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Microsoft Admits OpenOffice.org Is a Contender
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "Microsoft has unwittingly admitted that OpenOffice.org is a rival, by launching a three-minute video of customers explaining why they switched to Microsoft Office from OpenOffice.org. Glyn Moody writes: 'You don't compare a rival's product with your own if it is not comparable. And you don't make this kind of attack video unless you are really, really worried about the growing success of a competitor. [Microsoft] has now clearly announced that OpenOffice.org is a serious rival to Microsoft Office, and should be seriously considered by anyone using the latter.'"
There is the price, but then there is the horrible Ribbon interface. I have yet to meet someone IRL who *really* likes it. I recently installed Microsoft Office 2010 to recover emails from a corrupted system (Needed to open PST files, copied the mails to an IMAP server. No more Office needed... That what Trial Versions are great for!). Frankly, it comes over even more toyish, more "Please treat me as a dumb user". It's aggravating.
Interestingly, when installing 2010, it asked me whether I wanted to enable OpenDocument formats. I was torougly surprised by that. That's another admittance of Microsoft that OpenOffice is a treath.
Since the video is little more than quotes from people heralding the stark beauty of Microsoft products when compared to various open-source (and sometimes generic open-source) products, you might wonder where the quotes come from. They're old success stories, most of which are marketed as "Case Studies" on Microsoft.com.
I looked up the quotes in the video and apparently wasn't the only one to notice. Taking the first three quotes your years are 2007, 2009 and 2006. Some of them are more recent than others but I get the feeling that Microsoft needs to dig further back to find quotes deriding open source. I've used OpenOffice.org for a very long time. In college (~2002) I even used StarOffice on the school's Sun machines. And OpenOffice.org used to have some really really shitty aspects. But a few years back, major revisions have made it a lot better. Enough to cause Microsoft to come up with new ideas for their Office Suite. And I'm forced to use MS Office at work and I'm okay with that. It's becoming a contender. And as "tech debt" or "IT debt" begins to be realized for Microsoft and what it did to our history of proprietary format documents, I think OpenOffice.org is only going to look better and better. Yes, there's some cost with OO.o but there's some cost with MS Office as well.
It doesn't always happen but sometimes open source catches up to and even surpasses proprietary software. I cannot say OO.o will pass MS Office but it has made up a lot of ground in the past 2-3 years. A good example of this is the Linux 2.6 kernel and its steadily growing stability and features compared to Windows that remained largely stagnant while this occurred.
With the serious changes to the interface of MS Office suites (not saying they're bad, they're just some of the most major updates I've seen from MS), I think now is going to be the hardest time for Microsoft to find current quotes from customers criticizing open source. Because flipping from MS Word 2007 to OO.o is probably going to be as difficult for users to adapt to as flipping from MS Word 2007 to MS Word 2010.
My work here is dung.
Of course Microsoft knows OpenOffice, or for that matter any competing product is, well, a competing product. How does them releasing a video of their users comparing the products mean they're somehow extremely worried about it, or "losing" how this story makes it sound? Nice way to turn it around.
Don't forget, guys... it's called LibreOffice now!
Except that MS should focus on LibreOffice now... didn't they got the memo?
Or is it because they know Larry Ellison hates Microsoft...
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Of course, now that OpenOffice is finally becoming a contender in mindshare (as well as technically), they go and change the name, and potentially lose all brand recognition.
Interestingly, when installing 2010, it asked me whether I wanted to enable OpenDocument formats. I was torougly surprised by that. That's another admittance of Microsoft that OpenOffice is a treath.
It's better to support the format and keep users on your software than not support it and potentially risk losing them.
One reason I haven't switched is that I hate learning new software (as do most users), and I've never directly paid for an Office license, instead having it pre-installed or received through a MSDNAA.
P.S: I always use open source whenever it covers most of my needs.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
For all the people who get exposed to this new video by what ever means, if they never heard of OpenOffice before they sure have now - thanks Microsoft :)
Funny, I have yet to find anyone (except me...as I just hate it) in my workplace (research institute) who does not like the new ribbon interface.
