SoftMaker Office 2008 vs. OpenOffice.org 3.1

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy examines would-be Microsoft Office competitors SoftMaker Office and OpenOffice.org and finds the results surprising. OpenOffice.org — frequently cited as the most viable Office competitor — has pushed for Office interoperability in version 3.1, adding import support for files in Office 2007's native Open XML format. But, as Kennedy found in Office-compatibility testing, that support remains mostly skin deep. 'Factor in OpenOffice's other well-documented warts — buggy Java implementation, CPU-hogging auto-update system, quirky font rendering — and it's easy to see why the vast majority of IT shops continue to reject this pretender to the Microsoft Office throne,' Kennedy writes. SoftMaker Office, however, 'shows that good things often still come in small packages.' Geared more toward mobile computing, the suite's 'compact footprint and low overhead make it ideal for underpowered systems, and its excellent compatibility with Office 2003 file formats means it's a safe choice for heterogeneous environments where external data access isn't a priority.'" Note that SoftMaker Office is not free software — it costs $79.95 — and there is no version for Macintosh.

Comments

History

[googlesmith123]

One of the coolest things about german Softmaker is the software they made for the old Windows CE platforms like my old HPC ïHP Jornada 680. This included Word that could actually edit MS Word files and Excel that did something more than just display data.

Re:History

[googlesmith123]

If anyone cares. The software for Windows CE by Softmaker was called "Textmate" and "Planmaker", for word and excel (in that order).

Re:History

[googlesmith123]

TextMaker

Re:History

[davester666]

Um, everybody contracts "Windows CE" to just "wince", for obvious reasons.

Re:History

[dotancohen]

TextMaker

TextMaker and especially PlanMaker are great software. Even on Linux, those used to MS Excel can perform 99% of the special functions in Excel, I'm talking about those Excel-abuses that you read about on thedailywtf every so often. The program only has two major flaws that I could find:

1) It feels like Wine or Java. It does not use the system's open / save dialogues, system colours or other settings, etc. The open / save dialogues are so bad that they are deal breakers for me. While I would prefer that they use the native KDE dialogues as even OOo has found a way to do that in Kubuntu, even the crappy GTK dialogues would suffice.

2) Terrible unicode support! This, from a non-American vendor, who's native language includes characters outside of ASCII. That is completely unacceptable. RTL support is non-existent in TextMaker and PlanMaker, which is a deal breaker for Hebrew, Farsi, and Arabic speakers. That's only about one third of the worlds's population which cannot use the software due to RTL issues, and of the remainder 95% will have unicode problems.

Even if they take care of those issues, the OOo mailing list support is terrific. I am a casual user, I do not have the time nor patience to learn the office suite inside and out. But if I cannot find what I need in ten minutes of googling and RTFM, the OOo mailing list is very friendly and often come up with very creative solutions. That alone is enough to keep me using their arguably inferior product. And OOo 3.1 really isn't that bad. I know of at least 20 MS Office users who have switched to OOo due to it's rather intuitive interface.

Re:History

[temcat]

BTW, what version of Softmaker Office do you refer to?

What timing

[Rei]

I've been dealing with a rash of OpenOffice compatibility problems with MS Office that I hope don't cause my business plan to bomb in a local business plan competition. I've been discovering that the way it saves .doc files doesn't quite match with how MS Office reads them, so things end up misaligned - tables broken up, images out of place, etc. And don't even get me started on docx... I'm going to try to get a revised (MS Office-saved) version in, but I hope it's not too late.

Re:What timing

[gbarules2999]

To be fair, I had one Word project crumble because the damn program wasn't compatible with itself, after five minutes of sitting around. This is something even Microsoft can't get right 100% of the time.

I think the author's overstating OO.o's negatives a bit, but that's just me. I like the way it highlights text better.

Re:What timing

[mpapet]

I've been discovering that the way it saves .doc files doesn't quite match with how MS Office reads them

Hahaha!!! Microsoft is no better at retaining formatting than OpenOffice. I had one particularly wasteful work day attempting to edit a complex Word doc with embedded images, tables authored on Mac with French as the default language. We were each on different versions of Office too. The language of the document was Fr-english, so I was supposed to clean up the language a little.

I spent Hours spent attempting to keep the document open long enough to get the information out of it before it would crash Word again. Hours!!!!!

Do yourself and them a favor and send them a PDF. They'll think you are a big-shot with your Adobe Acrobat software and everything!!!

Re:What timing

[Jim Hall]

I've been dealing with a rash of OpenOffice compatibility problems with MS Office that I hope don't cause my business plan to bomb in a local business plan competition. I've been discovering that the way it saves .doc files doesn't quite match with how MS Office reads them, so things end up misaligned - tables broken up, images out of place, etc. And don't even get me started on docx... I'm going to try to get a revised (MS Office-saved) version in, but I hope it's not too late.

BTW, the problem is just as bad with Microsoft Word rendering other Microsoft Word files. Just this morning, I saw this example in action in a meeting.

Last night, one of the attendees sent out some notes for us to read before the meeting. We all dutifully printed out our copy of the doc, and brought it with us to the meeting.

Despite the fact that we all run Microsoft Office (yes, the document was created with Microsoft Office) there were 3 different versions of the printed doc at the meeting. You could tell by looking around that one version of the doc (printed from Microsoft Office for Macintosh) was aligned in a weird way when moving text around a table. Another version of the doc (Microsoft Office 2007) put a pagebreak in a different spot than everyone else's copy, and put an extra blank line between a table and its caption. This was a 3-page doc with an enumerated list of paragraphs, so differences were easy to spot when looking around the table.

This was a Word document in plain DOC format, not DOCX.

If you have a document that absolutely must preserve formatting, send it as a PDF.

Re:What timing

[IntlHarvester]

To be fair, I had one Word project crumble because the damn program wasn't compatible with itself, after five minutes of sitting around. This is something even Microsoft can't get right 100% of the time.

I've been using Word for like 20 years, and this has happened maybe once or twice.

"Word isn't perfect so you might as well gamble on OpenOffice" is a frequently used argument, but not a very compelling one.

Re:What timing

[SparkEE]

Does the competition actually require you to send in your plan as a .doc file? You should be able to send it in as a pdf or postscript.

It just always really irks me that people ask for finished documents in an editor's format. If people would just stop having this dumb expection, then it wouldn't matter if my tool of choice was Word, Ooo, Pages, Correl, html, or LaTex. They're all able to send out postscript files, and usually able to generate pdf these days.

The only time .doc files should be getting sent around is within a single team or corporation, where you have a reasonable expection that your coworkers have the same program available that you do.

Re:What timing

[datapharmer]

The proper rendering of documents is one of the main reasons PDF was created. If they require that you submit in some proprietary format that has known problems with rendering that shouldn't count against you. oh wait - its a BUSINESS competition... never mind.

Re:What timing

[Cornelius the Great]

I use Word at work for engineering requirements and software documentation and it's a common occurrence- I've seen several instances of making a small change (no formatting), saving it, and reopening it to find the formatting completely corrupted. Furthermore, while Office 2007 has fixed many of the formatting issues I saw in 2003, it's equally frustrating when docs (not docx files, but plain old ".doc") would display differently between 2003 and 2007 (half of the office hasn't made the switch yet).

This means that only the 2-3 developers who have Word 2007 installed can officially save and commit changes to our official process documents and software documentation.

Say what you will about OpenOffice- they at least can maintain consistent tabs across different versions.

Re:What timing

[gbarules2999]

I've been using Word for like 20 years, and this has happened maybe once or twice.

Lucky you. Too bad I run into that issue on a regular basis every time I go print something by one of the nearby libraries or computer labs. What a nightmare.

"Word isn't perfect so you might as well gamble on OpenOffice" is a frequently used argument, but not a very compelling one.

Neither is "OpenOffice isn't perfect so you might as well just forget about it and pay the money for Word."

I have no problems with anyone using either program; use what works for you. It just not fair to pick on one for having the same exact problem as the other with incompatibility.

Re:What timing

[WitheringtonSmythe]

That is not being fair that is assuming a pretty unusual bug is the same thing as a general incompatibility which is really stupid.

Re:What timing

[the_womble]

I agree. If people do not need to edit your document a PDF looks MUCH better, and it will always look the same - no worrying about different versions etc.

Re:What timing

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Microsoft has continued to make things incompatible, even if ever so slightly. And not just with competitors, but with their own software, forcing people to buy their latest and greatest.

And then people blame the other software manufacturers, and buy Microsoft's latest.

Nothing new here, move along.

Re:What timing

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used MS Office and OpenOffice for about a decade each, and I've had this problem maybe four or five times in each application. Using either application when correct rendering matters is a gamble, in my opinion.

Re:What timing

[fermion]

This is a valid concern, but is not really an issue with the office suite. If the goal is consistent display across products, this will never happen with any office product. There is simply little incentive. Any software developer is going to want all users to use their product, at the latest version. There is almost no incentive to build interoperability outside of the proprietary suite. This is the primary reason why I stopped using MS Office. I would send stuff out, and people, who were using a more recent version, could not read my files. Since they were the customer, it was my responsibility to upgrade, but I did not have the money. The solution was to move OO.org which was more likely to be able to write files in whatever version of MS Office the customer was using.

