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.)

Comments

OpenXML Plug-In Exists for Novell's OO.o

[eldavojohn]

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.

Re:OpenXML Plug-In Exists for Novell's OO.o

[Tiber]

They fixed it. I'm the Linux Guy at work, and I have to toss together powerpoint presentations.

Specifically what doesn't work:
* Slide transparency isn't supported, so anything you paste into slides will be 100% opaque when opened in MS Office
* Vector art does wild stuff. Whatever coordinate system OO is using, MS isn't. If you use anything that uses vectors, convert them to bitmaps first.

Re:OpenXML Plug-In Exists for Novell's OO.o

[edmicman]

If anything, I would think Office 2000 documents would have a much better chance at being compatible than Office 2003/2007. I've had very few problems with OO opening and working with MS documents. I *have* had problems with Excel formatting Calc docs, though.

Re:OpenXML Plug-In Exists for Novell's OO.o

[ByOhTek]

not far off the ball, but what I'd say:

UI:
MSO 2000 or MSO 2003 -> OO 2 or OO3 is easier than to MSO 2007.

I have had a couple issues.

Supercript: does not transfer well. You end up with the superscripted text way too large (full height, raised by about 1/2 the height of the base text, instead of half height raised by about 1/2 the height of the base text).

Page borders: Opening a word document in OO will open it with page boarders equal to the default of OO, not whatever you saved them as.

Excel comments: I comment cells in excel documents (and other spreadsheets). On any OS I set tooltips to white text, black background. OO opens them with black background and text (I think MS doesn't save a value, and OO uses the default text color with the tooltip background color). If you save it, your tooltips are stuck as black background and text (unreadable).

Re:OpenXML Plug-In Exists for Novell's OO.o

[MadMorf]

Technically it would be binary lob or blob, since binary blob is redundant:)

Well, maybe he's referring to an amorphous object consisting of binary data... :)

Re:OpenXML Plug-In Exists for Novell's OO.o

[Random BedHead Ed]

In my experience, OO.o handles damaged MS Office files far better than MS Office does. I've never known it to fail to open an MS Office 2003 or earlier file, but the formatting can be changed, and of course any VBA in the document is going to be a problem.

This is worth taking into account. I've been saved numerous times by OOo: Word files sometimes refuse to open in Word. And without constant backups, if this were to happen in a monoculture you'd be helpless. Even with backups you stand the risk of losing a revision.

Of course none of this justifies making OOo your primary office suite, just a good backup app. But IMHO, making it your main office suite is a question of how well you can tolerate occasional formatting errors, and how many hundreds of dollars it's worth to avoid them most of the time. Also, keep in mind that after a while all your docs will migrate to ODF, so those formatting errors are temporary.

Re:OpenXML Plug-In Exists for Novell's OO.o

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

On linux there are rendering issues if you have not ms standard true type fonts installed (verdana, tahoma, symbol ...), which btw are available for free.

Re:OpenXML Plug-In Exists for Novell's OO.o

[digitig]

Also, don't compare moving to OpenOffice to Office 2000... Compare it to Office 2007

I think I agree, but I'm confused by the phrasing.
I'd say, compare the transition from Office 2000/2003 to Office2007 to the transition from Office 2000/2003 to OO.o. Users are likely to find the user interface transition much smoother to OO.o, and either transition introduces some file compatibility problems.

Re:OpenXML Plug-In Exists for Novell's OO.o

[Anonymous Coward]

f it was possible to jruy-rig our multifunction copier to work with the color toner cartridges removed, because the cost per page for copying or printing in color was too high, and he didn't trust users to print only in black and white.

This is easily accomplished: If it's PCL-compatible, install the drivers for a black and white only PCL5/6 laser. If it's Postscript-compatible, install the drivers for a black and white only Postscript printer.

Of course, the question becomes: Does the device itself use the black cartridge to render black? Some will use the color cartridges to render black by default unless you override it at the printer.

Then you have to deal with the people that will install their own printer drivers... which you can't stop easily if the users have Administrator rights to their local computers or have access to a local Administrator account.

All in all it's generally not worth the amount of time it takes to set it up, and it sounds to me like there's a beancounter in your company with too much time on his/her hands. A better solution would be to purchase a low-end workgroup class black and white only laser printer, set it up and be done with it.

Of course, you should be encouraging people not to print hard copies unless absolutely necessary...

Re:OpenXML Plug-In Exists for Novell's OO.o

[duguk]

Try opening a Microsoft Publisher* document from Office 2000 in Microsoft Publisher 2003. It usually crashes the whole application, and always fails to open it. Not tried in Microsoft Office 2007 yet.

For the article, I'd suggest just keeping one copy of Microsoft Office 2003/2007 on one machine just in case of problems, and teach your users how to convert between MS Office and OpenOffice. I don't honestly have many problems with OpenOffice aside from margins going a little weird once from MS Word.

* Never used it myself. Used to work in a school.