Frankly, it comes over even more toyish, more "Please treat me as a dumb user". It's aggravating.
Well... that might be for your self aggravating ego; for the majority of users it means an interface that gets out of their way.
quoting from TFA:
After doing a little digging, we found that these quotes are actually from case studies and press articles from the last four years,
What I would really like to hear is equivalent quotes of companies who successfully migrated from MS Office to OO.o. Is there any? (no, not /. pseudonym-"in my office"-anecdotes, but real company names)
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
And if MS doesn't respond, it's because they're flustered and incapable of a proper response. If they do respond, they're desperate and scared and see the competitor as a 'threat.' Great is there any option, EVER, except MS is scared and on the run? While making record profits every year...
"...I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease." - Linus Torvalds
Now that OpenOffice is in the hands of a company which isn't being criminally mismanaged and which has a well-known vendetta against Microsoft, maybe this is out of valid fears for real competition. On the other hand, Microsoft has a way of waving Linux and other FLOSS projects around for misdirection whenever they need to conjure a competitor to refute claims of their monopoly. Microsoft "admitting" that OO is a competitor would be like North Korea "admitting" they have nukes in order to try and bum rice off of the west.
Directly paid or indirectly paid, you still paid.
I've never paid for an Office license period thanks to OpenOffice and it's predecessors (StarOffice, etc).
OpenDocument !== OpenOffice
Alternate hypothesis - Microsoft is really worried about the competition that Google docs presents to the casual web-connected user to their own Live offerings; so distract from that threat by hyping the non-contender. Don't get me wrong, I like oOo a lot and have used it extensively, but for enterprises the difference between deploying Office and oOo is like... well, there isn't even effective deployment documentation for oOo.
You'll be happy to know then that OO.o is pretty much about as exact a copy you can get of the Office 2003 interface... at least AFAI can tell, never used 2003 much.
Perhaps this is a result of your area of work, or the place work / study etc?
I know some people who don't like the ribbon, the vast majority have a clear preference for it. Obviously neither of our anecdotal observations prove anything on a large scale. I'm surprised that you've managed to avoid fraternising with anyone of a dissenting opinion in, what, 4 years?
Yes there is the price and the ribbon, and if anything office 2007 (not sure of 2010) seems to make it harder to do interesting things with my docs. I'd pay $100 for Word/Excel 2003 over OO.org (free), but I'm not sure I'd pay even $0.02 for 2007 or 2010 over OO.org.
Still... In my experience, it beats OO.org. MSO crashes less (I really haven't had it crash on several computers in my normal use, OO crases maybe once every few months - a lot better than it was early in the 2000s, in terms of times of use, I use MSO more). I can't seem to get OO.org to keep margins formatted properly, and I prefer the text rendering on MSO, although fairly recently, OO.org has improved that a lot.
Comparing 2003 to OO.org, since on any machine I can, I don't upgrade to 2007+, I would have to say, I think handling tables in formatted text documents, is quite a bit easier/more intuitive.
My overall view?
Word 2003 > Current OO.org ~= Word 2007
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
At least:
- Linux
- Firefox and Chrome
- Thunderbird
- Postgresql and MySQL
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
This may be a clue to Microsoft that not everybody loves the ribbon. At least not madly enough to pay for it.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
you'll be happy to know that riding a motorcycle is about as close as you can come to riding a kids trycicle.. at least AFAI can tell, never had a trycicle as a kid..
but yeah, the step from office 2k/2k3 to OO is much smaller then to the new ribbon shit in 2k7
People, what a bunch of bastards
It's worth skipping my mod points for this issue. I'll reply to you out of the 5 possible posts that are relevant.
I hate the Ribbon. But I banked on Rule ____ of the net that says if there's a purpose for someone's potential small project, it has better than even odds of existing.
Classic Menu for Office
http://www.addintools.com/
It's a plugin for Office that puts mostly similar menus back.