The issue really is the state of MS Office as a defacto standard, which really never really existed because there is no cross platform year after year guarantee that files will remain accessible. The way to insure that formating will remain constant across platform and through time, at least so far, is the PDF file. I laugh every time I get a .doc memo. I think how simple it would be to change the memo slightly, spoof the address, and get someone in trouble. MS Office security is not nearly as secure as Adobe PDF.

Back to the subject. PDF is a better way to exchange files, as long as they do not need to be edited. MS can provide a superior solution where files are edited. HTML is also good for distribution of files. I have also taken to converting my presentations into HTML or flash. Again, I see all these presentations on the web. Change the presentation, hack, upload, frivolity ensues.

My current situation is that I have machines that run MS Office 2003, and other runs later versions. The later versions tend to bork the 2003 files, and I will not even deal with the later version in 2003. I have OO.org installed, and if 2003 will not work I use OO.org.

Re:What timing

[Abreu]

use PDF

Re:What timing

[hedwards]

One shouldn't ever use DOCs for that sort of thing, ever. I thought everybody realized what a security problem they were years ago. Beyond that there's the compatibility headaches and requiring people to us a compatible office suite.

At this stage, I'm not sure that ODF is any better, but I've pretty much always had good luck using RTFs. And PDFs are great if you're just wanting them to print them.

Re:What timing

[Anonymous Coward]

Unusual bugs that break HTML/CSS/etc in web browsers are considered compatibility issues, why not apply the same standard to document editors?

Re:What timing

[Rei]

Whoa! I'm "Flamebait" for reporting the problems I've had with OpenOffice compatibility with MS Office, on an article about OpenOffice compatibility with MS Office?

Wow, tough crowd.

Re:What timing

[MightyMartian]

The key lesson here is that where two or more people are going to be working on a document, it's a very good idea that they all be using the same software and same version of that software. Even mixing in matching between, say, Office 2007 and Office XP can lead to formatting issues.

"Interoperability" is not a strong suit of any of office suite I've seen. Even RTF can be mangled if you're working with different versions.

Re:What timing

[jonbryce]

The common reason I find for people emailing word documents is when they are negotiating contracts. Then you see .docs being emailed between the parties and their advisers, with people suggesting various changes to the document. The final version will generally be distributed in pdf, but the discussion drafts need to be in word format so people can make changes to it.

Re:What timing

[Rei]

They like them in .doc so that they can play with embedded spreadsheets for financial statements and balance sheets.

Re:What timing

[BikeHelmet]

I've found OpenOffice to be quite consistent with Word 2000 and 2003 for simple formatting. Never tested it against Word 2007, but your point about different versions of Office is totally valid.

Re:What timing

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Personally, I find the whole "it slightly reformats my text" argument less than compelling anyway, regardless of which office suite is being advocated at the time.

For 99% of the cases, it doesn't matter. Heck, anyone who works in a company with both US and European offices probably gets their documents reformatted between A4 and US Letter paper sizes fairly often, and that's particularly amusing since many of them will only ever be displayed on-screen where such sizes are pretty bad for readability anyway.

For the other 1% of cases, well, that's what PDF is for.

Re:What timing

[thethibs]

Nah. The problem is that there's no "-1 Disagree" mod, so people too stupid to frame an intelligible response use "troll" or "flamebait" as a kind of disapproving grunt.

Re:What timing

[Capsaicin]

I've been using Word for like 20 years, and this has happened maybe once or twice.

The mind boggles! What have you been using it for?

The Windows box I keep on the desk next to me has three versions of Word on it (Word95, Word97 and WordXP) just to deal with issues with legacy VB scripts and wild differences in the various formats saves out to (eg html).

Re:What timing

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been dealing with a rash of OpenOffice compatibility problems with MS Office that I hope don't cause my business plan to bomb in a local business plan competition. I've been discovering that the way it saves .doc files doesn't quite match with how MS Office reads them, so things end up misaligned - tables broken up, images out of place, etc. And don't even get me started on docx... I'm going to try to get a revised (MS Office-saved) version in, but I hope it's not too late.

BTW, the problem is just as bad with Microsoft Word rendering other Microsoft Word files.

This is of the course the heart of the problems with OpenOffice.org; Microsoft Office compatibility. When you strive to be compatible with an enormous, twisted, inconsistent, poorly designed and abominably implemented bug, well, you have no choice but to be a bug. Worse, the bug is a constantly moving target to ensure that even relatively clean and architected "bug emulation" becomes twisted and destructive after a while.

What we need is something completely different. But it's already been pretty much proven that nothing that's not compatible has a chance because of Microsoft's monopoly-driven stranglehold. Catch-22. Either you die (or eke out your life in a small niche, as many do), or you mutate and grow into an enormous ugly bug that can never have quite the same properties as the monster it strives to exceed.

Still, given the choice between an enormous ugly expensive bug and an enormous (and albeit slightly more ugly) free bug... I'll go for the free bug. OpenOffice.org ain't all that bad... for the price.

Re:What timing

[santix]

You can save as PDF and, provided the computer in which you want to print has a reader installed, you can forget about those problems. I always do that.

Re:What timing

[Anonymous Coward]

I've found that Word reformats the document according to the particular printer it's printed on. This can cause soft page breaks to relocate just because you use a different printer, and I imagine it can cause text flow around an image to change, also. ( I don't know about the difference between Word for MAc and Word for Windows.)

I've also found that different versions of Word handle things like "smart[sic] quotes" differently from each other, even things like apostrophes and ampersands can be rendered as "@" or "=" or "?" when switching between Office XP and Office 2003.

Re:What timing

[1u3hr]

I hope don't cause my business plan to bomb in a local business plan competition.

So print to PDF. No reflow, nothing moves around in that. Or do thay actually require you to use Microsoft formats? That would be a whole can of worms even if everyone did use MS--versions, fonts, etc.

Re:What timing

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with that one. At work, we've got both the Mac and Windows versions of MS Office (2003) and even between similar years they don't preserve formatting well.

Re:What timing

[Kalriath]

On both sides of the fence, too.

Re:What timing

[Daengbo]

"Redundant" or "Overrated" are more common these days since they don't get meta-moderated.

Re:What timing

[Dan541]

I export to PDF as well, its a solution that works but it's still a pain in the ass to do.

Re:What timing

[Dan541]

In deed that is the entire purpose behind PDF, it is a finished copy.
However I still get people who think it is a good idea to edit PDF files and re-save them.

You cannot cater for all stupidity.

Re:What timing

[IntlHarvester]

Lucky you. Too bad I run into that issue on a regular basis every time I go print something by one of the nearby libraries or computer labs. What a nightmare.

True that Word reformats documents for different printer targets. However in business environments, almost everyone is using an HP LaserJet, so practically for me this has never been a huge issue.

Re:What timing

[IntlHarvester]

I'm certainly not using Word for programming or generating HTML ;p

Re:What timing

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything I send on that I want to be displayed correctly on the target's computer screen, I save as PDF from OO.o. Then again, I rarely send docs that need to be edited, just ones that need to be viewed, so YMMV.

Re:What timing

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you hand in a source document anyways - this is what PDF was made for.

Re:What timing

[sandGorgons]

i have managed to get meetings to Top-3 VC firms, using OpenOffice PDF export. Note that I used them for both plans as well as presentations - PDF does work on full-screen presentation mode beautifully. I dont use animations for VC presentations anyway.

I actually deliver my presentations from my Ubuntu laptop *exclusively* using PDF's. I have had the accident of moving around a picture from the presentation once and I could not get the placement back (undo :( ) and it didnt look too good.

Also pdf's have the advantage of printing exactly the way they look - on a mac or windows (VC's dont use linux).

Re:What timing

[Anonymous Coward]

Real heroes use LaTeX
That may be a troll... but it's easy to perform version control on TeX doc's, and formatting rarely messes up. Plus they look nice and professional

Re:What timing

[ska,id]

I've been using Word for like 20 years, and this has happened maybe once or twice.

We had plenty of templates for Word 95, all of them had to be recreated for Office 2000. All of them had to be recreated for Office 2007. None of them could be just used.

There is no compatible .DOC file.

This is also true for OpenOffice 2.4, no .DOC template could be just used; but any templates I made for OpenOffice1 or StarOffice 4,5,&7 look the same in OpenOffice 2.4, if the same fonts are available.

Re:What timing

[salarelv]

Try coping text from PDF's. It's sometimes impossible.

Re:What timing

[Haeleth]

It's never impossible if the PDF was created directly from a word processor document, and the creator didn't take deliberate action to make it impossible.

And, conversely, it is trivial to produce a Word document from which it is impossible to copy the text.

In short, the problem is not PDF.

Re:What timing

[Anonymous Coward]

If you factor in other formats, the problem gets worse. A friend e-mailed me a copy of a letter he had written to our local MP for me to comment. For some reason, he used MS Works to produce the file, and didn't use the MS Word which comes with Works, but instead used the built in Works word processor application.

After attempting to open the file in two different versions of MS Office and downloading two different file converters from Microsoft without success, I decided as a last resort to try and open it using OpenOffice on my Linux machine, not thinking for a second it was anything but a forlorn exercise. OpenOffice identified it as a Microsoft Office file and opened it without any fuss.

Re:What timing

[SpooForBrains]

Lately we've been seeing problems where Microsoft's own document converters cock up the layouts of documents, when converting them from docx so that Word 2003 can open them. This is the Microsoft solution for opening docx in 2003.

If they can't get it right, then it's not much of a surprise that OpenOffice.org has some issues.

