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OpenOffice Tops 21% Market Share In Germany

Posted by kdawson on from the camel's-head-and-neck dept.

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."

3 of 252 comments (clear)

  1. I have introduced a lot of people to OO.org by MarkWatson · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I have used OO.org to write several books, and it is what I recommend to people.

    That said, I prefer Latex :-)

    1. Re:I have introduced a lot of people to OO.org by Maxo-Texas · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I maintain a 500 page RPG rules book with Ooo which has complex layout, cross referencing, tons of graphics (going to OOo shrank the size of the documents by 75% because of how I could treat the graphics).

      I went to OOo because 2007 would NOT print the 2003 version of the documents.

      The first document took me about 8 hours to convert.

      It finally dropped to about 2 hours to convert 100 pages.

      First thing was to set up default styles, ( finally had a template document which I just opened empty and pasted the content into).

      Then I would rip out all the sections and put them back in manually (it's mostly dual column but with occasional single column for headers and the conversion engine created sectioning which was way to complex).

      The toughest thing for me to solve each time was 1-3% of the graphics which were at the top right corner of the page. They would float incorrectly and randomly until I nailed them down.

      I can't see going back to Word now. Even at $10 for a legitimate corporate user, home copy.

      --
      She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
  2. Re:Problem is by Ethanol-fueled · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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"

    It's not going to be "better" than MS Office as long as .doc remains the de facto format. There are headhunters who require .doc resumes, entire departments who use only .doc, and there are professors who require .doc assignment submissions.

    One infuriating "feature" of OOo is the inability to permanently disable that annoying auto-numbering and auto-bulleting. The help and searches reveal that you have to manually turn one or the other off each time it thinks you want a list when you don't. It's especially annoying for writing code-style, where tabs and indents are done manually.

    And, in Math, formulas don't render correctly when converted to .doc, at least not when printed from a Windows computer. Multiplication symbols show up as hollow checkboxes. It's impossible to use superscripts and subscripts simultaneously, as when using chemical symbols (in before "use TeX").