So the comparison becomes:
A: Office 2007 (or 2010?) with Old Menus
vs
LibreOffice (OpenOffice.org / branding squabbles with Oracle)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I'm not an open source zealot, don't use Linux, have no particular dislike for Microsoft, but Office hasn't really been on my radar for a long time. I used Word for years, but when I got a new computer a few years ago it didn't come with Office installed so I downloaded OpenOffice to see what it was like. Never went back -- there didn't seem to be any point. I'm sure there are many, many things that Microsoft Word, Excel etc can do that OpenOffice Writer, Calc etc can't do, but personally I've never hit that hurdle. Office may still be required for some business tasks, but for my own business and personal use, OpenOffice will do me fine. Thank you to the wonderful people that made it and released it for free!
The basic presentation is, though the Tools --> Options screen isn't quite set up the same way. Customizing the toolbars is also kind of a pain compared to the MS product (I thought the add button, move up/down interface had gone away around 2002?).
There's also some minor annoyances with OOo that bug me enough to not really switch from 2003:
* No "draw borders" functionality in the spreadsheet program (and the addon/plugin kinda sucks). Doing cell borders is a pain in OOo but very easy in Excel.
* The big purple lightbulb box that pops up all the time. It's not as bad as Clippy (which is the first thing I disable after turning off "automatically highlight entire word" and enabling "always show full menus"), but still bothersome.
* Asking me every single time whether I want to delete everything in the cell, or just the formula, or the formatting, or...
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
Oh boy could I talk about this, since I'm just finished converting our ODF files to OOXML. A year or so ago I recommended a move to ODF/OpenOffice, being one to generally support open standards and open source, and it seemed like a good fit since we have a multi-platform office.
The problem is, OpenOffice can't even stay consistent with ITSELF between saving a file and opening it on the same machine. Don't even get started into the irritating minor-but-unacceptable differences in a file between going from Mac and PC. The one time we opened and saved a document in Linux OpenOffice it screwed it up so bad that the file was unusable. But even on ONE platform, page breaks would move around, images would move in front of callouts, sometimes callouts would move to the very beginning of the doucment, and, worst of all, occasionally images would go missing from files. These are large files that we frequently send to print. It's completley unacceptable that we check every page before sending it to the printer.
And yet, on the forums that was about the extent of the advice that I got. Instead of help fixing the problem, I got recommendations to change the way the documetns were laid out that would have been impossible with our formatting needs. Any real help I tried to get was shot down by the, "I can't easily recreate it so I'm not going to fix it or try to figure out what's causing the problem for you.
OpenOffice could be a shining beacon for the open source community. But it really just sucks.
Typically Microsoft would keep messing with file formats, binary blobs dumped into the files, fonts/menus etc in every release to keep increasing the "spoiler" features and increase costs to OpenOffice and other competitors who are trying to keep up with the interoperability.
I have not seen any new feature in the last 5 years in MsOffice that is a must have feature or a killer feature. And most of the core functionality that could be saved and restored in Office97 format cleanly in MsOffice is done equally well in OpenOffice. Though it won the battle in getting OOXML certified as another "standard" format, the battle raised the visibility of interoperability issues and a few customers started actually separating "microsoft compatibility" from "interoperability". So they are setting the default save format is Office97 even on newer versions to keep their escape avenue open.
Another important strategic mistake it made was ignoring the web based office tools. Microsoft knew there were millions of pirated copies of MsOffice is being used everywhere. It turned a blind eye to it thinking, "these guys would never actually pay for an office suite. If we crackdown they might go to OpenOffice. So let us keep them in the tent, as a way to deny market share to the competition". When the web based office tools started coming out, they saw it as a pathetic little pipsqueak not comparable to the full power of a desktop Office tool. But it siphoned off a large portion of the bootleg users who were looking for a legal option to do simple editing without having to pay for a full price MsOffice suite. Now compatibility and interoperability with these web office tools is an issue and it is tying down Microsoft. It is not able to play the usual, "make enough changes to the file formats and the api and the look and feel and leave enough bugs in there to make everybody look bad compared to the defacto standard microsoft ".
