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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.
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+)...
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.
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!!!
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
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.
I thought it was an ad?
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
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.
"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?