virtual Machine for the unlikely rare situations
No matter how carefully you proceed there will always be some users who will insist that OO 'doesn't work' and that they must have MS office.
I find a LART, a roll of carpet, a bag of quick lime, a van and a secluded spot in the woods, and a shovel to be the best way to deal with these users.
In addition to price the major reason for me to use OO over MS is the seamless use accross OS's. I'm a developer who works on Mac OS X, Ubuntu Linux and Vista. I keep a lot of documents under source control, things like specifications, spreadsheets with performance data, and diagrams which I'm now doing in OO draw. There's nothing that quite prepares you for being able to check out, edit, and check in the same spreadsheet on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows and have it just work and render perfectly on all OS's. If you're a cross-platform shop in any way (for development, creative or anything) OO is a huge win in this regard.
Why on earth would you consider making a large transition with staffers who will be annoyed at having to do things a little different for a product that is about the same in quality and features? OO is much closer to MS Office 2000 than 2003 or 2007 (which, regretably are much better than OO still).
Before you serious consider upsetting the cart, make sure the features and benefits you gain are worth the headaches. Get to the end of the process, if most people don't feel the pain of change was worth the end product, they'll revolt and hang you from the patch panels.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
There will be two key things that determine how much work the transition will be, (in my experience).
1. How much VB is used mainly in Excel.
2. How are your workflows set up? Do they depend on other MS things that don't work with anything else?
All the other stuff is no harder than moving from an older version of MS Office to a newer. I have found it is worth looking at the little apps that people built in Excel, and spending the time on the transition seeing whether they can't be refactored to use Base, since everyone will have it, or moved over to the Starbasic stuff. (Or will it work with small changes in Novell's version?)
In transition you will need to give an overabundance of help right away to the heavy duty users, and engage them even before hand. In a small situation even have them help in looking at the little hand built apps. Plus you will find out usually about a month later when people actually really use the little odd things when they get to documents and and reports that they only look at quarterly, or monthly. Be prepared for that. Try really hard to separate the grumbling that will come simply because of change, and real issues that hurt someone's job.
I am currently looking for a job (as I suppose a lot of folks are). At home we all use Macs. My Girlfriend has Apple Pages, so I decided to use it. I was astounded how easy it was to make a resumé that looked pretty good from one of the templates. So I applied for a job and sent them the Word export (as I figured word was a default filetype). Not only does the resumé look really bad, many windows users can not open it. So I exported to PDF, same. So I took it to where I work now opened with the current version of word (disaster!)... spent a while fixing it, saved it... and people have trouble opening docx files in the more common older MS Word application.
I am a scientist, not a typesetter! And I wound up doing several iterations of this to get something that older versions of MS Word (running on older versions of windows?).
So bottom line, I used Rich Text and a MS font. I blame this on MS making their applications so picky when opening various competing filetypes.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
How about starting with good, old-fashioned requirements gathering?
Talk to a few people for as many roles as you can determine. Find out what features your office currently uses, and prioritize and categorize them(must-haves, costly-to-lose, frivolous[quantified as much as possible]). Compare this to the equivalent(or NONequivalent OO features). This data will tell you exactly what to do.
Classic cost-benefit, imho. Use leg-work and good analysis to make the right recommendation, not buzzwords and advertising.
Once you make the right decision, selling it to the masses is easier than you think. It's those decisions that are made with no real research or for the wrong reasons that aren't accepted and blow up in your face.
If you have users that work with MS Office mailmerge and label features, you might want to take a close look at that. I have found this feature to be pretty painful at times in openoffice. Compare, for example, starting with a CSV file of names and addresses and printing them to Avery laser address labels.
Generally training and file format compatibility were not an issue. The initial draw to OpenOffice.org was not having to count licenses (so tedious!), and later it helped us switch half the systems to Linux (most on a terminal server).
One 'gotcha' was that the accountant needed Excel to use Quickbooks because it interfaces directly over a COM API.
The second in charge (an Apple fanboy ironically) wanted to switch to Microsoft. He didn't give a good case why.
To increase compatibility reading OpenXML, install odf-converter-integrator. To understand how it works, read "A Better Docx Converter".
Seriously. If management wants to switch, you've already overcome the most significant problem. I have an office where well over 90% of our staff could migrate to OO without a hitch. Submitted a proposal to my boss who passed the buck to his boss. That one said, "Let me try it for a few weeks and see if I can do everything I need to do without resorting to Microsoft."
A month later, "I haven't had to touch an Office application once. Some things work a little differently but I was able to figure it out easily enough. We won't be switching."
"Wha?"
"There's just something not right about it. How can it be free?"
Back and forth for half an hour or so with no progress. Amazingly frustrating. The guy had determined that OO could do everything he needed, understood that we could use it free of charge, and refused to consider switching specifically because it was free.
Of course, my boss won't take a stand on much of anything so there it sits. Waiting for his boss to retire.
As for the technical transition, going from Office 2000 to OO 3.0 will not be much of a shock. The look/feel is very similar and the features are similar. As others have pointed out, your most likely sticking point will be complicated macros. So, if you've got anyone working on that kind of thing, start there. Most likely, you'll find one or two people who cannot function without MS Office. So they stick with office and everyone else goes to OO.
You own office now right? So you don't make money switching to open office right? And a 40-50 person office... easily. How hard can it be? Its not like you have to uninstall office to make open office work...
It should roll out just fine. But here is a few points:
*There may be some issues with macros or VB Script on spreadsheets that use them. :)
*Impress doesn't always play nice with PowerPoint presentations that use embedded windows media player stuff.
*Draw is still not able to open Publisher docs. So this could be a problem if you rely heavily on Publisher. Also its not as nice to work with yet.
*Don't forget about the extensions! Here is a list of the ones I use here when I deploy: http://blogs.frederic.k12.wi.us/paulsenj/?p=50
*You will have to deal with the "But its not Microsoft" people. This is actually the number one issue that I run into.
*If you use Outlook you will need to find something to replace it with. I would suggest a webmail system, it will make your life much easier.
~Petaris "The world is open. Are you?"
A few users who resist all change will put up a fight first. Then the local MS sales office will contact your bosses and overrule you. If that fails they will back a truck load of money and essentially give you MSOffice07 for free and some more freebies. If that too fails, MSFT will buy your small business and fire you.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
My real world experience with this very thing: I was the IT guy at a company that had a LOT of outside sales reps. on laptops. On occasion I would get the word from the sales managers that I needed to buy and prepare new laptops for sales reps that had just been hired on. I would also sometimes have a deadline of just a few days to have these laptops all prepared. Needless to say, there were times when I didn't yet get approval from my boss to purchase more Office licenses. So, I installed Open Office on several of these new sales reps laptops and set the default file formats to the typical MS ones. I also renamed the icons for launching the applications to the MS equivalent. The end result was that I had older sales reps asking me why the 'new guy' got the new version of Office and he was stuck on the 'old' version. These sales reps happily used Open Office sometimes for months at a time and simply thought that they had the new '2008' version or something. For the simple tasks they performed Open Office worked perfectly. Then, a big problem arose. One of the 'new' sales reps discovered that his Office was a 'counterfeit cheapo free program'. He then proceeded to tell all of the other Open Office sales reps that they too had a 'fake' MS Office. Once word of this spread the whiny brat sales reps all demanded that they have the 'real' Office. The company president....being ignorant as well also demanded that I spend $20K of the IT department budget to now buy Office licenses for the whiny, crybaby sales reps. Mind you, they had been unwittingly using Open Office for MONTHS with no complaints and in some cases thought they were special because they had the 'new' version of Office. For most office people, Open Office would work perfectly. Your biggest hurdle is in telling the whiners to shut up and use what's given to them.....or you could tell them it's the '2009' version and they will happily use Open Office without a complaint.