Re:OpenXML Plug-In Exists for Novell's OO.o

[sameerds]

Correction. Go-OO is not just some improved version, it is the the official version that you get in a number of distributions these days. Check their downloads page ... Debian, Ubuntu and Gentoo carry it as the official "openoffice" package in their own repositories. And as far as I can make out, that is the case with openSUSE too.

Re:OpenXML Plug-In Exists for Novell's OO.o

[weijiao]

This is a good analysis. Don't listen to the guys below who are just saying YES RAH RAH OPEN SOURCE and who have never worked in IT or had to deal with managers howling at them when a 10 year old document won't open correctly in a new software package. I love open source too, but let's be realistic here.

I think I am realistic. As is often the case, there is no one answer that will be correct. OOo is a little different from Msoffice. Just as each version of Msoffice is a little different from the one before. We are using OOo 2.4.

We have 20 or so desktops running linux and have been using OOo for the past 6 years. We routinely exchange documents with clients, but in circumstances where we usually run the master. Where it is necessary, for others to edit the digital file we just save to word format and send it off.

The real answer to your question depends upon how you use MS Office. If your people use every formatting and macro that is available, you are more likely to have problems in exchanging documents with others â" even in Msword. If your documents are relatively simple there will be few problems. A key point is that you can get a version of OOo and try it to see how the documents actually in use fare with it.

If most of your documents are for internal use in digital form you will have few issues in changing. If most off your documents are not subject to being reviewed and changed by others your people will fall in love with the save to pdf feature that OOo has. We send out in pdf whenever we can.

We use the spreadsheet, drawing and presentation features, but mainly for internal use, not for exchange with others. They do all that we require, but the bulk of our work is documents.

FWIW many of our documents are large, typically >30 pages; we extensively track changes; we work in two languages â" English and Chinese, and we have relatively few issues. Anyone familiar with using Msword will know that on large documents like ours, it will tend to fail to a corrupted binary file. The most recent versions may be different, but I have used it from the days of Word 5 in dos.

Don't think about changing everyone all at once. Change the easy ones and the key users. Once you get traction the rest will follow.

Short and long answers?

[Lumpy]

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.

Re:Short and long answers?

[Lumpy]

I always deal with managers like you. In fact one, just like you, was encouraged to leave that did put up a big fuss. When we did the transition here to OO.o away from MS office. His complaints were all for HIS scripts he wrote in Excel and Access. we told him he could stick with Office 2003 and he complained that he NEEDED the office 2007 upgrades. His scripts saved HIM time and were not useful for anyone else in the company. they could have stayed at Office 2003 for the next 56 years just fine...

Yes my point of View, after it was discussed with the rest of the upper management and then researched fully, and then finally made as a decision based on cost and benefits, is the only valid one. The desires of a sales person that is doing 25% of what he did 2 years ago are not important when we saved nearly $15,000 from the switch. 1 year later.. .ZERO problems.

So I am an authority on this, and it seems that you are one of those typical loudmouths in the meetings about change that really have nothing to back up what he is complaining about.

P.S. I'm the type of guy that gives IT MANAGERS a bad name. I've been in upper IT management for 3 years now.

Probably Not

[TheRealMindChild]

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.

Macros

[Enderandrew]

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.

Re:Macros

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft's constantly changing file format forces the world to upgrade.

That may have been true in the past, but the office 2007 compatibility pack is wonderful to open office 2007 files with office 2003, office xp or office 2000.

It's so good, that my company feels no need to upgrade to office 2007.

i don't see any problem

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

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.

Yes, but no.

[CannonballHead]

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.

docx seems to work

[fermion]

I use OO.org 3.0 and MS Office, not 2007. I am becoming increasingly happy with OO.org and see little need for MS Office.

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.

Yes, yes, and yes.

[mlwmohawk]

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.

Training

[AviLazar]

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.

Re:Go-OO is NOT for production

[Enderandrew]

Funny. SLES ships with a Go-OO build. Many distros use the Go-OO branch in their stable releases that they advertise for production use.

There is an unstable branch of Go-OO, and there are stable releases of Go-OO. Obviously, I'd suggest you use the stable branch in a production environment.

Success story

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Exploit Open Office improvements

[davide marney]

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.

"Some of my word files don't work right"

[Bob the Hamster]

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")

Re:Why not both?

[Spittoon]

So those people who depend on weird MS Office features never give the documents they create to anyone else to view?

Seems like that's the real issue-- whether or not you create documents using edge features, you will occasionally be called upon to view one.

At the point where OO.o lets the user down to the extent that she can't get the information she needs (as opposed to a little big of rendering oddity), she'll abandon ship real fast out of sheer self-preservation.

You can't dictate which features in Office to use. So if *anybody* in your company is using a different office suite, there will be problems with translation eventually. Following Murphy's law, it will be when you're trying to demonstrate the validity of your business case to the CEO.

Office 2007 GUI remedy

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

What kind of answer do you want?

[FatherOfONe]

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.