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OpenOffice Tops 21% Market Share In Germany
hweimer writes "A novel study analyzes the installed base of various office packages among German users. (Here is the original study report in German and a Google translation.) While Microsoft Office comes out top (72%), open source rival OpenOffice is already installed on 21.5% of all PCs and growing. The authors use a clever method to determine the installed office suites of millions of web users: they look for the availability of characteristic fonts being shipped with the various suites. What surprised me the most is that they found hardly any difference in the numbers for home and business users."
What surprised me the most is that they found hardly any difference in the numbers for home and business users."
That's probably because of a flaw in the methodology. Also, this study isn't a representative sample -- a lot of businesses don't allow internet access. Perhaps they are more likely to use one office package over another. This study is interesting, but hardly robust.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Didn't we already have this story today?
> "...What surprised me the most is that they found hardly any difference in the numbers for home and business users."
Wow...you are one easy-t-please individual - would you also be surprised if you found out they are one and the same...?
I wouldn't....and you wouldn't either if you were one of them.
... that StarOffice was a wildly popular office suite in Germany in the 90s (before Sun bought the code), I'm surprised the percentage isn't higher.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
This survey is a pretty big pill to swallow. I am pretty sure that nearly all the non-IT people I know would have no idea what Open Office was, and I'm sure there are many others who would feel the same here on Slashdot.
Of course, anecdotal evidence isn't a great benchmark, but come on...
I use neooffice on my mac!!!!!!
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I have used OO.org to write several books, and it is what I recommend to people.
That said, I prefer Latex :-)
What about everyone who installs msttcorefonts for compatibility? Not to mention all the other random fonts you have to accumulate to open documents?
This same data could be mined from what is collected by EFF's Panopticlick. Would be interesting at the very least...
The problem I see with OOo is that it is marketed and used as "hey, there is a free (as in beer) MS Office clone!" rather than "Hey, this is better than MS Office" but the problem is the second statement isn't true. Firefox won out over IE not by "hey, we have a clone of IE" but by being -better- than IE.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
So you admit that your opinion is worth even less than a flawed survey of actual users? Thanks for sharing.
I have seen OpenOffice gaining plenty of market share--frequently installed alongside MS Office on campus computers and such. It's true that non-techie people are still clueless, but the ranks of the techies are getting larger with every generation. So there's some anecdotal evidence to counteract your anecdotal evidence, and we're back to square one.
Oh, and don't forget those markets in which Linux has a large market share (like China) where OpenOffice is one of the only viable options.
That's right. As long as Microsoft controls Zapf Wingdings, OpenOffice will never take off.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Quote from Neooffice.org:
We have created an office suite that is adapted to the unique needs of Mac users by taking the features in Oracle's OpenOffice.org office suite and adding improvements
I know they bought SUN but do they "own" (as in possessive form) the OpenOffice?
Both suites were smaller and arguably better six years ago. At a certain point, Fred Brooks ("The Mythical Man Month") gets called in to apply his laws.
... Just wait until the David Hasselhoff special edition is released.
I love that my web browser can broadcast which office suite I am using.
That statement was made tongue-in-cheek. No need to flame.
I was perfectly happy using OpenOffice for all my home needs, but then when I started up a master's program, I could digitally submit assignments (depending on the prof) for most of my courses. The only problem was that even though I would save things in OpenOffice so that they would be readable on MS products, not a single one of my professors could get them to open, and weren't really interested in going through any additional steps aside from double-clicking to open them up. So, because I needed to submit deliverables in a format that they could read, I was forced to purchase MS Office. Ribbons bleh.
Sorry about that, so was mine, I didn't mean to come off quite so serious.
Cheers!
It's the nerd country. :-)
If they couldn't open your documents then either one of you were screwing things up - perhaps they only had Office 2003 and you were saving as .docx? I've sent files back and forth between MS Office and Open Office with no problems plenty of times.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
PDF?
Why not submit them as PDFs? They can open it in any platform and it will appear as I intended. Besides it would make you look cool.
Its working fine for me at my university.
PDF?
I can't be the only person who doesn't really, truly care about the market share of a particular product. Really, I don't. 20% of people use the same thing I do? Whoopee doo, what do you want, a paper hat?