We did a pilot project at my workplace (800-1000 users, pilot of ~30) and everything went smoothly because we gave a course to all. Message: factor some training for all users in the transition costs.
To answer the specific question: OO.o can save in .doc/.xls format, only macros are of concern (I did not test that). As for communicating with others without OO.o, making PDFs is the way to guarantee page layout, and it's free! People loved that feature, spared the hassle of procuring Acrobat licences.
You're not old until regret takes the place of your dreams.
I work in a small company that is still Microsoft reliant. I tried to test out OpenOffice with our documents. I started my experiment in OpenOffice 2.0 vs. MS Office 2003. I later upgraded to OpenOffice 3.0. 3.0 was greatly improved, but there were still minor glitches.
I had constant problems with numbered and bulletted lists and minor formatting differences. We also had problems with Comments not showing properly on documents that were in progress and being circulated for review.
Now, if we switched as an entire office, then these issues with circulating documents wouldn't be a problem, because everyone would be on the same system.
But the real sticking point for us is that our customers have not made the switch. Almost all of them are still using MS Office, so we decided not to switch because we do not want to introduce formatting errors in documents that we send to our customers.
I struggle with OO calc not responding to keyboard shortcuts or simple operations in the same way that Excel does. I wish I could find a shortcut / config file for OO that made it "behave" like excel.
I *like* having CTRL+SHIFT++ inserting a row or column. I like the delete key deleting the value of a cell without giving me a pop-up window. Is there any project or resource out there that makes calc (and other OO apps) "behave" as close to MS office as possible without having to configure it yourself for an entire evening?
I took a look at OpenOffice.org v3 last week, primarily to look at the database component. There are still some big deficiencies:
.odb file (it's buried under Edit -> Database -> Connection Type)
.sql files. Or to pull tables/queries out of an existing MDB into the ODB file. Linking to other tables in ODBC or MDB data sources should also be dead simple, not buried in some obscure menu location.
- No built-in import/export functionality comparable to MS-Access
- No easy way to link to a MS-Access MDB within an existing
- No DELETE / INSERT / UPDATE queries using the query designer
Frankly, the lack of an easy import/export feature is a big killer. It should be dead easy to import/export from CSVs, tab-delimited, and
The current workarounds for import/export is to go through the spreadsheet component, which is extremely convoluted.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
I did this a few years ago to cut costs at a small business I worked for. Everything was fine except for one user in sales. He whined and complained and since it was my idea to switch (not decreed from the executive level) he was able to whine until he got his own copy of office. My advice is to tell him that you refuse to do it unless A) you really believe in OO and B) your highest executive is a strong advocate and backer. If there is even a little doubt from the people above you, you will be in for a greater headache than you can even imagine. Another problems is marketing material. If you have any of those DIY marketing guys that like to print their own brochures, you will be constantly helping them because the instructions on the back of the brochure paper are for MS office only.
I used OpenOffice a few years a go. I did school work, then took it to school.
In class, my work would not open in Office.
The whole weekend lost.
I tried it last night. I save it as a WORD Doc., and most others I could. Opened in in Linux. DID NOT WORK.
With business needing to do work on one computer, then have it work somewhere else, Linux will cost you.
No, I'm not a troll, Just giving my experience.
Chris.
Tell the employees that you will give them 1/2 of the money you save from using OpenOffice instead of MS Office. I think you'll find them much more ready to learn.
I work in a legal office which uses a web based case management system. Guess what! Utterly reliant on MS Word and IE6 or above (and I use "above" with reservations). Clicking on a link on the secure website opens a Word document to be typed in. Trying it in anything other than IE does nothing. Trying to open a document in anything except MS Word does nothing.
OO is great and I have used it a lot at home. If all your office workers do is prepare documents and save them locally or to a localised server, run with it.
If you have anything web based which interacts with your word processor or spreadsheet of choice, there is a fair chance that it will need all of the .net and other controls that call for MS applications whatever you do.
Very sad!
You have an untapped resource that most techies never think about. Marketing departments do this all day, every day. Change management is NOT for system administrators. It's a marketing job.
Take a walk down the hall. Wear a tie. Ask marketing for help. Tell them you want their input and soon they will be coming up with ways to help that you could never have thought of.
Buy them happy hour drinks when it's done.
What to do if you are offered to use Office or OpenOffice based in your preferences, asuming you don't have any critical software associated.
Then employers should have de choice of software based in a proportional salary reduction asociated to license fees or choose the open alternative.
To be honest I think that the irreductible office users will open a bit more their minds
Obioulsy things are not that easy
If you're exchanging MS Office docs -- particularly ones going through multiple editions of MSWord, it is a commonplace for MS to claim the docs are corrupt and refuse to do anything. Frequently, OpenSource tools like OpenOffice.org or AbiWord read the files perfectly well, and then can save them un-corrupted in ".doc" form. My wife is an attorney, and she has to jump through that hoop all the time.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
Do anyone have any good resources for small business IT? Websites, forums, blogs?
You can't interact very well with merged cells, columns, and rows. http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=8302
When they get this figured out I would consider it.
No, OO's Writer application destroys Word's custom document properties and fields. Oh, it can read them and it'll carry them between OO formats, but you can't update them and they're gone if you ever save back to Word format. Also their API documentation is very sparse, because, as with many other projects, some mental midgets decided that a handful of outdated wiki stubs is better than evil Microsft's trillion-times-more-informative MSDN.
I actually did this conversion on about the same size if not a little bigger. The issue that I found is actually adaptability not functionality. We provided training to the users and showed them the differences between the MS and OO. After being pushed out it lasted for about 5 months and then everyone moved back to MS. And it was only transitioned back because people where un-willing to change. So if you are going to do this make sure that you invest a lot of time in actually "selling" OO to the internal staff. Hint: Set the default Save as to MS in each OO program, should resolve a lot of issues. Pros (besides price) -easier for users to understand over MS07. (if that is what you would move to in the future do to the fact that no one can get used to those darn "ribbons". -not as system heavy -very nice product to product integration across various pieces of OO -Series dumbs open nicely Cons -Users rebel as new looks, even if it is better. -some graphical transitions from MS to OO go wacky (ex powerpoints) -No training material available on the web that I know of (although i haven't searched in a while) I think that OO is the superior product. I was even able to open Ami pro docs in it! Good luck to you!
