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."

Comments

Re:I have introduced a lot of people to OO.org

[Maxo-Texas]

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.