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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."
I use neooffice on my mac!!!!!!
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I love that my web browser can broadcast which office suite I am using.
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.
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.
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)
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.
You must be new here....
All ribbons did was take the menus and turn them into tabs, then the items buried under the menus are now out in the open once you select the tab.
That's a notorious lie and people should really stop parroting it! No, a lot of commands are not now available, at least not through the ribbons. And worst is, you can't even add them to the ribbons, even if you know they exist (and they do, because you can find them when you try to add buttons to the button bar, which however the new Office discourages you from using).
So please, just fucking stop repeating this mantra that you can access all the commands through the ribbon - any even slightly advanced user of Word or Excel knows that's bullshit on a popsicle stick.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
The ribbon is fine for average users; it has the tasks that average users need to do on an average day. However, the REALLY rare tasks are now so hidden that I had to enable the Developer tab to be able to do things like work with templates. As a professional user (I'm a technical writer. We mainly use Framemaker, but sometimes have to use Word for some documents), I find the ribbon horrible inconvenient.
Which .doc format? Works 95? Office 97? Works 2001? Office 2k3? WfW1.0? MS Word 2.0?
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.