1. oo handles ; and : different the m$ orifce formulas 2. password protection is NULL both ways oo can ignore m$ and oo / m$ 3. setting one page to print in landscape is pita it can be done but it's not easy 4. the lack of outlost can be a huge detractor..if email client/calendar stuff is key check out your options 1st..I went with scalix 5. oo does not suffer bad xl formulas you'll learn quickly who really is a excel jedi and who is not 6. the consistent java updates need a better management system (pop ups to users about java ..you'll see)
Darwin Enforcement Agent
OpenOffice.org 3.0 is great, however you may seriously want to consider the following:
Are you trying to replace Outlook/Exchange? If you are then the answer is clearly NO
Do your office mates comment on documents through document markup features? Do they have to give edits to others outside of your office? Again, I would say NO.
Do you have any VBA intensive spreadsheets? Again, there is some VBA support in the Novell blob, but if you use a lot it will probably break. So, NO.
Margins are different by default in writer than they are in word; even if I convert a document to word I check it in the free MS Viewers (It is usually a bit different than is rendered by OO.org)
PowerPoint slides are out.
Any Mail Merging, or more complicated word/database use?
If you guys sit around and simply use the computer as a glorified typewriter/calculator, you should be fine. Otherwise you will encounter many headaches in interoperability that are also poorly documented to resolve any matters that require business/quick decision making.
Full Disclosure: I use OO.Org for work and personal use. However, I have to find the one computer with MS office installed when I have to comment or read comments using the built-in MS tools.
We run the gamut with all three types of operating systems in the environment. Since the sales teams interact with other Office 2007 product entities it was imperative that they have the same suite of tools to promote usability and to keep them out of our hair. For mac, Linux and windows users that are not on the sales teams everyone gets Open Office 3.0 and so far it has performed quite well. There were some issues with Mac versions saving images to tiff format and creating a nightmare on the Office 2007 machines but easily fixed.
http://www.anthonyw.net
A good plan is to keep some Office licenses around to ease the transition for the workers. An idea is to set up a server to perform conversions from Office binary formats to PDF or OOXML using the native apps. Since you'll only need retail licenses to deploy this you don't have to risk an MS rep finding out about serving multiple users from a single license.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Well the short answer to this question is yes. OpenOffice does read MS Office files. There will be some problems with formatting but that is understandable due to the fact that the two programs have completely different architectures and handle things differently. Thats not to say that you should disqualify migrating because of it. The easiest time to migrate is when your company is still small. The overall money you will save by doing the change over now is well worth the switch. Free is Free. As the company grows thats money that it can put into doing what it does best.
Don't expect any change of technology to go without problems though. That almost never happens. But don't be afraid to use a technology just because there are problems switching because there are always problems. There are also problems with not switching. It all comes down to which risk you want to take.
Functionally, OpenOffice is every bit as feature rich as MS Office if not more. Its a better product in my view. But thats MYHO. You may want to make that decision on your own.
I tried converting an office of about 25-30 people to Open Office and I can assure you that it will not be smooth. Now this was about 3? years ago, so I'm sure Open Office has improved greatly, and will make the job easier, but the problems I encountered were:
1) A general reluctance to move off of what they knew;
2) Concern that customers would not be able to communicate (whether the concern was valid or not);
3) Lack of training on Open Office. Everything is not the same and unfortunately users are not willing or able to work it out for themselves;
4) Some modules just were not as good as the Office modules particularly where there were heavy users or Powerpoint or Excel.
My recommendation isn't that you don't do it though. Its that you find a few people (5 or so) who will test and try and gently roll it out through the organisation, who are open to new things and who can act as "go to" people for others as you roll it our further.
I'd also be at pains to get the expert Powerpoint and Excel users to use it with some of their current presentations or spreadsheets to be certain that it works for them, and if not just say no problem and let them go on using what works.
I've found that people don't like change, and change unfortunately needs to be gradual, if its to succeed.
well said
I work in a IT department that supports about 100 users. We give open office to all the users and then we will install MS office on special requests. In my experience it is not smooth. The program works fine, but the users don't like change, simple as that.
My wife runs a small photography business (ie: just her and an assistant), and I'm the pro-bono programmer/IT specialist. She didn't rely heavily on office products (just contracts and simple CSVs), so when we did a reinstall a while back I suggested we move to Open Office. We haven't had any problems.
We also moved to Thunderbird and Google-calendar (using the Lightning plug-in).
I exclusively use Linux for all development and IT related tasks (office file share server, email/web/database server, development boxes) with the exception of a virtual install of Windows for website testing.
She has mentioned to me several times that the only thing keeping her from switching to Linux is Adobe. There's just no justification dropping Adobe once you've invested 2k+ in their software.
Once Adobe supports Linux (if ever), we'll be a 100% open source shop with the exception of VMs and Adobe products.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
There are many situations where the OpenOffice spreadsheet is not a replacement for Excel. This is true when a business is built around Excel scripting, for instance, or when there's integration between VBA apps and Excel. Don't underestimate the value and importance of a Pivot Table -- I know there are alternatives in OO Calc, but realize it's not an instant (free) migration.
It may sound minor and trivial here, but it's been a show-stopper that you can't invert a Y-axis. Also seemingly trivial, but no "accounting" format and a couple of other number format issues, and some other differences in how charts work, can be a big deal to the people you want to persuade to adopt.
As for the word processor, the migration from Word to Writer (or back) tends to be pretty smooth. It is often claimed that people who use word processors don't really use a lot of the advanced features, but I would argue on that point, as I have seen the reverse. But even so, Writer does a very good job with some of the things that a casual user would consider "arcane" or even "useless", that say, a legal secretary might find indispensable. On the other hand, I also run into things that are a job for LaTeX that neither Word nor Writer can do. Here's one for you: Produce an industrial equipment catalog that will have colored thumb guides at the edge of the page to indicate sections. Here's the rub: You don't know in advance what the page size will be, how many pages there will be, or exactly what page any given item will be printed. I dare you to attempt that one in a word processor ;-)
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Granted the business is only a few dozen people, maybe five of which actually mess with the computers, but a local business I did a job for was having, among many other problems, conflicts between MS Office of different versions. It seemed to be an actual system problem (even a reinstall of MS Office didn't fix), but I introduced them to OpenOffice and they have been using it since. The first comment was "how can this be legal?" and next was "It is different..." (talking about the interface), but it didn't take long for them to be doing everything they were without crashes every other save.
from a company that is constantly using the track changes feature in Word. there have been issues when clients are opening them in openoffice. i'm sure other people have mentioned if you're using Exchange w/ Outlook, you're going to have a BIG problem.
Since it costs nothing to try, why not download a copy and try opening several examples and try saving several examples (and testing if you can "round trip" the documents.)
