Slashdot Mirror
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.
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 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.
"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?