It doesn't matter. Let go.
I write bullshit
simple. word counts.
universities often require writing intensive courses to have x amount of word written a semester. professor will often dock major points (being 100 words under for 15 hundred word document can fail you) if they can't just see how many words are in a paper at a glance.
that and he plagarism checker databases like turnitin lack the ability to parse anything but word files. hence you see why many universities just tell students to shut up and buy MS office.
(I personally think its stupid and counterproductive)
I managed to complete a post-graduate course using Open Office. Assignments were given as Word documents, and needed to be submitted as the same. I always saved in Word 2000 format and my professors never had a problem. If Word was offered at the same price as OO, I would buy Word. I've only used OO because I'm too cheap and don't using office apps enough at home to justify the price. I wish OO were better than MS Office, but it's far behind. When ever I try to format text Writer never does what I want. I've tried drawing diagrams in Draw but soon gave up due to the poor interface, and Impress, well that's the worst of the lot.
I use OO and never send anything other than PDFs which it handles quite well
. .
Open Office may have peaked in quality. Open Office Draw 3.1 crashes for me about twice an hour, while older versions never did. Draw also has some weird intermittent bug in selection, were suddenly everything goes grey for a few seconds. The last 2.x versions were solid.
I'm always amused that the crash reporter program wants the user to type in which OpenOffice program they were using. The crash reporter ought to know that.
Open office and Microsoft office have significant formatting differences. Ive had 0 success loading saving a file in OO and having it look the same in Microsoft office. Additionally ive tried several builds of OO and I have again had significant problems with saving in OO and having it open the same the next day in OO...
Well, that certainly wouldn't fly in Germany, with their compound nouns. For example (yes, extreme one ;) )
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinderkennzeichnungs-_und_Rindfleischetikettierungsuberwachungsaufgabenubertragungsgesetz
BTW, do those word-counting universities have a stated goal of "simplifying" the language? Are they the same bitching about poor literacy of students?
One that hath name thou can not otter
FWIW, my anecdotal, non-flaming stats on my OOo experiences of myself,my three adult kids and two grandmothers converted from Windzzz/M$office to OOo over the last few years... Six happy users of OOo ... Five happy Linux users (one kid just won't let go)... Eleven missing licences at Redmond!... Priceless!... I can hear the chairs crashing now.
All of us only do the odd letter and I run a spaghetti spreadsheet to track some finances.I figure we have collectively saved somewhere between A$2000-A$4000 over the past five years. YMMV.
I prefer Classic Slashdot.
I didn't believe this statement so I looked it up.
According to their student guide at http://www.turnitin.com/resources/documentation/turnitin/training/en_us/qs_student_en_us.pdf
At the top of page 2:
" We accept submissions in these formats: MS Word, WordPerfect, RTF, PDF, PostScript, HTML, and plain text (.txt)"
So while I think plagiarism checkers are kind of a waste of resources, your statement is still false.
That's terrible... At my university "word count" is meant as a guideline only, you don't have any issues unless you're over/under by like 500 words. Even then we are told that as long what we have written is quality work it doesn't matter too much if it's under/over the word count.
Your statement about TurnItIn not accepting PDFs is incorrect, they have done so for at least as long as I have been at university (4 years). From their website:
Turnitin currently accepts the following file types for submission: MS Word (.doc), WordPerfect (.wpd), PostScript (.eps), Portable Document Format (.pdf), HTML (.htm), Rich Text (.rtf) and Plain Text (.txt). All files submitted to Turnitin must be text based. Papers which have been scanned must be sent through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software before they can be submitted to Turnitin
I'm pretty sure it calculates the word count and shows it to you before you submit it regardless of the format it is submitted in and that the lecturers/professors can see this when they open the document.
Granted there's many other reasons to disapprove of TurnItIn.
In the American university setting they're about bloating, not simplifying. They wouldn't use word count as a metric if they cared about the clarity and substance of what was written.
That is a school (and prof) in need of a clue. No one should submit finished documents in an editable format. Formatting problems, accidental changes, intentional changes - this is just asking for trouble. If the school's anti-plagiarism software can't deal with PDFs, it is bad software and ought to be replaced.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
You didn't consider a PDF? Seems like the standard way to go, if .doc wasn't working...