There are some documents which used some features which wouldn't come across (specialized formatting stuff,) when it was tried at one of my employers/clients.
For most (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) it was okay.
The database is way too primitive (so is Microsoft's so no loss there) so we rolled our own and we used specialized drawing tools.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
To get the full value out of OpenOffice, think about going beyond merely swapping out Word. If you take advantage of some of OpenOffice's unique features, it might get you a quicker ROI.
For example, I once had to pull together the technical response to a large RFP. We had over a dozen authors. Rather than shlepping copies of the whole response doc back and forth to everyone (my nightmare scenario), I used Open Office's Master Document feature to create a live, compound document: a Master Document for the entire response, and a separate Chapter Document for each section. Since the Chapters were separate documents, the various authors could work on them independently. Once a week I would refresh the Master Document, which would automatically pull in all the work thus far.
This worked really well, and the way Open Office cleanly separated the master from the sub-documents was very impressive. The point is, we got a lot of bang for the buck out of that experience, and that one project pretty much sold everyone on the value of making the switch to Open Office.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
I have installed Openoffice on many workstations that need a good document editor. I just rename the icon to Microsoft Word or Powerpoint and they use it.
Later I get the "they couldn't open the File I sent them.", then I educate them on how to save a document in what format they need(usaully word 97 for compatibility). I also show them how to export to PDF.
Sorry for the AC but I can't login today.
Every time I try to migrate users at my company from MS Office to OpenOffice, the story is the same. They accept it at first, but a week or a month later, they come back to me and say "Some of my word files don't work right in my office. can you give me the same version that [name] has?" where [name] is the name of a person who still have MS Office 2002 on their computer.
When I try to track down specific complaints, I usually find a subtle formatting problem that breaks a table over a page boundary, or makes an awkwardly formatted page, or a font that ends up making a particular line of text just one pixel wider than it used to be causing a reflow. Stuff like that.
I get *almost* the same reaction from people when I try to upgrade them to MS Office 2007. (with higher emphasis on "I can't find feature X" and lower emphasis on "this document formats wrong")
Keep a couple copies of Office around in I.T. support, one on a laptop that you can loan out in an emergency, to handle the odd issue that the user can't resolve using OO alone. Fix their problem when they occur and give them OO files afterwards to work with. Expect issues to arise and simply deal with them.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I find that OpenOffice is as usable and capable as the MS products. It is definitely ready for prime time, and indeed I prefer the OO programs. However, there are still some compatibility issues. The ones that I have personally encountered are:
1. Word cross references: Cross references created in Word do not transfer well. If your document uses lots of cross references, especially references to headings or numbered items, then expect problems.
2. Powerpoint fonts: Fonts are sometimes changed when going between Powerpoint and Impress.
3. Captions: Word has a figure caption mechanism that does not convert well to OO. MS Word models captions as paragraphs with no page break allowed between the figure and the caption paragraph; OO converts these to a floating block that contains both the figure and the caption. I find that I usually need to re-do captions after converting.
4. Alignment of bullets, and bullet characters: Bullets are often changed when converting, in terms of their positioning and the character used to represent the bullet itself.
There are other issues, but these are the ones that have been the biggest headache for me. I have used these programs to create very large documents (some are 800 pages), so both can handle large and complex projects. For large documents, it is not practical to go back and forth multiple times: expect to convert once and then stay there.
I myself have not had trouble with vector graphics as some here have.
- Cliff
I use OO.o at home and Office at work--there is almost no difference. The only plus I see to Office is the PowerPoint and Outlook.
Pros:
MS Office 2000 more similar to OOo than MS Office 2007
Backwards compatibilty: For some reason OOo is better with older MS Word documents than recent MS Office versions
Cross platform: If you ever were to move to a different os, you are already half way there with OOo deployed
Cons:
If you exchange complex documents with other (MS Office) companies they can get screwed up.
Judging by the upcoming features in 3.1, there's still no outline mode that's even remotely comparable to MS Word. *sigh*. Maybe in 2011?
creation science book
Yes, Office 2007's Ribbon sucks for knowledgeable power users but ...
This can easily be mitigated by buying one of the many Office Menu Ribbons (e.g., Classic Menus) that create an Office Ribbon with all the menus right where they normally are.
The non-power user is typically able to pickup and use OOo and feel comfortable in about one week. The non-power user will generally perform simple non-advanced tasks. The power user, however, usually requires closer to one month to figure out how to accomplish the "advanced" tasks in OOo rather than in MSO. As an advanced OOo user, I was asked how to accomplish a specific format in a text table in MSO. After 30 minutes, we gave up. I knew how to do this in OOo in seconds. MSO may have supported the effect, but neither of use could figure out how to make this work. To address the needs of both, it is recommended to have some sort of documentation, and perhaps even some class time, to help during the transition. It helps a lot to have a few power users learn OOo first and get them on board. A few dissenters can railroad the entire effort. The usual recommendation is that MSO be completely removed so that hold-outs are not continuing to use MSO. You should verify that at least the majority of your document's are usable/readable OOo. Having spent years moving documents between MSO and OOo, I have a handle on what is more likely to cause problems (at least for text type documents). A typical problem is related to graphics that is not anchored as a character and that is free to float around the page (this is the default use). For power point / presentation documents, there are some effects that may not translate well. Macro compatibility is not good between MSO and OOo.
I didn't see the alpha then beta then release candidate builds... all released publicly and tested by tens or hundreds of thousands of people with Go-OO as I did with OpenOffice.org. How can it be considered a stable production release without a widely distributed public testing?
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
There will be the day someone needs to open an old file that cannot be openen with Open Office 3.0.
The only way to save the bacon is to have one PC at hand for everyone to use with the old Microsoft Office 2000 installed. And a "super user" close to it to assist the average user to convert the file to in a different - more compatible - MS format.
It's a very primitive approach, but works amazingly well in the real world.
Also silences a few of the office whiners.
Good luck,
janmartin
What your company does, But it seems likely to me that there might be many workers who are simple to transition and a few that would be insanely hard.
Why not give everyone OO.o and mandate exclusive use of OO.o for most people that really don't need office but leave some room for the guys that are having problems to use office 2000.
Eventually, office2000 will obsolete itself, and if OO.o truly is a suitable replacement, people will adopt it willingly. For the hard core two or three that justifiably can't move, update them to office 2007, but leave them with OO.o as well.
If OO.o is not suitable for everyone then why hold the company back by mandating it across the board.
Finally, you could split up the packages, ie. use OO.o word processor, GNUmeric and powerpoint.
Nullius in verba
Just go into the OO settings and click "always open and save in MS formats" and it will be easy.
.ppt .doc and .xls files back and forth daily between many flavors of MSOffice and OO.
.pdf exporter. That alone has gotten many more converts.
I do work with Fortune 10 corporations on down to 200 person small businesses. And we trade
The most frequent benefit of using OO is the direct
If you're brave then switch the whole office over to OO at once. If there are some queasy nerves then do a small pilot of general office staff first before getting it to technical users (that might be pushing bleeding edge use with macros). Later these same users will be able to get there too.