Re:What timing

[Capsaicin]

I'm certainly not using Word for programming or generating HTML ;p

Ah yes ... wordprocessing! I've heard that some folks use Word for that. ;)

Re:What timing

[dotancohen]

That's why you never, ever send documents meant for reading in Word format, only PDF. Even different versions of MSO on different hardware will make a difference. Even a different printer driver installed can make MSO documents appear differently! MSO, OOo, and other word processors are designed for creating documents for print. Collaboration and other features have been tacked on over the years, but they are usually used in homogeneous environments, business where everyone is on the same hardware.

When you send a document for reading, send it in PDF. Any OS, even a cellular phone, can read it and display it exactly as you intended.

Re:What timing

[Lord Bitman]

How about "it completely mangles my text when I use formatting as exotic as a bullet-point"?

I'd rather write my resume in HTML than OpenOffice

Re:What timing

[donaldm]

Does the competition actually require you to send in your plan as a .doc file? You should be able to send it in as a pdf or postscript.

When you send a information to anyone that you don't want changed you should never send that information in a format that can easily be modified. Sending in PostScript is not really appropriate either since PostScript can easily be modified as well. PDF is by far the best method for the above.

In a collaborative project plain text can be ok since this easily lends itself to version control, however this depends on what the project leader has dictated. In many cases even project leaders don't know the basics of version control relying on the so called catch all of Microsoft Office which to them is "good enough". Don't get me started on "SharePoint" which as far as I am concerned is a good concept (not unique though) but horrible when there is no policy on managing it.

The only time .doc files should be getting sent around is within a single team or corporation, where you have a reasonable expection that your coworkers have the same program available that you do.

I agree with the single team although I normally send ASCII but if you have a large corporation you can still have problems. Actually large corporation normally send web based documents.

Re:What timing

[grahamm]

What we need is something completely different. But it's already been pretty much proven that nothing that's not compatible has a chance because of Microsoft's monopoly-driven stranglehold. Catch-22. Either you die (or eke out your life in a small niche, as many do), or you mutate and grow into an enormous ugly bug that can never have quite the same properties as the monster it strives to exceed.

I suspect that much the same thing was said about compatibility with WordPerfect before it lost out, almost overnight, to Microsoft Word.

Re:What timing

[Anonymous Coward]

Even funnier : I have used OO.o quite a few time to rescue an MS Office document no one was able to open. OO.o support for MS file formats is not perfect, but its ironically still better than MS'.

Re:What timing

[JazzLad]

In Word, yes, not in OO.o ;)

Yet another reason to not pay for MS Office

(que the replies that say you can with a PDF printer, yes, of course you can do that)

Re:What timing

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Yes, that's a more serious problem. Then again, both MS Office and OpenOffice have always sucked at formatting lists and automatic numbering, and for some reason I can't fathom, neither development group has ever shown much interest in fixing it.

Re:What timing

[FrankieBaby1986]

Simple solution for you (what I do at college): Use PDF for what it was designed for. A presentation format. If the intended audience needs to see it as you intended it, and need not edit it, just export as PDF. Or send in the native ODF. If they can't accept a file in one of these ISO formats, then they have serious problems. Be the example of how not to be a slave to MS.

Re:What timing

[Dan541]

I use OO.o but my university uses MS Office so if I want to print off their computers I need to export all my documents as PDF beforehand. It's trivial but still irritates me.

Re:What timing

[lahvak]

...since PostScript can easily be modified as well. PDF is by far the best method for the above.

And what exactly makes pdf harder to modify than postscript?

I agree with you that pdf is better choice for sharing document than postscript, but the reason has nothing to do with how hard or easy are they to modify.

Re:What timing

[JumpDrive]

This is one of the reasons which got us started uninstalling 2007.

Re:What timing

[Anonymous Coward]

At least OpenOffice is trying to be compatible with Microsoft office. Microsoft as far as I know is not trying to be able to read and write open office formats.

Also, OpenOffice is open source. That means we can all help fix it.
Microsoft however is closed source,

Last comment, that SoftMaker office is 80 $, Why would I want to use this when Microsoft Office is about the same price, and OpenOffice is free???

Re:What timing

[Tanktalus]

You have to submit in .doc? Why not PDF? Ouch.

Re:What timing

[sglines]

I've had this happen too. My solution is to open the MS Word doc file in Open Office, save the doc in OO format, Close OO then reopen in a new instance of OO and save again in .doc format. In every case the problems that crashed MS Word (and Adobe InDesign) went away.

Re:What timing

[Anonymous Coward]

I realize you probably have no choice in the matter, but have you tried LyX for writing documentation? It's a structured document editor - basically, a graphical interface for TeX/LaTeX. To be honest, I've only used it a few times (documentation is an afterthought where I work), but I've been very impressed with the results. Of course, as a web developer, I prefer thinking in terms of structure (HTML) vs. presentation (CSS), so LyX is a natural fit. Check the features page for a better overview than I can give you.

KOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

This was not a comparison I was particularly interested in.

Re:KOffice

[Sparr0]

Ditto. Or the Gnome suite (Abiword, Gnumeric, etc). Hell, I still maintain multiple installations of StarOffice. There are so many alternatives out there, but no one ever considers most of them.

Scores: OpenOffice 7.4 vs SoftMaker 7.7

[InsertWittyNameHere]

All that OpenOffice bashing and SoftMaker Office boasting and there's only a negligible scoring difference between them?

From reading the article you'd think OpenOffice was crap (less than 5) and SoftMaker Office was the greatest thing next to sliced bread (8+)...

Re:Scores: OpenOffice 7.4 vs SoftMaker 7.7

[Kjella]

Are we using the reviewer's scale where anything better than notepad is a 4? If so that could actually be a real difference... Anyway, I wasn't aware this company was trying to take on Office so interesting news. A bit of a slashvertisement but it gets very one sided when we get all the OSS releases/raves and nothing else.

Re:Scores: OpenOffice 7.4 vs SoftMaker 7.7

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. Since when was the latest version of MS Office still a contender at all? That ribbon interface did nothing but make the entire app unusable. Sure you can talk about file formats but when it comes to usability OO.org at least makes things simple enough that power users aren't forced to relearn basic tasks.

Ever moved to an English-speaking country and been forced to change how you use the words "and" and "the"... no. Because they're so friggin basic that people don't change them for compatibility reasons.

Re:Scores: OpenOffice 7.4 vs SoftMaker 7.7

[Daengbo]

I want to know how Softmaker gets an 8 for value and OO.o only gets a 9. It's free (and Free). If the scores are so close, shouldn't OO.o get a 10?

Re:Scores: OpenOffice 7.4 vs SoftMaker 7.7

[sorak]

Sliced bread is an 8? Wow, I always wanted to score with an eight, and now there are a dozen of them in my pantry.

PR pimps + magazine whores = slashvertisements

[__aagujc9792]

Nothing to see here.
--
phunctor

IBM Symphony

[hilather]

Is far superior to either of these. Google it. It has the closest compatibility with microsoft office. I would post a link to it but I'm on my iPhone.

Symphony is free as in beer.

Re:IBM Symphony

[mail2345]

Link for all you lazy people:
http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/home

Re:IBM Symphony

[Abreu]

.nsf/home

For a second I read ".nsf/work"

Re:IBM Symphony

[binarylarry]

It's also... OpenOffice.org based.

Re:IBM Symphony

[Anonymous Coward]

It's available for Macs but heaven help any Mac users who want to use it. After spending much of my own time troubleshooting the problem launching the app with the first Mac release with them they got it fixed only for 1.3 to have the same sort of launch failure problem!

That's OK, for you undaunted masochists! Just download a shell script they uploaded somewhere, chmod 777 in terminal, oh and remember to close Terminal when the script exits (because you launch the script, not the .app package) and you're up and running. Oy vey!

The UI seems promising which makes it such a frustrating product because it is tortuously slow.

I also notice the "thumbnails" don't show anything on the Mac release...

I miss Lotus Smartsuite.

Or Gobe.

Something.

Anything!

I have Microsoft Office 04, tried the Intel Native Office 08 but it was not stable enough so I tossed it over the side.

Most of the time I end up in Numbers and only use Word is I must.

The other day I was trying to look at some US gov't (EPA) stats just posted online. Oops, one set was available in .XLS but most of the data was posted in (send them to Gitmo!) Microsoft Access format! Access? Are you serious? No Access in Mac:Office. Eventually I found a payware ($30) ODBC driver for Access that I could use with FileMaker Pro but since I didn't need this data for any profitable venture, I canned project out of aggravation.

What the hell is the gov't doing publishing data in a format that is available only in a proprietary database form?

Slashvertisment

[R4nm4-kun]

Either I am really stupid (which is possible I won't deny it), or this is clearly a hidden advertisement on Slashdot for SoftMaker Office. To be anywhere near a fair comparison they should have included IBM Lotus Symphony, KOffice, StarOffice and others. Not compare OpenOffice to some commercial product I don't think many people ever heard about.

I don't understand why this has made it to the frontpage.

Re:Slashvertisment

[Zantetsuken]

Also, they should have included Go-OpenOffice, as this is what is in most mainstream GNU/Linux distro repositories and not the vanilla OpenOffice that you download from Sun. Also, as you mentioned comparing with IBM Lotus Symphony, they should mention that it's based on the older OpenOffice 1.1.4 due to that being the last version the upstream with a particular dual license of LGLP and one of Sun's licenses...