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
Same thing happened to my girlfriend however she was actually using MS word. Turns out her lecturer didn't like using the computer and wanted a paper copy instead.
Interesting - you didn't submit the document back to OOo did you? Because if you did, that might actually be useful!
In my experience, I've been using OOo for years. It's damned nice software, and works well for me on Windows, Mac, and Linux with minimal issues. It's true, documents saved in either MSWord or OOo will look a little different in the other. Fonts will be different, spacing a little different, etc.
But I've successfully edited/saved documents back and forth with a Word user, highlighting text, bullet points, and the whole works with very little problem while negotiating contracts. I question the trouble that you mention. I've never had OOo fail to open a document created therein, but have a number of times "recovered" documents that Word couldn't open but OOo could!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I find no noticeable difference between menus and the ribbon as far as finding stuff. One still has to learn where the options are to find them fast. A better approach when you have gazillion options would be a quick text search of options where you can type in a small portion of a word(s). Mini-Google, if you will. If you cannot find your option, you can add your own synonym so that your word works the next time. Maybe common synonyms can be sent back to HQ where they are incorporated into the next version. Easier-to-customize tool-bars would also help. There's a point in feature quantity where hierarchical menus and ribbons are the wrong tool for the job.
Table-ized A.I.
I've seen the crap that some people put together in Word or whatever and the documents don't open in Word or Open Office. However, repairing one of these in OO is possible but in Word, forget it... 10 minutes in OO produces something that prints. 30 min in Word produces nothing but garbage.
Really, all these people that have trouble are probably doing something bizarre, like using spaces to tab, or returns to get to the next page. Formatting goes wonky really fast with goofy methods.
That said, I never have a problem with Notepad documents. They always print what's there.
Yes, though to me the aspect of it that promotes long, monotonous forms which could be gotten rid of with one or few precise, but uncommon words or constructs can be adequatly descibed as oversimplication. Of the clarity-harming kind, too; for lack of better words to descrive it ;p (luckily I have a good excuse, not being a native EN speaker)
One that hath name thou can not otter
The vast majority of my friends are not tech savy. Many of them use open office. I'd put it at around the 30%. Those that don't use it, know what it is. I'm not aware of any personal contacts that do not know what it is.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
At least not in all cases.
I have a family member (not a computer guru but someone with a fair bit of computer knowledge) who tried OpenOffice and found that it was unusable due to documented being formatted differently in OO.o writer and in Word (and formatted differently in ways that matter). Said family member ended up buying Office 2007 in order to get documents that looked the same as they did on the other machines.
Please tell us about your synergy and paradigms and being in the ballpark. And lean manufacturing with your SCRUM mastery.
hence you see why many universities just tell students to shut up and buy MS office.
From what I've seen, most unis that standardize on MSOffice also have MSDNAA subscriptions, so you can get a copy for free as a student (and you actually get to keep the license even after you graduate).
And for developer tools, there's DreamSpark.
After using a mixed OOo/Office environment since 638c, my experience is that the formatting differences are trivial and easily overcome and the situation improves drastically for every major release.
Formulas break - which can be remedied by pasting them into the document as images instead.
Styles break - which is usually only noticed if you use fancy styles with numbering and such. Stick to simple bold/larger fonts for styles.
Tables break sometimes - which can be remedied by using tabbed lists instead.
Saving to MS Office 2003 has turned out to be the best compatibility option.
No, actually - saving to PDF and sending those to recipients is usually the magic silver bullet. I don't know about your uni, but my worklife clients are not supposed to do any alterations to my documents anyway.
I've never had a document saved in OpenOffice fail to open in normal Office, though I admit I haven't tried it very many times. Formatting can be different, yes, but it still opens. You better be careful to change that Office 2007 to save as .doc instead of .docx by default or your professors won't be able to open them unless they're using Office 2007 as well. Oh and by the way if they're using Office 2007 you could have just stuck to OpenOffice with .odt files since Office 2007 now supports them.
Interesting. Why should a student deliver a file in some MS Office-format? Our students have to deliver their diploma thesis on a disk/cd together with a printed version. This is because the faculty employs some software solution to track down plagiarism. But nobody is told to give us DOC-files, as PDF (or even plain text) is absolutely sufficient. I could not figure out a single reason why one should want to have a DOC-file apart from the desire to copy/paste usable paragraphs!