For the advanced course... take a random server, install Ubuntu with the LTSP.org packages, PXE boot the clients with old stripped and converted pc's. Then load the office productivity apps. Enjoy IT cost savings joy.
I once outfitted an entire small manufacturing business this way with 'rescued from the landfill' computer equipment. Ethernet cable was the only real expense. (routers and print servers ran monowall and freesco).
You're up for a great adventure - don't miss it.
no OOO equivalent. end of discussion if those two are in the mix
I know if it was me I wouldn't necessarily trust what I read on Slashdot.
At a minimum I would do the following:
1. Open and check many documents in my organization. If possible I would ask people in the business to help with this.
2. I would see if any documents had any macros or God forbid DDE, OLE or VB macros in them. If so I would see how hard it would be to convert them or look at what Novell offers to help with that.
3. I would do a small pilot group with both Microsoft and OO installed to test.
4. If all went well with the pilot group I would remove Microsoft Office from their workstations and test some more.
5. If all that went well I would expand the rollout to more of the company. I would probably save sales for last.
At some point I would have cheat sheets developed and possibly offer some training for the people. I would probably try and do this as early as possibly but expect to change the training depending on feedback from the pilot group.
Having said all this, you will probably find some things that don't work as well and others that will work better. This is the nature of the beast. My personal experience running OO is that it is very good, and we migrated years ago. My experience "may" be totally different than someone who uses Microsoft Office a ton. I will say that when I first tried it in our organization (old org), the employees HATED it. I was a bit surprised on the amount of hate for a Office product... The weird part was that we found out it was because we told them that they were loosing Microsoft Office. When we changed our wording from "removing Microsoft Office" to "upgrading to the latest version of Office" the general attitude changed considerably. Suddenly most of the people said they loved it. Weird, but my experience.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
Hi PtP, Your transition can go fine, you just need to do a lot of planning. In nine years of training and consulting, I've seen successful and unsuccessful transitions. Here's my article on it. Here's the angle for an individual transition. http://www.fanaticattack.com/2008/switching-office-suites-from-microsoft-office-to-openofficeorg.html Here's the angle for a team transition. http://www.k12opentech.org/solveig-haugland/2008/02/24/five-principles-successful-openofficeorg-transition Essentially you need support (read: 100% commitment) from the top, lots of piloting and planning, and accepting that yes, your PowerPoint stuff might not look as good but that's OK. Solveig Haugland http://www.getopenoffice.org/ http://openoffice.blogs.com/
I have tried moving away from MS Office but there are many small important things that are missing. On the top of my head for example there is no way of rotating images you have to use an external program even for simple 90 degrees rotation and no way to keep scale correct when resizing images.
Okay, I'm going to make an assumption that you know how to do a migration. e.g. You don't change everyone at once, you get some 'early adopters' singing praises, you treat the bitch down the hall with kid gloves, and you provide training for everyone.
Now, assuming you know how to make people smile when confronted with change, the question I have is: will they hang you at the end of the day if it fails? Assuming you get 6 months into this migration and things are still broken all over the place, the boss' admin assistant wants to kill you, and the company has lost $1M worth of productivity, will you get fired because of it?
Somewhere between the yes and the no of that question is whether or not you should do the migration. Personally, if my ass was on the line I just wouldn't bother. However, if you feel like the company will support you as long as you try to make it work, then maybe this is a good time to introduce OSS into the organization.
These are tools, nothing more. 50 seats x $200 per MS Office (Basic) license = $10,000. That's a small price to pay for a productivity tool. You'll save more money by scrutinizing the company phone bills than by cutting MS Office.
----- obSig
It all depends on what you are doing, whether its just document processing and e-mail and basic presentations, or if you are doing really complex things with it. Then, it depends on whether your company has control over the formats used, etc. If you do have control and can migrate your formats over to the openoffice, or even PDF, formats it will make your life easier.
You'll need to do brainstorming and planning to figure out all the tasks your employees use MS Office for and determine what is and isn't feasible in OOo.
If it looks possible, I would recommend doing a small test-run by switching over 5 to 10 users onto OO.o so you can demonstrate feasibility and work out as many kinks as you can before you jump into moving over all 50 workstations. That way, management knows there is an easy exit strategy and you don't waste -quite- as much time and money as you could have.
Employees will always complain about their regular lives changing, and you'll want to simply provide them with as much support as you can, so they can quickly learn and get used to the new system. In no time they'll have learnt OOo and it will go from the freaky new software to the same old.
The nice thing with OOo is you don't have to worry about open-source operating systems or anything like that, as it runs on most OS's.
If you are fairly reliant on Macros in your Excel spreadsheets you may run into a brick wall. I had to install Excel using WINE in order to actually use some of my old spreadsheets.
-- Sex is the antonym of pringles. Once you pop it's time to stop.
You probably have the "Free vs Expensive" arrow pointing in the wrong direction.
"Free" is sticking with a product suite that is doing the job for you. "Expensive" is upgrading or rolling out a whole new office suite (planning, imaging, installation, configuration, conversion), along with the added user support that you'll need during and after transition. If anyone uses Visio, you'll have to keep it — there's no OSS equivalent. If they embed Visio diagrams in other documents, you're SOL; Open Office can't do that. Then there's the Excel Analysis Tools. Calc is laughable and Gnumeric is not quite there (but close).
Unless there's an urgent need for a capability that's not in Office 2000 but is in Open Office, and there's no reasonable workaround, your best option is to do nothing.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
First of all, don't even think about converting your documents yet. You want to spend 6 months working with OpenOffice to ensure it meets your needs before you do something like that.
Here's how I would approach it:
1. Check the update / patch procedure for OpenOffice, ensure you can easily apply updates and security patches.
2. Train / engage staff. Set up a wiki or something for people to report problems & for tips to be documented. Make sure everybody understands that this is for long term benefits, and that you appreciate it's going to be awkward to begin with.
3. Install OpenOffice on all computers, set it as the default viewer, saving documents in Microsoft format.
4. Test. Run like this for at least 6 months, preferably 12 so you get a good idea that all documents work ok.
5. After a couple of months, if there are no major problems, start removing MS Office from machines, because I can guarantee there will be a bunch of people still quietly using it and buggering up your long term test.
In addition to making sure you don't get stuck with a lemon if you find it doesn't work, it also gives plenty of time for the conversion market to mature. In 6 months time, start looking for tools to bulk convert your existing documents. Then take a backup of everything and over one weekend, convert all your documents to ODF and set that as the default file format.
For a while, I've been using the Linbox Converter [0]. Running on a dedicated Windows server with MS Office installed, it can convert documents sent over the network into âoecleanâ PDFs by print-to-file'ing them, and sending them back.
This is not exactly what's required here, as I suppose the documents have to be editable. The glue to make the system run, however, is mostly written in Python. This may make adding functions like saving as an earlier version of the format (âoebye bye OpemXMLâ) quite easy to implement.
