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

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: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: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.