Finally the software costs have soared. It used to cost 50$ for MsWord and 1900$ for a desk top in 1995. Now it is 100$ for a decent desktop and 300$ for MsOffice (more if you want these ultimate, professional versions). The hardware has become very powerful and a virtual machine running an WinXP 2005 image in a protected sandbox actually runs faster than the original machine it shipped with. People are recyling their old Microsoft Windows licenses and Office licenses using VMware.
I think Microsoft will still milk a few more billions of dollars from MsOffice. But it is not going to grow as fast as it did. If they suspend all new development on it and just milk it for profits, they might actually make more money than trying to add more bells whistles and hidden mines and bombs to thwart interoperability.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Let's say we were M$, and we have over the years been beaten for holding monopolies. Let's say we had some inkling that a suite of M$Office monopoly were coming because a little birdy told us so. Mayhaps we should start painting OpenOffice as a contender so we can say use that to disprove M$Office as holding undue sway in the market place?
Microsoft can be really proud of XBbx. It is a real success. But everything else they are doing is crumbling like a sinkhole under them.
Windows: Macs just climbed to 10% of US sales. That's a huge event, considering that no software vendor can consider losing one in ten of every sale. It means that even despite Windows still near-dominence, Macs are in some ways on equal footing with them. And then of course there's Linux, which continues to grow in mindshare and has the price that can't be beat. Not to mention the security compared to Windows. Plus the libre vs. dracon mindset.
IE: Internet Explorer is now losing ground like crazy to Firefox, not to mention Safari and Chrome. And it's no wonder. Anyone who ever used IE and then *anything else* would find that *anything else* is better in every way except for compatibility with retarded websites that never bothered to program for anything except IE. And have you noticed that those retarded websites have gone from very prevalent to almost nonexistent?
Office: See above story. Then there are things like iWork for the iPad which costs $10 per app. MS doesn't even comprehend that space.
Windows phones and tablets: Well, they're just coming out with these, so its hard to draw conclusions yet, but... they're just coming out with these?? Usually when Microsoft releases something because everyone else is doing it, they have a really hard time doing it at all well. May I draw your attention to the Zune?
Bing: How many of you use Bing? How many of you use Google? 'Nuff said.
IIS: Still nothing compared to Apache.
Exchange server: Still a contender, but the open source tools are very robust now, and the licensing for Exchange is punishingly expensive. If enterprise still wants to buy commercial products, then solutions like OS X Server cost a tiny fraction of Exchange for most of the functionality.
Then you may notice that we see story after story of Microsoft closing down projects which were going to take over the world and which seem to have died a slow and long-overdue death. Again... you gotta wonder how much longer they're going to wait before they give up on the Zune. I'll bet they are losing tons of money on it, but keep it alive just so they don't have to face the humiliation of shutting it down.
So what does Microsoft have going for them? Yeah, Xbox. And while PS3 has at least jumped on the Wii-controller bandwagon, XB seems to still be missing the boat. But maybe they'll catch up here. If I were MS, I would want to spin off Xbox as the one branch of the company that might survive.
Don't get me wrong. They're still a huge and very powerful company. But it seems like they can do no right anymore. How much longer can they keep investors interested in holding their stock?
Odd - I love the thinking behind the ribbon UI.
It's a modal editor, which makes me feel more at home when I come to it from Vim.
Instead of a monolithic editor with thousands of options across many mindsets at any given time, I have a simplified (yet fully functional) subset, classified by user modes.
I'm hoping some of the OpenOffice mockups I have seen around that utilize this mindset come into fruition as an option.
But for a 'Power User' that uses the keyboard shortcuts, one has to remember the 2003 menu layout and type away blindly. The idea that the ribbon makes things easier for hard-core Excel is laughable.