Being a Open Source advocate, I would like not to have MS Office at all. The main problem for me is all recruitment agents demand resumes in MS Word format. While this is ridiculous and I'm sure PDF would be fine for them, they don't budge. So with my hands being tied I begrudgingly bought MS Office for the sole purpose of creating resumes.
Yes, I know OO can export to Word format, but it's not 100% perfect - and when it comes to resumes they have to be perfect.
So the real hurdle is to change peoples mind sets to accept either MS Word, or ODF.
Just the other extreme...I guess you'd get it with "score is determined by how short the paper encompassing everything I want is" from the professors.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Not anymore - the Freedom Fonts are good enough.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
This is amazing, after all the stories I have read on slashdot about how OOo is just as useful (although maybe not as good) as MS-Office here we have a story about how in .de they are at more than 20% market penetration. Great news! But all I see is nay-sayers and complainers, people saying how they coulndt use OOo because their uni bans it, it crashes all the time, it's not compatible, how it ate their dog etc etc.
This shows something very interesting to me about the demographics of slashdot. During the european nighttime, especially after midnight CET, the demographic of slashdot is almost entirely USians. It's strange, since during the day, European time, slashdot is overwhelmingly pro-FOSS, but at night the opposite happens. This article was posted at 11pm slashdot time (GMT -5). 5am CET, 4am UK and Ireland time.
And what kind of comments do we get while the europeans are asleep? Overwhelmingly MS shills and anti-FOSS FUD. It's very enlightening. A pro FOSS success story posted, and the comments call into question the results, the methodology, the usefulness, the product itself, everything. It's a marketers dream. I would look to see if other pro-FOSS articles are gamed in this way, and if it depends on the time it's posted, but Im at work now.
Perhaps someone could investigate further.
Well, we could always use the data gathered by the Windows Update Tool and get real and precise data of installed packages...
Basically what you're asking about, is an office suite, driven by a command based interface (like Vim and Emacs), with a nice auto-complete.
(Which by the way, I think is a nice way to cram all the tons of features in a simple interface).
Notice that similar command-with-autocomplete exist elsewhere :
- Firefox's awesome bar (who needs hierarchical bookmarks anymore ?)
- The KDE4-reamped version of the good old "Alt-F2 - Run command" (now with awesome-bar like search feature, and icon previews)
Even microsoft windows implements it in a way (similar to the new-style KDE menu) :
- You can either search the (even less practical) new-style menu to find the soft in the hierarchy.
- Or use the command feature which is at the bottom of said menu to search/launch command.
The same could indeed be used for Office suite :
- A minimalistic tool bar with the can't-live-without buttons, so newbie can immediately start working on simple stuff without needing to memorize tons of options names. Can be hidden by power users once they know all key combinations and commands.
- An easy to access (like "just hold the windows+shift button and start typing") awesome-bar like search/command box. With on-the-fly preview and help.
A different approach could be :
Use more key combinations (emacs-like), and have semi-transparent pop-ups with help as soon as the user hit the first modifier (Ctrl, Alt, Meta, etc.)
Could work with simpler interface, but I think that something with the amount of options like an office suite could also benefit the awesome-bar like search.
Hum... someone should try writing such a plugin for OpenOffice.org
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I have not been able to submit PDFs (generated directly from OOo and also 'PDF printed' from OOo) to turnitin.
Unfortunately the site has nowhere to comment and mention this to them.
Hmm, in my book anybody who uses that kind of thing for a thesis is a masochist.
For anything beyond causal word processing (say beyond 20 pages and 3 revisions) LaTeX gives you so much more:
- it's text based so you can use source control such as svn to track and merge revisions;
- style is orthogonal to content so you can change them independently (I had produced two versions of my thesis, one in the horrible university-required format, another quite nice-looking (http://egor.ch/thesis/), by commenting a couple of lines in the header);
- it gives you as much or as little control as you want - you can just specify \chapter etc and let it do the formatting, or you can control the position of every dot on every page if desired.