Re:Slashvertisment

[Mystra_x64]

That's rather pathetic way of showing advertisement for those who turn their JS off and have /.s "Ads Disabled" option on...

Re:Slashvertisment

[R4nm4-kun]

I have JS and Ads on, because I want to contribute a bit back, so I don't understand why I'm being "punished" like this (just using Opera with some custom filters, guess it's blocking some of the ads, so funny sig btw). But really, I'm quite upset right now, I hope this is the last time I'll see something like this, or I'm considering not "seeing" Slashdot anymore.
I might also be subjective, I really like OpenOffice.

Re:Slashvertisment

[Enderandrew]

Mod parent up, please.

Re:Slashvertisment

[Tablizer]

Either I am really stupid (which is possible I won't deny it), or this is clearly a hidden advertisement on Slashdot for SoftMaker Office.

Keep in mind that these are not necessarily mutually-exclusive conditions ;-)
           

Re:Slashvertisment

[Mystra_x64]

Well, since I have mostly have javascript turned off (for all sites) I selected "Ads Disabled" I don't see then anyway so I might reduce some traffic for servers. // Sig is unfortunate truth...

Skin deep?

[DrXym]

I haven't had any trouble with any MS Office files I've thrown at OpenOffice. Granted I mostly open MS Word documents but they've all opened fine. Far more impressive to me was when I dug out an MS Office for Mac file from about 15 years ago and THAT opened in OpenOffice even though MS Word for Windows wouldn't have anything to do with it.

So while I'm sure there are certain files which don't convert well I've been extremely happy with OpenOffice's support so far. I'm less happy about the general level of bloat and lower level of usability that comes with the product. I can't help wonder who thought it would be a great idea to toss in Python, Java, StarBasic and god knows what other runtimes into this app. There is a very cobbled together feel about the whole thing.

Re:Skin deep?

[Registered Coward v2]

I haven't had any trouble with any MS Office files I've thrown at OpenOffice. Granted I mostly open MS Word documents but they've all opened fine. Far more impressive to me was when I dug out an MS Office for Mac file from about 15 years ago and THAT opened in OpenOffice even though MS Word for Windows wouldn't have anything to do with it.

So while I'm sure there are certain files which don't convert well I've been extremely happy with OpenOffice's support so far. I'm less happy about the general level of bloat and lower level of usability that comes with the product. I can't help wonder who thought it would be a great idea to toss in Python, Java, StarBasic and god knows what other runtimes into this app. There is a very cobbled together feel about the whole thing.

OTOH, I've had nothing but problems with OO and NeoOffice when it come to Powerpoint. They both mangle relatively simple files with embedded tables;to the point that the trouble to fix them is not worth the few hundred bucks it costs to Office for the Mac.

If you only use OO or Neo it's not really a problem, and I use and recommend Neo for someone looking for a good office suite and does not need to collaborate with MS Office users. I think its great for college students; especially since it's free and saves in MS file formats for when you turn in assignments.

If you need seamless MS Office interoperablity stick with MS Office./P.

Re:Skin deep?

[demachina]

The problem isn't really OpenOffice handling Word doc files. The problem is more if you produce a Word doc file in Open Office and send it to someone using Office it usually looks like crap to them. If you create the documeny, publish it as PDF and send it to someone on Windows, then you are fine. The problem arises if you actually have to share an editable .doc file with someone using MS Office. In that case Open Office is usually pretty much a fail, especially if the document is non trivial, with complex formatting, pictures or diagrams.

I don't necessarily fault the Open Office developers for this, I'm sure Microsoft makes it as hard on them as they possible can.

But, all of the open source fanboys who say OpenOffice has no problem interoperating with Word are simply wrong. Until and unless Open Office can interchange doc files with Word seamlessly its going to have serious problems gaining acceptance in the business world. Microsoft knows that, they know the network is working in their favor in holding their monopoly on office software. They sure aren't going to make it any easier on Open Office to send doc files to Word. I wouldn't be surprised if MS Office detects characteristics of Open Office produced doc files and intentionally mangles them.

Re:Skin deep?

[McBeer]

I haven't had any trouble with any MS Office files I've thrown at OpenOffice. Granted I mostly open MS Word documents but they've all opened fine.

Office -> OO works better then OO -> Office. It really doesn't work either way if you attempt to use more complex tables, graphics, OLE, and such. When I was in college, I set my sister and girlfriend up with OO since I couldn't afford Office. Both of them were reduced to tears at least once trying to get OO to do what they wanted (often times what they wanted was for it to inter operate with Office). I now have a job and bought them both office. No more tears.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Value

[Anonymous Coward]

They gave OpenOffice.org only a 9 out of 10 in value? Isn't value what you get for your money? It's still free right?

Re:Value

[Cornelius the Great]

Generally yes- the software is free. But to businesses paying salaried workers, throwing in free software that takes additional time and effort to learn can end up costing you more in the long run.

For the average geek and quick-learner, free software is worthwhile. For computer-illiterates, "free" can be an oxymoron.

Re:Value

[dangitman]

No, value is about much more than money. Something can be free of cost, but still have negative value if it's a pain in the ass.

Re:Value

[hedwards]

Have you tried the last few versions of MS Office? I mean seriously, the amount of training it would take somebody to go from Office XP to OO.org is less than the amount that would be required to make the switch to the current version of MS Office. At least at the default, there may be a way that I don't know about to give it older UI.

Trust me, those folks are going to have a lot more trouble trying to follow MS as it innovates its way along.

Re:Value

[Enderandrew]

I would contend taking an Office 2000/2003 user and placing them infront of Office 2007 would require extensive training, where as migrating to OOo is the easier move.

I gave it to my mother and she can just use it.

Why are you calling it an article?

[msimm]

I thought it was an ad?

Competitor Not Clone

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenOffice may be a competitor to Microsoft Office but it is not a clone, and I wish people would stop always expecting it to be a clone.

OpenOffice provides the functionality that any modern office could require, and it does so in its own way. Although MS Office compatibility is provided, that particular feature is not the raison detre of the OpenOffice suite.

Let's start judging OpenOffice on what it can accomplish -- and it can accomplish a lot -- and not on just how it measures up to the Microsoft product.

Re:Competitor Not Clone

[Darkness404]

Thats a nice idea... Unfortunately the only reason for many people to have a word processor is to read/write to Office files. Making the ability to do those crucial.

Re:Competitor Not Clone

[MightyMartian]

You have a very good point. The most important aspect of moving away from one software package to a replacement is that the replacement be able to import the original software's data. So, if you approach OpenOffice.org as a replacement to MS-Word, then you're not really all that worried about whether it can save in MS's doc format, so much as it reads it. Once you've got it into OO.org, then it seems rational that one would start using ODF file formats, rather than expecting OO.org to support not only the proprietary MS doc format, but also the underlying object model.

That being said, on the computers that I manage which are for public use, I have OO.org configured to save to MS formats by default. There are problems, but my attitude is that if these folks want to open and save their Word 2003 documents flawlessly, then they can go buy their own copy.

Internally, I use ODF almost exclusively, and I simply don't have these issues.

Answer..

[msimm]

Kdawson, boner, cute girl in advertising. And that's the optimistic version!

Re:Answer..

[Sponge Bath]

And that's the optimistic version!

You think it's improbable Kdawson can get a boner?

Re:Answer..

[hedwards]

Well, he certainly seems to make a lot of them. Perhaps it's a picture of Kdawson in the advert.

Evermore is another.

[LikwidCirkel]

I've only tried Evermore Office, which is a near-perfect Chinese MS Clone that retails for $15 or $50 for the enterprise version. It even runs on Linux and possibly Mac. It works for me, but I still keep wishing there were a better free solution, because I really don't like OpenOffice.org, but I still use it for basic stuff.

Re:Evermore is another.

[Enderandrew]

Evermore looks like it might be based off of OpenOffice 1, like IBM Lotus Symphony was.

Why pay $80 when you can get Office for $50

[Anonymous Coward]

So I can buy Softmake Office, a MS Word clone, for 80 bucks. Or I can wait for a sale and pick up MS Student and Home for 50 bucks and I get 3 licenses for that price...

Thanks but I'll stay with the free OpenOffice or I'll drop 50 bucks on the real deal.

Re:Why pay $80 when you can get Office for $50

[westlake]

I can wait for a sale and pick up MS Student and Home for 50 bucks and I get 3 licenses for that price...

If you are a student with an .edu address you can have it all for $60. The Ultimate Steal

If your employer participates in Microsoft's Home User program, it's all yours on disk for the price of S&H.

These are just three of the reasons why the free-as-in-beer office suite just doesn't generate all that much excitement.