I've tried OpenOffice* several times. I'm still running MS Office 2004 on my Mac, and I've used MS Office 2007 at work. While Outlook has some stability issues, and people really need to learn that Excel isn't a substitute for a well programmed GUI when it comes to FORTRAN frontends, Microsoft Office still beats the pants off of OpenOffice. Being cheap and trying to be legal, I decided to install Open Office rather than upgrade my copy at home. It's just not the same. Open Office feels clunky. I know they can't copy the look and feel of MS Office, but that's not an excuse for not making things intuitive. On top of that, the compatibility with MS Office documents is really bad if you try any sort of formatting. In a world where MS Office is still king, that's just not acceptable. On it's own OpenOffice is alright, but in an environment where people are switching between MS Office and OpenOffice or working with people who use MS Office, it's just not good enough. I've mostly switched to TeX for typed documents and but I still open Excel 2004 at home when I need a spread sheet program, not OpenOffice. Maybe this video mean's MS is scared of OpenOffice, but MS Office still has the momentum to keep the lead for a long time.
*I'm going to keep calling it that, as that's the name on the splash screen when I load it.
I remember what I've gone through, when working with documents, where compatibility to Microsoft Office is needed.
OO.o was not really an alternative, I've had the best results with Abiword, when using Word documents.
Is it realistic to search for a complete office suite like MS Office? Wouldn't it make more sense to collect different applications that perform in their task the best?
Like, Abiword is a contender to Word, Gnumeric to Excell, etc...
EOF
Thanks to the Ribbon interface I spend much more time in the Microsoft Office products. It has never been easier to search for the tools that I've been using for over 10 years thanks to the new Ribbon interface. I just keep selecting tabs until I find the thing I was looking for. And it only took me half an hour to figure out what the Office Button was and that it was hiding operations like save as and print preview.
Funny, I have yet to find anyone (except me...as I just hate it) in my workplace (research institute) who does not like the new ribbon interface.
Just make sure that the people who say they like ribbon UI actually use MSOffice as anything else but Notepad replacement.
I was totally oblivious to the upgrade of MSO in my company - as I use for my needs OO.o anyway. Even compared to the older versions, for technical documentation latter is superior (after disabling all the annoyances, obviously). When it comes to the official internal documents (and internal Wiki may note be used) I still have to go with MSO.
It pain me every time I sit with others writing/correcting a document to wait for them to walk through the whole ribbon thing to find an option or a button. Before they had to simply move mouse over the toolbar and read the tool-tips.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Is it possible to open 2 different Powerpoint presentations in two different windows in Office 2007 or 2010?
This is one of my main frustrations in Office 2003.
The other is the stupid Word formatting preventing you to set a paragraph style in the paragraph after a page-break without said page-break having the same style (thus, if want a "Heading" after a page-break I need to leave an extra paragraph mark to prevent the page-break appearing in my Table of Contents).
Of course, the last time I used OpenOffice Org I found a lot of similar (but worse) small details (paper cuts) that prevented me from using it. The only thing I now use is Open Office draw.
Oh and btw I hope that now that they are changin OO.o to LibreOffice they take the time to separate the huge beast into smaller programs (no need to load all the OO shit to use only Impress)
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Outlook? There are tons of email programs, and Outlook is the very worst email client I've ever used. If you'd said PowerPoint or Excel you might have had a valid a point. But Outlook? That's a laugh!
I don't use Powerpoint Or OO's spreadsheet myself (no use for a spreadsheet at home), but I'm not even sure if OO has an equivalent to Powerpoint, and Excel is head and shoulders above Lotus or Quattro (I have to use all 3 spreadsheets at work). If OO has an equivalent to PP, someone please correct me.
Free Martian Whores!