- You mentioned thousands of formulas? All typeset in a WYSIWYG tool? Why would you do that to yourself?
Word and OpenOffice are IMO both fine for typing up a letter on the quick, but that's about it.
43% of all Germans forgot to uncheck the OpenOffice box on a Java update/install. 50% of those were too lazy to uninstall it.
Your post proves the elitism in the MS camp. How do YOU know they need MS Office? Do you know what MS Office provides that OOo doesn't? You're professing even more arrogance because you're not only assuming what MS Office would provide but that OOo doesn't provide it. AND that what MS Office doesn't provide (like, say, PDF printing) isn't wanted either.
AND that it's all FOSS's fault.
No, you have to pay to get their work. Or do you think it's not worth knowing how to do what you asked how to do?
If it IS worth it, then you get a free book. Even if it isn't worth it, you get a subsidised book (or just a book paid for like any other book).
Which .doc format? Works 95? Office 97? Works 2001? Office 2k3? WfW1.0? MS Word 2.0?
I think i should clarify. The document(s) opened however the formatting would be different. Particularly for the images I saved in it. Secondly I had looked it up and there were others who had already complained about the issue and had no luck. It was not worth it to me to add to their list.
I just find the way OO.o Writer and Draw work much better than the combo Word + Visio. I liked the old Visio, before MS took it over. I think that Draw works much the same way. The only thing that is missing is a way to export OO.o documents with embedded drawings to a Word document. In that case the drawings themselves are missing (the frames are there though).
Microsoft proprietary formats are the problem. .DOC, .XLS and such.
Everyone actually is used to
Many government/agencies/business only accept submissions in "Word" format. Until we "fix this issue" in the whole world, no way OO can take over M$ Office.
That's sad, you know.
Germans STILL love David Hasselhoff.
I'll try anything once. Twice if it tastes good
Sure it is. Just not for you (or your family member).
Honestly, is it so hard to just say "It's not there yet FOR ME" instead of blanket-panning a product?
I wouldn't say no to a horse burger.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I had similar problems, but also found that similar problems exist exchanging .doc formats between different users. The main problem has been with .docx being unable to be opened by previous versions of Office (there is an update that allows older versions of Office to open newer .docx formats.... but does everyone install the Office updates?)
There are some solutions including trying to see if your .doc submission opens in Google Docs, Think Free or similar. Should not be a problem unless there is something besides straight forward formatting (my main reason for abandoning Office, also that Office is a horrendous memory hog, and I prefer to use Ubuntu).
One thing that I wished there was wider support for other word processors by EndNote, or that the alternatives to EndNote were better supported by libraries and other academic resources (a common bibliographic format that is widely adopted?)
Something to consider is that your professors are probably dealing with an increasing number of "the dog ate my homework" variations, including assignment submissions that are impossible to open (a strategy to buy more time... the dog being that "danged computer!") It is not that your professors are being unreasonable or heartless, but in this age of constant budgetary pressures, they all have way too many students to be dealing with document compatibly problems (besides, the university's IT department should have a mechanism where the student submits the work and is able to verify that the submission went through... you do not want your professor playing compatibility analyst while looking your other student's grammar horrors).
Most normal people actually find the ribbon much easier to use because they (and I as well) never wasted the countless hours to memorize how many menus deep you had to go to find X rarely used feature.
Way to accuse anyone who doesn't have identical preferences to yours of being abnormal. Not content to state what your preferences are, you feel the need to disparage the rest of us. Way to go, douche.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
At least not in all cases. I have a family member (not a computer guru but someone with a fair bit of computer knowledge) who tried OpenOffice and found that it was unusable due to documented being formatted differently in OO.o writer and in Word (and formatted differently in ways that matter). Said family member ended up buying Office 2007 in order to get documents that looked the same as they did on the other machines.
I have a family member (not a computer guru but someone with a fair bit of computer knowledge) who tried MS Office and found it was unusable due to MS Office just generally sucking, and being totally unable to open .odt files! Needless to say, until MS adds better compatibility it's a waste of money. Said family member ended up downloading OO.o in order to get a decent office suite that did what she wanted, when she told it to.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Anyone with Sun's Java on their system gets an advert for Open Office every time it's updated - Every few months I get several people ask me what it is, and I tell them it's (usually) good enough for their purposes, and morally superior to that knocked off copy of MS Office they "borrowed" from work. Some have converted, but the rest have simply just carried on with "what everybody else uses" - but without paying for it.