Re:Why pay $80 when you can get Office for $50

[jpkeating]

I am pleased to see SoftMaker get some recognition. I've used OpenOffice.org since the early days of StarOffice, and have tried every GUI editor available for Linux. SoftMaker's suite is worth the money. I've bought it twice (the original TextMaker, and the 2006 suite), and will buy it again. TextMaker (the only member of the suite I use) is easy to use, has everything I need and more, and works well with Word formats. I only use OpenOffice when I have to make a document that uses Japanese and also requires formatting. Kennedy is right about OpenOffice's weakness. Not long ago I tried to make a document containing Machu Picchu pictures gleaned off the Web, with identifying captions. Just two to four photos on a page, with captions, so I could print out the set I had collected. OpenOffice failed utterly. Making captions was difficult, and it kept crashing. After each crash, photos would be distorted or missing. It couldn't properly reopen a document it had made, even one made fresh without a crash. TextMaker 2006 had no such problems. I was amazed that OpenOffice failed on such a simple task. TextMaker does have a number of weaknesses, and I have given SoftMaker feedback on my main gripes and requests. The biggest have to do with encodings and non-European languages. It allegedly can deal with Asian characters, but in practice does not. I have not bought the most recent versions because the older ones (I use two) work just fine for me, and because I am waiting until they iron out their encoding problems. It also has a proprietary file format, which I use only while working on a document; I keep documents for the long term as plain text, or in RTF or PDF format.

Re:Why pay $80 when you can get Office for $50

[Anonymous Coward]

Educational discounts for softmaker: 20 euros, US$ 25, see here . I think I'll check out the trial version and see what it's worth. Unfortunately, though, it's missing support for ODF.

Cripple Fight!

[pankkake]

They both suck.

Re:Why so few contenders?

[datapharmer]

The problem is (A). Not even microsoft has figured out how to do that between versions.

Re:Why so few contenders?

[644bd346996]

While the two aren't 100% mutually exclusive, (a) requires there to be a fair amount of crap in the code. The prior standardization of ODF was far from the only reason people were opposed to the standardization of Microsoft's formats. Even their new XML-based format is a steaming mess, and you can only polish a turd so far...

Re:Why so few contenders?

[Astadar]

It's not hard to write a better one. It's hard to write one that's still compatible with the a) unpublished, b) quirkily implemented, c) voluminous spec that is MS word. At least sufficiently well enough to be a modest replacement.

I'm sure the folks at OO.o have been trying VERY hard to match Word behavior, but it's obviously not that simple.

I've run into several issues where OO.o doesn't render word docs properly and many more where an OO.o saved doc doesn't render properly at all in Word.

A shame, really. But that's the reason that we still have MS Office in the house. My wife and I use it for work just often enough that we can't afford not to have it.

SofMaker

[Brandybuck]

I purchased SofMaker suite since they support FreeBSD. It's decent software, much much lighter in weight in OpenOffice, and free of annoying featuritus. It's chief drawback is its proprietariness. If they ever open sourced it, I would banish OpenOffice forever from my harddrives.

Re:SofMaker

[Hurricane78]

Why would I use a Office suite which is free of features? I mean I want to actually use that think, don't I?

It would be like using Gnome. (Their basic idea was very good. But the implementation is horrible. I'm really objective here. I would have loved for Gnome to also be a software design success.)

When did it happen, that features became somehow uncool to a small but loud subset of the people (I guess)??
Is it perhaps, because the developers of software with features did not get the point of good defaults and how to put the settings dialogs and feature toggles in the background to not disturb newbies and people who are not really using the power? (For whatever reason.)

Re:SofMaker

[jedidiah]

> Why would I use a Office suite which is free of features?

Because your actual requirements are meagre and more resemble the sort
of word processing programs that existed for home computer users before
Word Perfect wannabes became the forced defacto standard.

> When did it happen, that features became somehow uncool to a small but loud subset of the people (I guess)??

Once people realized they were being perpetually charged over and
over again for the same thing and when relatively pointless features
like the macro interpreter became a vector for malware.

Sometimes a simpler device that meets your need is better than using an overpriced corporate tool.

Re:SofMaker

[Brandybuck]

80% of the features in OpenOffice I never use. I suspect that neither do most users. There's also stuff that can be provided by other apps. The Unix philosophy is for small apps that do one thing well, rather than large apps that do everything. For example, graphical editing controls in my word processor. Why can't use Inkscape instead?

If I wanted a full desktop publishing suite, I would use Scribus. But all I want is something that will open my boss's Word documents, and let me write a nicely formatted report.

All those advanced features in the background *do* disturb the newbie. Currently OpenOffice takes twenty seconds to start. And saving (even autosaving) documents can be five to ten seconds. IT'S FRAKING HUGE AND SLOW!

Re:Why so few contenders?

[Darkness404]

Yes and MS can't do that even between Word versions.

On the Mac (hey, it's already a slashvertisement)

[93 Escort Wagon]

I've used NeoOffice, which is a native OS X port of OpenOffice, and also OpenOffice on Fedora. While it's certainly capable software, there do still seem to be some "gotchas" when it comes to MS Office interoperability - but the big issue is how ponderous it is. Java apps still seem to have this basic issue with not feeling "snappy".

Now I'm using the latest version of Pages from iWork. I started out just thinking of it as "maybe getting a little less dependent on Microsoft"; but I've found I just plain like it better than Word. I haven't run into any interoperability gotchas yet, either.

Re:Why so few contenders?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but A and B are contradictory; the Word format, in all its various revisions, forces crappiness upon anything capable of understanding it.

Microsoft will Nurture SoftMaker

[bugs2squash]

If they have any sense. Not only does it shield them a little from euro trust-busting legislation, but it also propagates MS proprietary file formats and breeds developers that are familiar with them. None of these things is bad for MS in the long run. A near toothless competitor is a godsend to MS.

Obvious

[tiger32kw]

Wait, something that cost $80 performs better than something that is free? Just blew my mind with this article.

Re:Obvious

[Ecuador]

Yeah, open source and free software is always inferior to the expensive proprietary stuff. Linux users sure are cheapskates for not paying for much more expensive (= "obviously" better) solutions (Vista perhaps?). I don't know about you, but most people's time is much more expensive than any software (ok, some might call me on that and claim CS4 Suite is more expensive than their time - but anyway), so productivity is more important than price.
I use a combination of free & non-free software, since I simply choose the best. It is actually our CEO's dogma that engineers are more expensive than machines & software, so I am encouraged to buy whatever will do my job better. If it happens to be a free solution (which of course is often but not always), that's just a bonus.
Talking specifically about Open Office, it is definitely not one of my favorite open source projects, so I never use it as a "hey guys, why do you give all your $$ to MS when you can get this great thing for free" example...

Re:Obvious

[tiger32kw]

Oh wow a self righteous linux post who saw that coming on slashdot.

In most circumstances you get a better product when it cost money than if it is free, in all aspects of life. There are of course exceptions to the rule.

Re:Obvious

[LingNoi]

Did you even read the parent you're responding to? You just echoed his argument! What an idiot...

A Better Test

[sk999]

Randall should try creating a document on a Mac, editing it on an MS Windows PC, and opening it on a Linux machine. Let's see, MS Office, N/A, SoftMaker, N/A, OpenOffice ... we have a winner.

Most documents I get these days are in PDF format. The occassional MS Word documents are usually so simple that the best way to read them is using antiword. Just about every Excel file opens fine in OpenOffice 1.1. The most problematic powerpoints are those created by Mac users with embedded Quicktime files - no one else can see those.

For complex documents, the publishers I deal with require LaTex.

Yes, I do have access to MS Office, but now that it has been upgraded to 2007 with its ribbon interface, I have no idea how to use it anymore.

Re:A Better Test

[moronoxyd]

Randall should try creating a document on a Mac, editing it on an MS Windows PC, and opening it on a Linux machine. Let's see, MS Office, N/A, SoftMaker, N/A, OpenOffice ... we have a winner.

now throw in Windows Mobile for good measure:
- MS Office: pretends to be able to edit office files, but loses a lot of formation along the way
- OOo: not aviable on Windows Mobile
- Softmaker Office: fully featured mobile version that can actualy be used to do something (an yes, it cost's extra)

In the end it always depends on the specific user.
I don't use a Mac, so I don't care whether my office supports Mac OS X or not.
You probably don't use a Windows Mobile device, so you don't care about that.

But never assume that what's good for you is good for everyone.

Re:What timing [PDF stinks]

[Tablizer]

But PDF is annoying in many ways. First, it's difficult to copy-and-past from. Second, the page navigation system is different from both typical word-processors and web browsers (HTML), at least for Adobe. And third, the fonts always look blurry to me.

whither googledocs?

[jsepeta]

whither googledocs?

Re:whither googledocs?

[Anonymous Coward]

And AbiWord, at least for the word processing part of it all.

Buggy Java implementation... NOT

[Anonymous Coward]

"Factor in OpenOffice's other well-documented warts - buggy Java implementation, ..."

OpenOffice ist not, and never was, written in Java. It's C++. And it's open source, so you can even look that up. The point is: Why does a review, whose reviewer didn't even bother to do elementary facts checking, end up on the front page?

Re:Buggy Java implementation... NOT

[Locutus]

Why does a review, whose reviewer didn't even bother to do elementary facts checking, end up on the front page?
 

when it's a slow news day and/or there's a need for more ad dollars.
 

Lob
 

Re:Buggy Java implementation... NOT

[thammoud]

Saying bloated and buggy C++ is no /. material.

Re:Buggy Java implementation... NOT

[sorak]

If it is C++ then why does it require you to install Java during install?

GoBe Productive!

[Vinegar Joe]

Still rocks!

is this a stunt or truth

[the simurgh]

must we be reminded that randall c kennedy is a man whose actions may be a bid for attention? he supposedly hates microsoft is now singing their praises. is this an attempt to stop the promised Microsoft lawsuit? hmm maybe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randall_C._Kennedy

Re:is this a stunt or truth

[MightyMartian]

Yeah, that's the most unbiased article I've ever seen on Wikipedia.