There are Unix and Windows clients available at [0], but I once did a bit of packaging to make the installation of clients easier [1].
(Disclaimer: I once was an intern at Linbox, and did not conduct an unbiased survey of such solutions before deciding to use the aforementionned one. It turned out to work well enough for my needs, though.)
[0] http://www.linbox.com/en/converter
[1] http://gforge.inria.fr/frs/?group_id=424&release_id=897
I mean, "tasked"? Once you've learnt English, you can try "Computers for retards" but not before.
This is a pretty open ended question. A lot of it depends on the kind of company, the kind of work you do, types of users, etc. This kind of transition would pose very different challenges for a 20 person company versus a 200 or 2000 person office. I've seen small companies who run the entire business out of Access and Excel, so switching from these programs would bring things to a griding halt. I've seen big companies where the excel users / accountants would stage a revolt, most likely resulting in your death. It really depends on the kind of company and the kind of users.
I always like to look at the 'Why' factor, both positively and negatively. Why are you bothering? What is it about Office that's making you consider alternatives?
As expensive as Office is, I do think it's a solid piece of software. Every case is different, but cost aside I would question the need to move to OO.o in many cases. Maybe cost is a big thing for you, I don't know. I think the roughly $350 expense every 3-6 years is bearable and justifiable in most cases, but that's just me.
MS propaganda aside, you do have to do some evaluations as to the cost/benefit of the solution. I'm a Linux/FOSS fan as much as the next guy, but I've been involved in cases where it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense or the cost savings are often negated.
Anyone who uses slide transitions should be shot.
He didn't say shot with what. A Pez launcher maybe?
I'd say a nice simple fade makes the presentation seem more professional. If it is an annoying checkerboard or bounce out bleh! But to each his own.
"The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget." -Thomas Szasz
I didn't participate in such transitions, but one of my past employers did such migration already in OO.o 1.x times.
They have employed rather pragmatical approach and made (partial) migration in several phases. At first they mandated that all employees have OOo installed. Then whole R&D (and all of internal documentation) migrated to OO.o. That was rather painful yet rewarding. Then those who didn't need M$O ditched it. At the end of migration we had most of personnel using OO.o (rather successfully; it's when I joined the company) - only of sales (minority in engineering company) and test department were using simultaneously OO.o and M$O.
I'd rate OO.o for technical purposes higher than M$O since many features in former are implemented much simpler than their counterparts in M$O. Comparing old documentation M$O template with newer OO.o template I found that OO.o template was missing all the black magic people had to employ to make derived M$O documents easy to edit. OO.o's outlines alone were saving lots of time. Export to PDF was beautifully solving problem of communication with business partners.
All in all, I'd say, that using OO.o internally is pretty easy. Yet company has to be ready to have also number of M$O installations to be able to read/edit documents from partners. Hinting your partners that you are using internally OO.o and PDF/SWX/ODF are preferred formats might lead to some nice surprises: many companies at least pilot OO.o internally and pretty happy to send you documents in your preferred format.
And piece of advise: do NOT mix OO.o and M$O documents: binary .DOC format compatibility is all but myth. Implement OO.o where you can clearly draw a line between internal confidential documents and external/public documents.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Maybe, you should pick a version and try sharing documents with a few different office users to see how well it works for you over 6 months or so. I predict when your done you might have your answer.
Our sysadmin has really been trying to use it on her own machine on and off for a few years. She has to exchange docs with lots of different people running lots of different versions of office (mostly vendors). Without fail, there is always some bug that forces her to use ms office. Recently she was trying to open a 20 page word document in OO, and it took something like 10 minutes to open. Turned out to be a known bug in OO. My boss is also trying to use it, but he leaves it open for days on end, and it misbehaves by locking up his X session to the point where the machine has to have X killed from a remote machine. Then there are the dozens and dozens of compatibility problems which aren't deal breakers but do cause problems. In the end it keeps turning out to be cheaper/easier just to pay the devil and use Office instead of dealing with all the OO problems.
Your experiences may be different, but I suspect that something like http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Product/1151523326841#tabview=tab4 may still be a better bet than OO if you really must use something other than office. It has compatibility issues too, but last time I tried it was a much better solution than OO.
For example, for management level correspondence, you need documents that open perfectly at destination; otherwise, your company will be embarrassed: remember some people uses PDF just because even between original MS-Offices', sometimes documents lose their structure and look pretty bad.. in my experience with OO this issue turns really nasty.
If you can pass this trivial but mandatory barrier, you can start working in the really technical considerations.
You can't distinguish between /. banter and how you would deal with people not happy in a real life situation, but here you are, pontificating about the matter.
We all rile about other people in private, and many of us think our ideas are the best, that does not mean we approach people with lack of respect, in a forum like this many people will let some steam off without that being necessarily be how they would talk in a more formal situation.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Our company switched over to OOo around 2.1 (we just got 3.0 not long ago). Our company has two home offices, one in the states & and in South American. We have several hundred locations worldwide. At first it was a tough sell & to be honest I was not a fan. However, I, along with fellow coworkers in the field, have grown to really appreciate it. In fact, it is all I use at home & at work. I didn't even bother installing MS office on my last PC build. Most, if not all, of the home office users have both OOo & MS office. Occasionally a file will come down the pipe that we can't open, but the second try saved in OOo format works. I can't say much for Power Point as we mainly deal in with the standard word/excel files, or calc/writer if you will. Bottom line, yes you can switch over, but expect some heavily used files not to transfer over flawlessly. Expect users to bitch, but after they're seasoned it'll be just another program.
Honestly, I have very few issues with it. It really depends on what you're doing with it. Impress is reputed to have translation issues, and I'm not solid on their Base application, but the writer (word) and Calc (excel) applications do mostly accurate open/edit/save on Office docs. It also handles opening (but not saving) of DOCX files. Bottom line, test it on your use pattern. I think you'll find it al the very least, compatible with Office, unless you're using some heavy scripting, It should suffice for most of your needs.
Don't ever expect migrating from MS is going to be smooth, MS' is software that is designed to screw you up for migrating to something else, expect some pains and costs, that's right, there are gonna be costs, that's the problem with MS software, the bill is usually bigger in the long term.
Also Lol @ the guy that seemed to advertize Novell's fork of open office because it had OOXML filters. News flash: so does Sun's OOo 3.0 ...
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
From past experience with a highly-watched transition: keep a single windows/ms office install sitting on an older piece of junk in the corner (beside the typewriter you still keep for those last, rarer and rarer forms you don't have in digital form) so you have a way to deal with some particularly weird or crufty .doc / .xls / .ppt file that OO struggles with when you're on a short deadline. People will use it sporadically for about six months then forget it exists.
