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

[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

[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.

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.

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.

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.