Re:Why so few contenders?

[kklein]

MS Word is terrible!

On what basis do you assert that? It is the industry standard and has more features--and more ways to get at them--than any word processor out there.

That isn't to say it's perfect; in fact, I have been using Apple's Pages more and more for simple documents. It's faster, and it handles styles correctly. Also, it separates comments from tracked changes, which is awesome.

That being said, any serious writing that I do, and certainly any collaborative work, is always done in Word. It has the best/most complete offering for tables, little things like line and paragraph numbering in the margin (you don't think about that until you need it--and only Word has it, as far as I know), and lots of scripting support, whether it be simple autotext entries, or entire standard tables that you can set to insert by tapping a few characters. Oh, and don't forget total control of keyboard shortcuts.

With absolutely no offense intended (I promise!), it seems to me that the only people who claim Word is "terrible" or that some other offering is better overall, are those who don't have to do a lot of word processing. Word does stuff that no one else does.

(Please god don't send the TeX zombies; I don't have time to explain to them that no, most fields do not use TeX, and I've actually never met anyone off of Slashdot who even knew what it was. Also, yes, I know it's not a word processor. I know. I know.)

Re:What timing [PDF stinks]

[Rude Turnip]

It is not difficult to copy and paste from. I probably do this on a daily basis. The only time you can't copy and paste is if the document author was an idiot and blocked the copy/paste/print functions, or if the source content for the PDF was a scan of an older printed document.

The page navigation system is no different than word processors or web browsers. In fact, it's a little more optimized. Using Adobe's reader, you can even turn on thumbnails and skim through a document like you're using microfilm.

If the fonts look blurry, that is a function of the source document and not the PDF format. G-I-G-O.

What's with the .org?

[dangitman]

Can anyone tell me why the Openoffice.org application has the .org in its name? That is usually used to designate a website's domain, not desktop software. It's really weird that they'd put that in the name of a piece of application software.

Re:What's with the .org?

[AmberBlackCat]

Apparently, Microsoft somehow got exclusive rights to the word Office. Or something like that.

Re:What's with the .org?

[dangitman]

How does adding .org make the word "office" disappear? In any case, Microsoft only has trademark rights to "Microsoft Office", not just any use of the word.

Re:What's with the .org?

[Zantetsuken]

Wikipedia:

The project and software are informally referred to as OpenOffice, but this term is a trademark held by a company in the Netherlands co-founded by Wouter Hanegraaff and is also in use by Orange UK,[3] requiring the project to adopt OpenOffice.org as its formal name.[4]

Re:What's with the .org?

[AmberBlackCat]

I don't know. Maybe because now it's their website address instead of a common noun, or something equally ridiculous. I personally think they should drop the OpenOffice.org name from all of the icons in the start menu. Why can't it just say Writer, Draw, Base, and Calc? And in the context menus, why wouldn't they make it say "Open with OpenOffice.org Writer" instead of "open with swriter". It's like they have a deadline and just want to get the product out of the door. Anyway, I use it and so do my children and nephews. Why? Not because we love open source or think it's superior. We use it because Microsoft Office is preinstalled as a trial version that expires and we're not paying 89 dollars to type papers. Their marketing info really should say "Microsoft Office expires and you can't afford 89 dollars. Click here to download..."

Re:What's with the .org?

[dangitman]

That's completely retarded. How does adding .org suddenly not make it trademark violation? If I started a company called Microsoft.org, then Microsoft would successfully sue me. Why would this be any different?

If there was a trademark issue, then why not just pick a completely different name? The more I hear about this outfit, the more it reinforces my conclusion that it's the product of diseased minds.

No version for Macintosh??!

[Farhood]

Pssht......remind me why I'm reading this?

sent from my iPhone.

Re:What timing [PDF stinks]

[dangitman]

I'm sure everybody is aware that PDF has annoyances. But that's very different than the situation with DOC or PPT, which are utterly broken in almost every respect. PDF actually works for its intended purpose, which is why it is so successful. DOC and PPT are only prevalent because of marketshare, not because they are useful.

Re:What timing [PDF stinks]

[PitaBred]

For your first point, get a better reader. It's not that hard to copy text out if you have a decent PDF viewer (and the data is actually in text, not an image of text, which is quite common). For your second point, that again depends on the reader, but I find it quite intuitive, and not really that different from word processors. You press page down, you go down to the next page... select a page number, it jumps to that page. How is that different than most word processors? As for your third comment, again, get another PDF viewer. They all render the text themselves, and can many times do it differently. I like Foxit reader on Windows, and just use kpdf on Linux. Works great, no blurry text.

Re:Why so few contenders?

[dangitman]

The problem is (A). Not even microsoft has figured out how to do that between versions.

This just brings us right back to the question you were trying to answer.

Microsoft isn't very good at developing software, so it's not surprising that they can't write a decent word processor. However, there are hundreds of more talented software companies on the planet - so why can't they do it?

I think the answer is pretty obvious. It's not about the quality of software. People can and do write better word processors than Microsoft. It's just that the business world dominates this category of software, and they just go with Microsoft by default.

Compatibility Mode

[R4nm4-kun]

Well, I think Microsoft will solve the compatibility problem "a la" Windows7. Office 13 will load Office 2007 that will load Office2003 that will load OfficeXP and so on, and so on.

Re:What timing [PDF stinks]

[jonbryce]

You can fix the blurry text as follows:

Right click on the document, and click "Page Display Preferences", then click on "Page Display" in the side menu, and in the "Rendering" section, select Smooth Text: "For Laptop/LCD screens".

Adobe uses its own font rendering system rather than the one in Windows, and clear-type is not the default setting.

If you are using the Mac, the same procedure applies except that you may have to ctrl-click if you only have one mouse button.

Re:Why so few contenders?

[Toonol]

I'm in the process of editing a 150 page book with lots of tables and lists. About halfway through the process of writing it, I moved to OO because Word was creaking under the strain; it would glitch, it would repaginate differently from load to load, it was just unpleasant.

Open Office has seemed much more robust in that sense. It didn't open the document without problems; I had to do extensive reformatting. If this was something I would be exchange outside my company, I would have stuck with Word. But if you're using Open Office Writer from start to end, I think it is a respectable competitor to Word. (Calc, however, isn't quite there.)

WordPerfect, where's the Love?

[CrashNBrn]

Yeah, I do miss the days before Word. I recall WordPerfect in splitscreen mode almost all the time - so I could see where the FontCodes were, where the underline code was, in voluminous green and black.

Of course it had keyboard shortcuts that only an Emac-aholic could love.

Re:What timing [PDF stinks]

[cetialphav]

It's not that hard to copy text out if you have a decent PDF viewer

I have always run into problems in trying to copy and paste out of pdfs (this is with a variety of readers). For example, if the text is layed out in mutiple columns, selections cross columns instead of flowing down the column, which is not what is wanted. You also run into problems with ligatures. For example, fi can be combined into a single glyph and that is what gets copied and pasted instead of the two individual characters.

Re:On the Mac (hey, it's already a slashvertisemen

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a popular misconception that OpenOffice's "snappiness" is affected by Java. Fact is, Java is used for a few wizards, macro languages, and little else. You don't have to install Java to use OO.

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Java_and_OpenOffice.org

Please feel free to change this post to complain about "bloat", though (or any other unquantifiable term that makes you feel like a power user.)

Shameless Ad

[Hercules Peanut]

I'll agree with previous posts. This is nothing more than an add for a new app. I will NOT be visiting their site. Besides at $79(39 educational) I'll take iWork from Apple and have an awesome Presentation app and office compatibility, Of course we need another office format like we need a hole in the head but hey, you opened the flood gates with your fat price tag.
BTW: I still recommend OO to everyone. You can't beat free and it seems like a pretty solid office app on every platform. Frankly, I'd choose it over MS Office 2007 even if it were free. Have you seen the new interface? Awful!

Re:Shameless Ad

[moronoxyd]

I'll agree with previous posts. This is nothing more than an add for a new app

This 'new app' has been around for 10+ years.

BTW: I still recommend OO to everyone. You can't beat free and it seems like a pretty solid office app on every platform.

I tried to work with OOo, but it's just so damn slow...

Re:Why so few contenders?

[Blakey Rat]

Blizzard the *game* studio?

If anyone's interested...

[malevolentjelly]

Softmaker Office 2006 is available for free for Windows, not trialware or anything. If you're running Windows and you'd usually just be using AbiWord or OpenOffice, it's way lighter and much nicer.

http://softmakeroffice.com/

Notice: Only TextMaker and PlanMaker are present (Word and Excel). If you need more advanced functionality, give 2008 a shot. They have an excellent student discount, also.

I don't mean to just pimp software or anything, but this is a great product from a tiny software company in Germany, and it has quite a legacy.

I've enjoyed it so far as a lightweight word processor for my EeePC.

Re:Why so few contenders?

[stabiesoft]

I remember our tech pubs person had lots of problems with microsoft on large docs. We always used frame maker. Not cheap, but very nice for large stuff. I never saw it burp. I have used it for over a decade and even pony'ed up the $'s for a personal copy. Recently I've tried OO, but I find the formatting non-intuitive compared to frame, so not a fan of OO either. Probably because it is too much like word.

Re:Why so few contenders?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Why doesn't Blizzard or some other studio do it?

Man.. imagine what the splash screen for that would look like!

