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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.
If anyone cares. The software for Windows CE by Softmaker was called "Textmate" and "Planmaker", for word and excel (in that order).
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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.
Link for all you lazy people:
http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/home
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.
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Quack, quack.
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.
Sigs are for losers
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.
TextMaker
Say NO to unpaid Internships!
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.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
"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?
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.
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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.
It's also... OpenOffice.org based.
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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.)
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.