You should maybe consider o3spaces as well. Basically it's a platform you can use to get a higher level of compatibility and collaboration regardless of which suite you use, and revisions are stored in SVN - or it was when I last checked. It's a CMS that actually works, not like Sharepoint which managers use to micromanage and deeply nest the sh*t out of documents, in what is effectively an overglorified network share front-end. *ahem*
I could tell you more about o3spaces, but the manager who made the call on whether to continue that project was a die-hard MS fan, regardless of the FACT that we're a nix shop. And she liked to wind us in IT up by insisting that we pay money for inferior products when we'd been pointing for weeks to more suitable FOSS or low-cost-pseudo-FOSS alternatives. You'll note I'm talking in past-tense about her, because she made us play the BOFH card, and she was "managed out" shortly after :)
in use comparison between OOs and Office 2007, OOo 3 is not even close. Sorry, but Office 2007 is that much nicer to work with to the point that if you are on a supported MS platform and you deal with office productivity apps all day, it is worth the money for Office 2007.
We use Ooo 3.0 for about 50 users but some cannot make the move because you cannot (easily) print a chart from calc.
We used Ubuntu and Open Office for a (very) small office. We had 6 computers in a simple network, using OO. The staff had no problems with it after some training, and some of them asked me to convert their personal computers to Ubuntu after they got used to this excellent operating system. Our experience was very positive. We saved quite a bit of money, not having to purchase M$ stuff! Bob B.
So if I understood the original post correctly, their office uses Office 2000 and needs to open Open XML documents, so is considering OpenOffice as an Open XML enabler.
Why not just use the free (as in beer) Office Compatibility Pack provided by Microsoft to enable Open XML document in Office 2000, Office XP and Office 2003? Deploy one update instead of a whole new Office suite. The mind boggles.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=941B3470-3AE9-4AEE-8F43-C6BB74CD1466&displaylang=en
From what I've tried, the word/writer and excel/spreadsheet items works well. The one problem I've had is in the Database part. I've had to totally redesign the databases when switching to OpenOffice. You can import files but must redesign the database in OpenOffice.
The Charts module in Calc, 2.x and 3.0, is still mostly broken. Dont try and plot any more than a couple of thousand points, it will make your PC crawl.
They are rewriting the module, so hopefully fixed in 3.1 or 3.2.
Compatibility is something that needs to be addressed>. But the is a strong case for not sending office document files outside the organization, and instead sending .pdf (or maybe .rtf occasionally). We do this as a matter of policy.
Converting incoming .doc & .xls files has never been a problem for us.
take a look at my brief blog entry discussing this very point. http://www.hossi.co.uk/index.php?section=16
Also, feel free to use our video tutorials,which cover many aspect of Open Office as well as other programs
YES we can!
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
I upgraded machines, and my new box already happened to have OO on it, so I gave it a go before deciding to buy a new copy of office.
OO 2.4 and now 3 has performed well for me in the past year - I've yet to have a document a client has sent fail to open. On the odd occasion it looked odd, I used the free word/excel viewer to open the documents (which confirmed they were broken - it looked odd there too). Note I only really deal with Word and Excel documents.
Really, it'll just depend on whether there are any specific must-haves for you in Office - for me there were none.
Small company, 6 people ranging from ubergeek Linux users to tech-luddites.
My experience, YMMV:
At first OO looks a lot easier to shift to than Office 2007, but things are so similar that people get frustrated when things aren't in the same place.
Those who are willing to try it and learn it will love it more than regular office. Those who throw toys out of the pram when things don't happen the way they used to will hate it.
We had a psycho hose beast work here, aside from generally being a PITA she couldn't use word properly, hated OO as a result.
OTOH everyone else had varying degrees of frustration, I'd say the biggest problems were a lack of usable current documentation. There's lots for OO 1.0, a fair bit for 2.0 but things have changed since then and the docs for 2.x aren't as helpful as Office Online.
Use latex. This is what it's for.
This is how the loudness war is killing music.
In our company we have 50 people using openoffice on their desktops, but we also have a server with MS Office and a license that permits 5 concurrent users to connect to that server over RDP, for the situations when somebody really needs MS Office, which is rare...
If you put linux on the Desktops, this question will be less important.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
So if I joined your company and you were in charge of IT procurement and I complained about the lack of OOo (it has features I NEED), you'll go get it, will you?
It seems to some people that "suck it up" is acceptable when it's "suck up the standardisation on MS Office" but not when it's "suck up the standardisation on something not MS Office".
you forgot them.
GIMP doesn't do transparency. "I can't leave PS until GIMP does transparency". GIMP doesn't do 16 bit colour but does transparency, "I can't leave PS until GIMP does 16 bit". GIMP does 16 bit and transparency but doesn't to pantone, "I can't leave PS until GIMP does pantone!!!".
Shit, whatever GIMP doesn't do that PS does, IS MANDATORY or you aren't a proper user.
Whatever GIMP does that PS doesn't do is irrelevant, that's not used by proper users.
We formed a new company in July and I, as CIO really pushed for OO. I asked each member of our team to try it for a week and get back to me. Part of the reason was that most of us had Office 2003 licenses, but 1 guy had 2007 (the least technical MBA guy).
A week later and 2 of us decided to use OO unless there was an issue.
The other 3 opened 1 document each and "didn't like it" whatever that means. They didn't uninstall Office so there were file extension issues. PowerPoint files were the biggest issue. Fonts, locations, etc. where never quite right.
For me, the lack of autofilter in spreadsheets was a real issue. I'm not running OO v3 (ubuntu standard installs only), so perhaps that has been fixed?
In the end, we had to decide based on cost and time wasted. We are a MS provider that Action Pack is too easy to use - $300/yr. What a deal. Most of our work isn't MS solutions - we do UNIX/Linux mostly.
The real killer is Visio. We're technical architects - Visio is a must, period. There's nothing else comparable, anywhere. Even at $599 per copy, we can't be without it.
If you have power Excel users that have VB macros in their documents, those macros will not work.
Similarly, if your use of Office extends to MS Access, there is no direct equivalent in OO.o that can open existing files and use them as is.
For Word and Excel docs that do not have macros or complex formatting, OO.o should work fine. PPT conversions seem to be hit or miss and often require some editing (e.g. changing fonts).
With Microsoft Office 2000 ... very few, and fewer than you would find with a transition to Microsoft Office's current version. You can just install, set it to open .DOC and .XLS by default and most of them will not notice the difference. I showed the IT guy and CEO of a small business how it worked, and in a week the whole company was using Open Office.
Macros: Complex ones might not work, simple ones probably will. If you upgrade to the latest Microsoft Office, NONE of them will work because they switched to some new programming language.
Formatting: If done rationally by the document author, survives nicely. The more elaborate the formatting the greater the chance of it borking.
Oh yeah!
The big exception is Microsoft's bastard stepchild, Powerpoint. You might have to redo some presentations because the fonts and layout and effects will get borked. Same happens every time you open them with a different version of Powerpoint, so it's not OO's fault. SUGGESTION: After the install, remove any excess fonts and have someone re-create the basic office templates for business letters, etc. Then distribute the template files or make them available in a common directory.