Re:What timing [PDF stinks]

[AI0867]

It is not difficult to copy and paste from. I probably do this on a daily basis. The only time you can't copy and paste is if the document author was an idiot and blocked the copy/paste/print functions, or if the source content for the PDF was a scan of an older printed document.

The page navigation system is no different than word processors or web browsers. In fact, it's a little more optimized. Using Adobe's reader, you can even turn on thumbnails and skim through a document like you're using microfilm.

KPDF can also show thumbnails of the pages. Additionally, you can choose to ignore DRM so you can copy/paste and print, just like just about every PDF reader out there that is not Adobe's.

Kind of Right.

[crhylove]

Open Office is bloated.

There, I've said it.

That being said, the portable apps version runs nicely, and at least it doesn't hijack my registry and everything else!!

portableapps.com

.doc compatibilities

[falconwolf]

The common reason I find for people emailing word documents is when they are negotiating contracts. Then you see .docs being emailed between the parties and their advisers, with people suggesting various changes to the document.

However if different parties are using different Office versions they can have compatibility problems as people above have pointed out.

Falcon

Re:Why so few contenders?

[Enderandrew]

As someone who loathes their business practices, I think over the years, MS Office has turned into a very good product. And MS does have a few very good products.

The biggest problem I think they face is that with little serious competition, a lot of the spit and polish never gets addressed. Daily I come across a stupid usability issue that I wish they'd fix. But since they don't listen to direct feedback all that much, it likely will never be fixed.

OS X prides themselves on usability and polish, and people are starting to pay a premium for it. Or in the Linux world, I can fire up bugzilla, or email a dev. Heck, I can just open SVN and submit a patch myself.

They need someone to challenge them more in the Office marketplace, and then they might put out a better product.

Re:Why so few contenders?

[Enderandrew]

I thought I read in some interviews when Richard Garriot was first developing games, and starting to code them in assembly, that companies were exceedingly impressed with what he was able to accomplish with limited computing power back in the day. They begged him to write a spreadsheet.

Re:Why so few contenders?

[ichthyoboy]

I do all of my word processing in OpenOffice, and only check the output in Word for compatibility with the rest of my lab. Oo.o has many of the strengths that you say are only found in Word...

It has the best/most complete offering for tables

I've made plenty of complex tables in Oo.o. The only problem I've found is that when a file is saved as a .doc and opened in Word, tables look horrendous. That's why I always save as .odt and use the ODT plugin for Word.

little things like line and paragraph numbering in the margin (you don't think about that until you need it--and only Word has it, as far as I know)

In Oo.o Writer, line numbers are as simple as Tools->Line Numbers. I've not needed paragraph numbering, but I'm sure it's possible...

Oh, and don't forget total control of keyboard shortcuts.

Tools->Customize->Keyboard. Customize to your heart's content...

Office compatibility

[falconwolf]

If you need seamless MS Office interoperablity stick with MS Office./P.

MS Office does not offer compatibility between different versions though. If you want a document to display the same on different platforms, and do not need to edit documents then .pdf is the best format to use.

Falcon

I have been using Apple's Pages

[falconwolf]

That being said, any serious writing that I do, and certainly any collaborative work, is always done in Word.

And how compatible is your Word docs made in OS X with Office for Windows, and visa versa? I haven't used it, I use NeoOffice, so I don't know but some comments above say they are not that compatible.

Falcon

They All suck.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used MS-Word since 1989. It gets confused sometimes. A few months ago, it got confused over header formats and wouldn't let me correct them. Word Sucks.

I've used OpenOffice extensively the last year trying to convert our small company over. We can't open and work on the same documents in either Word or Excel - the formatting gets screwed between MS and OO systems. Reviewing fails terribly.

ABIword isn't compatible enough with either solutions.

Bottom line - all our customers use MS-Office, so complaining that they don't/can't support OpenOffice is counter productive. MS-Office sucks, but at least we are "all in this together" and made at MS **together**. That is a bonding experience with our customers.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a Linux guy - my desktop is Linux and I have 12 Linux xen VMs running now. I boot WinXP in a VM to run MS-Office (and Visio) - nothing else. But it isn't worth the trouble (time/money) to **not** use MS-Office.

Re:Why so few contenders?

[Stormwatch]

I'm in the process of editing a 150 page book with lots of tables and lists.

So... LaTeX?

Re:Why so few contenders?

[Stormwatch]

A game studio, doing "serious" software? Risky move. A failed attempt at that pretty much destroyed Infocom.

Re:Why so few contenders?

[Kalriath]

Yes, I can just imagine the kickass cinematic - "forget the word processor, give me a longer intro movie!"

Perhaps Blizzard should re-do that Office 2010 The Movie that Microsoft released.

Re:What timing [PDF stinks]

[Tablizer]

Keep in mind that even if I find a better PDF viewer and/or adjust the settings to make it tolerable, the users of my documents may not want to bother to do the same. In other words, you are addressing only half the war. But thanks for the suggestions given so far. (It is true that users may not be annoyed by all the same issues that I am, but in general people do seem to use PDF as a last resort.)
   

Fonts?

[Tablizer]

What's a typical problem with the fonts, as mentioned in TFA? Is it a problem with O.O.org's programming, or the Java font engine itself?
 

Re:Fonts?

[Anonymous Coward]

What does Java have to with it? OO.o is a C++ app.

Re:Fonts?

[Tablizer]

What does Java have to with it? OO.o is a C++ app.

I could've sworn I've seen Java load flash-screens in some of the apps. Also, Wikipedia says it's a mix of C++ and Java.
     

Re:What timing [PDF stinks]

[Dan541]

I'm sure everybody is aware that PDF has annoyances.

Most of those annoyances are brought on by the idiots that publish PDF files without a clue.

The inability to print, for example.

Hello troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Wonderful, so just the name issue alone is enough for you to discard the product? Wow, I'm impressed.

I presume Quark Express won't be much use to you either unless you happen to be a health food nut?

As for trademark, the result is compromise between parties where on the one side parties do not want to give up their trademark but have arrived at a compromise that provides enough of a difference to avoid end user confusion. Once you grow up you'll find that this how disputes are solved best, not in court but by negotiation, but there are whole nations full of people who have yet to evolve to an adult state..

Re:Hello troll

[dangitman]

Wonderful, so just the name issue alone is enough for you to discard the product? Wow, I'm impressed.

It's more than just the name. The product itself is also very poorly designed. But the name does matter - the thought process that lead to them naming it that way is not healthy, and doesn't inspire confidence in the group. On its own it might be a minor thing, but I really think it's the symptom of bigger problems.

Re:What timing [PDF stinks]

[dangitman]

That's true. The copy-paste problems are symptomatic of a poorly published PDF. One of the really stupid things I see a lot of is people who make a PDF with text that is rasterized, when the very idea of PDF is integrating text and graphics cleanly in a WYSIWG manner. For crap's sake, PDF can even render text from Photoshop, with layer effects and everything, as editable display text.

MS Office 2007 is a DOWNgrade

[cheros]

2007 joins Vista in being a downgrade. The whole ribbon thing puts the "less retraining required" MS argument against Open Source rather firmly to bed. It's crap, especially for experienced users it means they're hit with endless searching for features that used to be two menu steps away, so how anyone can sell that as a usability gain is beyond me.

Maybe for absolute beginners who have never seen a system in their life - but there comes the lack of logic in the interface to pester them. Some people love it, but I found them to be more a vocal minority, most people I know hate the ribbon with a passion that even Vista didn't manage to acquire. It.is.total.cr*p.

Re:MS Office 2007 is a DOWNgrade

[lahvak]

One thing that MS Office 2007 seriously improved is their equation editor. That does not really mean much, since the old equation editor was so incredibly crappy that pretty much anything would be an improvement, but I must say that the new Word actually has a semi decent equation editor. It does have several major annoyances, I did manage to break it several times by some simple use, and I there are several better options, but at least it is usable, reasonably fast, and most of the time it actually produces fairly good looking formulas.

Ooffice equation editor is pretty horrible: it's "user friendly" clicky interface is completely broken, to the point of being even worse than the original MS equation editor. Sure you can type in the formula editor code directly, that's what I always end up doing, and that is definitely better for someone used to TeX than the old MS equation editor, but most users will probably not even be willing to try it. And after all, why not just use TeX or MathML here, instead of introducing some completely new rather obscure code. Even the new MS equation editor lets you type in TeX commands for math symbols (although it does it using its completion mechanism, which is not without its problems).

SoftMaker Office is free

[Anonymous Coward]

SoftMaker Office 2006 is totally free. You can download it from the FreewareGeeks.com website:

http://www.freewaregeeks.com/index.php?page=detail&get_id=271&category=41

Re:What timing [PDF stinks]

[Haeleth]

For example, if the text is layed out in mutiple columns, selections cross columns instead of flowing down the column

They don't if the PDF was created properly.

They used to have it for FreeBSD

[synthespian]

A couple of years ago, they made a version for FreeBSD, and I used it all the time and it was better than OpenOffice, which had too many bugs for my taste.

Since they stopped putting out a version for FreeBSD, I went back to OpenOffice.

It's really too bad they stopped making a version for FreeBSD, because, with the linux emulation layer (where one can choose Fedora libraries, for instance), it should be really easy for them.