Installed base isn't necessarily the same as number of active users. I've got a bunch of software on my computer than I haven't used since the initial install.
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
Surveying the responses from a Slashdot post won't get you a very accurate sampling, for sure.
I've shared experiences with most of the users here. Sometimes OO does better than Word, even with Word docs, sometimes OO falls flat on it's face with the simplest Word docs.
The reality of OO is that for it to take hold in US (or Europe, I might add) it has to handle Word stuff flawlessly. And the only way to do that is for money (and thus developers) to be thrown at it. The open source community won't do it by will alone as who the heck wants to spend time coding compatibility with Word docs? If Oracle or Google wants to put a real dent in MS they should attack the office suites by pouring in some money to OO. Only then if OO can handle all the old Word docs thrown at it can it be considered a viable alternative. But, even still there are plenty of old business apps that tie-in to the office suites which will require businesses to keep Word (and IE6 God help us) around.
Sorry, I think my pessimism is warranted. As nice as OO is, MS Office and Windows will NEVER be replaced in the US. Might have hope in Europe and elsewhere if only because those folks ought to be peeved enough that their money is going to fund a big US company.
MS Vista was the chance for something like Linux to replace the OS and it didn't happen and it won't EVER happen on PCs. Too much legacy s/w and docs that businesses can count on working in Windows (whatever version.)
I very much hope I have to eat my words, but we will not see Office or Windows anywhere less than ubiquitous on the PC in ten years. Maybe if there will be some new platform like a wearable computer then possibly something like Linux will take hold. The generation growing up now will be less tied to the OS, more tech savvy, and more able to pick up new apps. But on PCs, in the US, Windows isn't going away for a long time.
Awwww, they luv eachother.
Ok People, Enough with the OO vs MSO flamewar.
Here is the TRUTH about software.
95% of people have trouble learning anything on the computer because everything is naturally structure in cause and effect relationships. They actually have to spend large amounts of time learning how to do "simple" tasks in any computer program. These are smart people BTW. Once they learn where commands are and the STEPS (as opposed to concepts) to get a certain task done. They are happy to repeat these steps to gain productivity.
They do NOT want to learn new steps, new menus, new shortcuts, but instead of subconsciously understanding why they are frustrated they simply state that the new product is inferior rather than realize that it is not inferior, just different, quite often in very subtle ways.
This is true with any software. Take Autocad vs Microstation for instance. I use both very proficiently and am constantly having to listen to intelligent engineers argue over which is the “Better” platform.. In 100 percent of the cases I ask what software their first Job was using and it is the platform they promote.
If you used Word for ten years then you will probably have trouble learning OOO and will be more productive in Word.
Soft ware is a tool. People in these arguments all too often forget that is not what you use to write that matters but what you write with what you use.
Congrats to open office for their contribution to the myriad of software available. It is significant and respectable.
All of you should be grateful that your lives are so blessed that you can actually argue about this crap instead of wondering how to survive the next week. Shut up, Get off your high horses and do something good for the world.
And in conclusion OOO is better. LOL
I have on two occasions submitted PDFs exported natively by OOo to turnitin with no problems whatsoever.
That said, turnitin needs to die a horrible death.
Maybe, but it's "free" not as in "freedom" or even "beer", but as in "Windows comes for 'free' with a new PC".
Let's face it, the students are paying for MS Office, it's just that the price is hidden in their tuition, and they have no choice in the matter.
It's the "MS tax" all over again. Once again Redmond shows their strongest skill: leveraging their monopoly to the point at which people are essentially forced to buy their software.
-a.d.-
I'm Erwin Schrodinger and I approve of this message, and I do not approve of this message!
OOo .GT. MS Office in at least one big way: installation size. The latest OOo installer is less than half the size of MS O2K. I have no interest in trying newer versions of MS Office but I imagine they are considerably bigger than O2K.
So, any feature comparisons have to take into account that OOo does it all with much less disk space (and yes disk space is an issue on my Eee with its 16GB SSD).
I come here for the love