Look at the comments on the site where the video was linked to. Most of the comments were negative toward OO. However it seems that the biggest issues are compatibility (with M$), ease of use (complaints from people who had learned WP and SS apps on M$ Office), speed and support. Since the 'world standard' for WP files seems to be M$.doc format and this is always a moving target the compatibility complaint is real. Ease of use is an issue, and OO does need to improve in this area. Having more 'training' documentation, perhaps some YouTube videos for this would help. I don't know how much of OO is still built on java, but getting rid of this layer and re-writing EVERYTHING in some good HL language (C, C++, etc) would help with the speed issue. I'm guessing that the Java runtime layer is taking a godawfull time to initialize and suck up all the resources it needs. Finally there is support. There is decent on-line support for OO, but it's all over the place. You might have to google all afternoon to find the right URL to find answers to your questions. I don't know if you can buy OO support from Conical (Ubuntu), but there is an oportunitiy there for them to fill.
I use OO writer at home to write documents, and their spredsheet mostly to view excel files (which it does rather well, once I allow it to convert them to native format). I've had tons of problems with fixing format of documents imported from M$ word however. Once I get the format right on the screen it doesn't always print the same way. It's a WYSIAWYG problem. (What you see is ALMOST what you get). Mind you, OO (OK from now on LO) has promise and maybe now that it's been forked from Scum/Oriface it may improve as a true open source project. Gnu Cash took a while to get as good as it is, now it rivals the commerical product. Hopefully LO will improve to this point.
That does look great. It's the "classic" option that Microsoft itself should have had included with MS Office 2010.
So, for an extra $45 USD (the price for converting all of MS Office), I can get the standard UI of ... the copy of MS Office 2003 that I already have.
Maybe I'm crazy, but it's a lot cheaper and simpler to: A) not upgrade to the most recent version of MS Office, or B) install OpenOffice and permanently get off the MS Office upgrade merry-go-round.
I really like the ribbon. It's an improvement over the combination of toolbars and menus. I can seem to be able to find things more quickly. OpenOffice on the other hand looks and feels like Word for Windows 2, with all its problems.
It is a really old problem with this kind of comparisons: MSO aims medium and large size companies primarily, OO.o / LibreOffice targets SOHO. MSO has collaboration tools, OO.o / LO doesn't, so it is absolutely needless to compare these applications. If anybody wants to create a competition, use programs for the same market - in this case MSO and StarOffice. SO has similar functionalities as MSO, so compete MSO against SO, not OO.o / LO.
When OpenOffice has an Outlook equivalent, it will be a contender.
Outlook. Rivaled only by the PowerPoint in ruining productivity.
Pretty much the best M$Exchange client - and unfortunately pretty much the worst e-mail client. Ever.
Most recent problem I will never see in any other MUA: refusal to search mail box because it is not indexed by the Excahnge and Windows search (oops, why ever) isn't accessible.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
I like the ribbon interface. It took some time getting used to it, but now I don't want to go back. We've even developed a couple of custom applications at work and used a ribbon interface and the users love it.
Please turn your spellchecker on. ;)
It'll be hard for MS Office to come up with something that would make someone want to change over or at least pay full price for MS Office. While I don't know if I could see college campuses and larger business places switching to Open Office I could see many small businesses switch. Even Google Docs is a contender against Microsoft for me personally. I just don't need everything these office suites suggest I need.
iburnaga.blogspot.com
IE: Internet Explorer is now losing ground like crazy to Firefox, not to mention Safari and Chrome. And it's no wonder. Anyone who ever used IE and then *anything else* would find that *anything else* is better in every way except for compatibility with retarded websites that never bothered to program for anything except IE. And have you noticed that those retarded websites have gone from very prevalent to almost nonexistent?'
one serious notable exception-
Government websites: It's not worth the risk of using
government websites designed to take end user information and file it with anything but IE
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The Video itself actually is quite good. It goes head-to-head with OOo and banks on the prime benefits of MSO compared to OOo. Familiarity, existing macros, performance on Windows, wide-spread usage as an advantage in itself, cost of switching, etc. I've seen use cases where current Excel versions beat OOo Calc in terms of features and performance.