Re:On the Mac (hey, it's already a slashvertisemen

[SpooForBrains]

That's true for OpenOffice. However NeoOffice uses Java in order to present an Aqua interface.

If the sluggish nature of NeoOffice really is too much, maybe consider OpenOffice.org Aqua instead.

Re:What timing [PDF stinks]

[Anonymous Coward]

clear-type or other names for anti-aliasing is what makes the text look blurry in the first place. You may like the blurry look, but turning clear-type on does not help someone who is complaining about blurry text in the first place.

Turning it off makes the fonts completely sharp. Unfortunately, Adobe Reader seems to have sacrificed any form of font hinting, for the sake of blurriness. So, the text looks jagged, rather than blurred.

Or don't run a bug...

[jonaskoelker]

Still, given the choice between an enormous ugly expensive bug and an enormous (and albeit slightly more ugly) free bug... I'll go for the free bug.

Sigh... a part of me wants to say "Is that the best we as computer professionals can do?"

before getting all riled up, though, I think it's plausible that some of the problems are due to business people thinking their company, rather than the competition, should be the one making money by solving people's needs, which forces them to serve people's need less well.

But let's leave that as speculation ;-)

The real point I want to make: it would be really nice if everybody could converge to some agreed-upon subset of (La)TeX for producing documents, with some well-crafted wysiwyg frontend for producing .tex files. Then, having people send pdf files around would make sure we wouldn't have any inconsistency.

Maybe the application should produce .tar.gz files with source, pdf, and (maybe?) version tracking, such that it's easier for people to attach "the file they open in $EDITOR" and have useful results on the recipient end...

Oh well, I can dream, can't I?

Re:Why so few contenders?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because of A. There is no way to make a good file importer for DOC files. Normally, when you make a program like a word processor, you'd create a specification for the file format. Even if you're not going to distribute it, it will still be there, and by reverse engineering, you can recreate the specification from the files.

Not with DOC files. There is no specification, a DOC file is a memory dump. That's why even Microsoft can't make a good import filter. They can't go look at the specification. They can't even reuse the old DOC reading code, because that would just read it all into memory in one big chunk.

The thing is, as soon as you change *anything*, even just adding a new feature, a programs memory layout changes. Add a field to a class or struct? Any field after that one is pushed to a higher address. An array of said class or struct now uses different offsets, because the size changed.

A saved file should never just be a memory dump. (That's not to say that no file should be. Temporary files can be memory dumps without causing problems. Because they aren't transferred from one program to another, or one version to another).

Not free

[muzicman]

If it isn't free I am not buying it...... Wait a sec...

Re:What timing [PDF stinks]

[Bazzargh]

It is not difficult to copy and paste from. I probably do this on a daily basis. The only time you can't copy and paste is if the document author was an idiot and blocked the copy/paste/print functions, or if the source content for the PDF was a scan of an older printed document.

No, you're wrong. In PDF text is stored as small chunks to be printed at the current point with the current font. There is no concept of a paragraph or a column. So if your text is even marginally complex - for example, you have superscripts, multiple columns, text labels on an image beside the text of your document, manual kerning, font substitution for some characters, bidi text... then you have lots of disconnected text chunks. In order to copy these, the reader needs to guess what the original formatting was. And I haven't even started on ligatures and mathematical formulae yet.

For this reason PDF readers often have 2 copy modes: rectangular and reading-order. The rectangular option tries to preserve position information (fairly easy), while the other option tries to guess and preserve the reading order (fairly hard). The rectangular option works well on tables, but poorly on multicolumn text; the opposite is generally true for reading-order selection. Evince's text selection is rectangular, Acrobat used to have both but seems to have only reading-order selection these days.

I happen to know this because I've done some work on fixing text selection in poppler; but its not just poppler-based readers that have a problem: its just as bad in Acrobat and (on the mac) Preview. Its not very hard to find documents with problems like this, and its one of the most-duped poppler/evince bugs.

It's Good Stuff

[water-and-sewer]

I have used Softmaker Office since about 2001, and it works well. In my experience it does a better job of rendering Microsoft docs than OpenOffice.org does - especially docs that have tables, even simple ones. As for perfect compatibility, I don't know why anyone even bothers to compare to Word anymore, since it's well known that even Microsoft is unable to make Word perfectly compatible with previous versions, and I too have experienced issues going back and forth between Word 03 and Word 07 on Windows (at work). It's ridiculous.

On the plus side:

Softmaker Office is fast and uses few resources. I've got an old Pentium III (128M RAM, 555Mhz) and it runs WELL on an old version of SUSE Linux (8.1). Obviously on my Core Duo it flies. It does a better job of reading and writing Word docs than any other software I've got, including some Macintosh stuff. I can also use it on FreeBSD, which is really cool.

On the negative side:

I love the OO.o stylist (F11) and Navigator (F5) and miss them desperately on Softmaker Office. I also love OO.o's ability to make master documents, and its embedding of one doc into another are useful as well. Softmaker doesn't do either of those things, which I miss. The proprietary doc format is also annoying, but I export everything to RTF or PDF, same as I do for the rest of my docs. At least it lets you export to RTF, Word, and a bunch of other formats.

As for the fact that it's open source, I frankly don't give a crap. Abiword is the best example of an opensource word processor that I know of and I don't think it's that good (at least, it's never been very stable for me). I'll take the closed source - and even pay for it - if it's a good product and I can do what I want to do.

Google docs is stronger competitor.

[Organic Brain Damage]

I'm using Office for most 90% of my word processing and spreadsheet work. I am far more likely to switch from Office to Google Docs than either SoftMaker or OpenOffice's offerings. Why? Google Docs offers simplicity, collaboration and built-in backup. I believe it is 1000 times less likely that Google will lose my files compared to me losing them if I have to store them on a hard drive and remember to setup some kind of backup facility.

WordPerfect

[Anonymous Coward]

It's rather sad but, no one ever mentions Corel WordPerfect. The latest version WordPerfect Office X4, Is fully compatible with MS Office, including 2007. It also supports OpenOffice and ODF formats. It includes PDF creation AND editing.

In my opinion, right now, Wordperfect Office X4 out does them all for a competitive price. But, no one ever mentions WordPerfect anymore. Why is that?

No version for Mac?

[intheshelter]

Well then they suck c@ck in my opinion!

The .ODF, Open Document Format, is the standard.

[Futurepower(R)]

Why distribute a .DOC file? The .ODF, Open Document Format, is the international standard.

In my opinion: The .DOC format is proprietary and buggy, and very expensive due to forced upgrades and general proprietary quirkiness. The .DOC format is supplied by a company that makes more money if it spaces improvements over ten versions, rather than making all improvements in one version. The .DOC format is supplied by a company that makes more money if the .DOC format is implemented in an abusive manner. Why open yourself to abuse?

The best way to send documents that will not be changed is as .PDF files. That's a simple menu choice in Open Office. Or, use PDF Creator from any application.

Microsoft's ODF Support Falls Short It's just another proprietary format, from a company that makes money by locking people into proprietary formats.

"Out of the box OpenOffice.org version 3 opens Microsoft Office 2007 documents, but often odf-converter-integrator converts with better quality." I haven't tested that myself.

References:

OpenDocument Format Alliance. OpenDocument Format Alliance on Wikipedia

OpenDocument software

OpenDocument

OpenDocument adoption

Kingsoft Office

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone had any formal experience with Kingsoft Office?

Open Office is a useful tool for MS Office users.

[Futurepower(R)]

I've done that also. Sometimes Microsoft Office corrupts its own files and then refuses to open them! If that happens, the only fix I've found is to open the Microsoft Office .DOC file in Open Office and save it again as a .DOC file. That fixes the corruption.

So Open Office is a necessary tool for Microsoft Office users.

Microsoft "innovates"?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Trust me, those folks are going to have a lot more trouble trying to follow MS as it innovates its way along."

Microsoft "innovates"?

As in Zune and Vista and Microsoft Bob?

Re:What timing [PDF stinks]

[Tablizer]

I don't see "Page Display Preferences" in the right-click menu. What version are you referencing? Thanks

Re:What timing [PDF stinks]

[lahvak]

For example, if the text is layed out in mutiple columns, selections cross columns instead of flowing down the column, which is not what is wanted.

I noticed that several times in pdfs that someone sent me. I believe one thing they had in common was that they were all created by some sort of wordprocessor. On the other hand, I have a fairly large collection of TUGBoat articles, TeX documentation, and other documents with multiple columns, and in all of them the selection works perfectly fine.

You also run into problems with ligatures. For example, fi can be combined into a single glyph and that is what gets copied and pasted instead of the two individual characters.

Hm, that does not seem to happen in any of the about 20 pdf files I tested. They all have ligatures in them, but the ligatures can be cut and pasted just fine.

It seems to me that both of the problems are caused by badly created documents, not by the pdf format itself.

Wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

Buggy Java implementation...isn't OpenOffice a fork of StarOffice? Isn't StarOffice made by Sun? Isn't Sun the maker of Java?...how did they manage to screw that up?

I've been using MS Office at work for 10+ years now. I've been using OpenOffice at home for about 2 years now. Comparing MS Office and OpenOffice is like comparing Mighty Mouse and Mickey Mouse.

Re:What timing [PDF stinks]

[jonbryce]

Version 9

Re:What timing [PDF stinks]

[Tablizer]

Reader-only or Writer ("pro") version?

Re:What timing [PDF stinks]

[jonbryce]

Both, on different computers