OO will work as a network install, if you want everyone to have access to shared drawings and templates. I've never done that, but I've heard it's possible.
Other open source stuff you can use easily, and it's excellent for newsletters and technical documents: GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus
So, you don't state any of the needs your user will have, yet you ask if you will face any problems. As I see things, if your users are satisfied with OO, then you are too. But we can't guess here. Knowing their exact needs when it comes to portability seems essential to me. Other problems as the difference between button layouts in OO and Msoffice may be more or less important depending on the user base. Let me finish by saying that for someone that doen't like the idea of "being stuck in microsoftland", you seem pretty badly informed when it comes to free/open source software. A look at the features of open office would have answered at least the first and last of your questions.
"Pay The Piper writes
As an IT Support Technician in a small corporation, I've been tasked by one of my managers to determine the feasibility of transitioning our small 40 or 50 person office from Microsoft Office 2000 to Open Office 3.0. What are some of the problems I may run into as far as document cross compatibility? Has the Open Office suite evolved to a point that permits easy transition from Microsoft's suite? Besides the obvious 'free vs. expensive' argument, what are some of the pros and cons of transitioning? Are there any reliable ways to view/edit/save a document saved in the OpenXML format through Open Office, or are my co-workers and I still going to be stuck in Microsoftland?"
The point to be made here is that for the casual user, Open Office works just fine. There are some issues with macros that need to be worked out especially if you exchange documents and spreadsheets with MS users. There is no Access database, so you need to consider that. Reading and/or saving data has not been an issue so far. One co-worker was having trouble reading a 2007 Word doc with his XP/2003 Word and I was able to read it with OO and save it as a 2003 doc. He was able to read it without any problems. So exchanging files has not been a major concern.
Some of the tools I use prefer a windows environment so I use wine. Wine is very mature these days and almost everything works flawlessly. My advise is to dump MS as quick as you can and deal with any out of band issues as they occur - you probably won't have very many.
Ten people use software they have to pay for. One person uses software which is free and is available to the other ten users if they only bothered to install it.
The ten who use the software they have to pay for insist that the one who does not, must buy the software they use so that they can all communicate.
How daft is that?
One that cropped up recently was that neither OO.o 2 or 3 could open a Powerpoint file from 1995.
Of course, neither could Office 2007, or 2003, or 2000. I kid you not.
Another thing is that the OO.o Powerpoint clone does *not* have the same large gallery that PP does.
Finally, and this may be a killer, there are websites that absolutely *refuse* to open a document saved from either OO.o 2 or 3 in M$ Word 2k/XP format. For example, I forget if it's Monster or Dice, if you try to upload your resume saved this way, it fails, and complains "this is a .doc format file!".
On the other hand, I have *never* had anyone fail to open in Word, directly, a file that I saved in M$ Word format from either OO.o 2 or 3.
mark
This is a weird bug we found - try exporting an excel file (from any version of excel that I've tried so far, on both Mac and Win) as a dBase4 (dbf) file and see the data truncated! It appears to export only the data that is visible on-screen, so any data that is wider than a column cuts short at the 'column width' in the exported database file. The only way around this is to expand every column in the excel file so that ALL the data in each cell of that column is fully visible.
So is this a bug, or is it a 'feature' - a true representation of WYSIWYG in action!? heh ;)
FWIW I regularly have to open Word files into OpenOffice and resave as ordinary doc files, because the docx format appears to be borked in MSOffice. If it weren't for OO I'd be jiggered. So even if you aren't switching everybody to OO as their mainstay office app, it's probably as well giving everybody a copy of it, just to bypass a lot of the bugs in the MS suite.
OO is a pain--crashes for no reason far too often, and formatting (spacing, sizes, positioning) isn't compatible with MS (a document made in OO comes out looking completely different in MS, and vice versa). Don't tell me there's a way to do this by "simply" doing A, B, and G, then standing on my head in the rain facing east on a Tuesday. I'm not a Luddite, but I also don't want to spend hours figuring out to configure the program. I won't buy a car that doesn't work properly until I've spend 10 hours under the hood rebuilding it--why should my standards for software be any less? And I'll be your office is full of people like me who just want their software to work. OO is nowhere near that critical "it just works" level yet.
No-one said you had to DELETE your old versions of Micro$oft just in case you think you will have a 10 year old document or one weird spreadsheet. The question is about the future path and costs. This version has clearly hit prime time, past version just didn't cut it. When in a hole, stop digging!
Surely it's easy to win finance guys over to openoffice. Tell them how much it costs.
if you are upset by people saying microsoft software is a pile of shit, then please don't read this. i don't want your delicate sensitivities to be hurt.
As for my response, I'd have to say that people who convert will be happy with the change. They will be able to exchange documents. They will be able to work the way they prefer. However. Microsoft WILL find a way to make the files your people create incompatible with their software. It won't be a constant incompatibility. It will be for two weeks here and a month there. It will always seem to start on Tuesdays. Yet it will tend to end on the 26-28th. Eventually, your people will be so annoyed with delays some of them will start asking to switch back. You will not feel the pressure to switch until someone very high up will not get an email, 10 seconds after it was sent, with an incompatible 40G .doc attachment. However, that will not be the end of your ability to put up with the bs at your job. That 24 hours will go something like this:
8am. You will increase the document size restrictions on your server.
1pm. The seventh time you explain to the exchange weenie on the other end that he ALSO must increase the maximum document size for the email to get past his server, he will go "oooooh that setting" to someone on the other phone.
4am. The other guy's network will become available again. The outage will be due to a "reboot" policy which for some reason, unknown to you, includes the router, switch, and firewall.
5am. The VIP will call and ask "why isn't the email server on his blackberry working". and "tell me again why we don't have internet for the blackberry at work".
7am. An X coworker will read the resume you shot off to test the email server.
8am. You will have coffee with your new boss.
One thing that burned our test users with Impress is that when images are dragged-and-dropped in, they are linked, not embedded (PowerPoint defaults to embedding). This caused one of our users to take an image-heavy presentation they had carefully assembled and have no images show up on the presentation machine.
When you add images using the menu in Impress (testing with 3.0), you can choose to link or embed, but when dragging-and-dropping, which is what our users were used to, the default is link. This cannot be changed as far as I could determine (see bug 15369).
Impress also converts embedded images to PNG, which can really inflate their size compared to JPG.
I work for a small office who has been working with Office version ranging from word 97 to word 2007. I've had a few problems with the way some documents render but for the most part they are relatively easy to get through. Biggest things that I see people will have problems with are the things they take for granted, Mail merges for example. They are similar but word is more user friendly, no just to be fair I've not looked to see if there are plug ins for mail merging. Excel charts was another thing that I had some problems with, I could view them fine but when I needed to make changes or create new ones its not quite the same. Small Learning curve but nothing too difficult. Reminds me a lot of Office 2003.
JB
http://callthefuture.blogspot.com/2009/01/start-change-yourself.html
check out this blog. It contains some useful information that can guide you throughout the process.