That all being said, the main point about MS Office that we all have had in the last 12 years is adressed aswell:
I'm sure nobody in his right mind here would object to using MSO if the reasons are sound. However, we musn't forget that the illegal practices of MS have cause entire generations of users to be brainwashed of the concept of word-processing and spreadsheet tools and instead have used the terms 'Word' and 'Excel' as synonyms for the former without even noticing. OpenOffice *and* this commercial have changed that. And that is a huge step forward in reparing the damage that was done by MS. Which in itself is a good thing.
All along I too am sure that in the long run open will win - as I've said 5 years ago allready. This ad shows we're still headed the right way.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Powerpoint 2007 is horrible WRT having presentations open side-by-side. It's possible, though. The thing is: Unlike the other Office 2007 programs, Powerpoint is still MDI, with the inner window buttons hidden at first. Go to the View ribbon and the look at the "Window" section. These are your standard MDI window commands: arrange, cascade... use them to make the inner windows actually visible as such. Once you do that, you even get inner window buttons in the top right corner of the ribbon once you maximize one of these windows again.
http://www.moonlight3d.eu/
While I am a happy user of Openoffice.org and do recommend it for home users, I question whether or not it is ready for corporate deployment. The video, while obviously biased (and sort of unprofessional [slamming other products to make your own look good, really?]) does make some good points. Like it or not, the vast majority of people have grown up with Microsoft Office and any switch will incur efficiency costs due to the learning curve. In my view, OpenOffice.org was designed to be a 'home' alternative for Microsoft Office. For most users at home, especially those who use Microsoft Office almost exclusively for Word, OpenOffice.org is more than adequate. Excel, OneNote, and Access users might will usually find difficulties due to differences in equation writing etc.. Perhaps the ideal users for OpenOffice.org is the primary school, early secondary school students, whose main usage of Office suites are limited to document creation (eg, essays, papers, reports etc.). Those who dislike the compatibility issues may not realize that while Microsoft Office is the dominant software, this will always be an issue. Whenever a competitor comes close to realizing full compatibility they will introduce another 'upgraded' version of their document format. This will keep all others one step behind. Personally I believe that documents should be saved as HTML, but I don't really know what the real advantages of the .doc/.docx/.odt formats offer.
I have yet to meet someone IRL who *really* likes it.
Because we all know that your subjective anecdotes comprise the entire userbase of MS Office, right? It's funny that you claim that so many people hate it yet the entire foundation behind the ribbon was based on feedback from users during usability and UI tests.
Well, the old interface (of Word, specifically) encourages bad usage. People would choose fonts of various sizes instead of using styles, which makes working with the documents in an actual publishing setting a fucking nightmare. The new one is a lot easier to use properly, and it's much more obvious how. Just like OpenOffice, in fact, but it goes one step further and sorts the various features so that they can be readily accessible without making a convoluted and cluttered interface.
Objectively, it's simply better than the old one. If you prefer the old one, well, you were probably not using it correctly anyway.
If OO has an equivalent to PP, someone please correct me.
It's called Impress. I've never used it (I don't do presentations), so I don't know how "equivalent" it is, but it is OpenOffice's presentation software.
Personally I've seen many people migrate from M$ Office over to OpenOffice. Why? Cost alone is one huge factor. Microsoft Office IS good software, I admit. Well, except for Outlook that is. But OpenOffice offers a LOT and it's a free and straightforward suite of applications. Good good stuff here.
Good God, man! Ever heard of archiving? When things slow down at the end of December each year, I usually take a couple of hours one day to sort though email. I delete all old personal email that found its way to my work inbox, old mailing list emails, coworker "out sick today" emails, etc. Then, any email from 2 years ago gets sent to a separate folder, archived, and compressed. That way, my email client only has between 1-2 years of email it has to keep track of. If I absolutely need to access an email from more than 2 years ago, I uncompress and unarchive a folder from a previous year. In over 10 years, I've only had to do that once. If you're already archiving old email and you are still dealing with a couple of gigs of email, then you should "train" your coworkers to store large attachments on a server and just send you an email with a link to the file. I absolutely hate receiving a 25MB PowerPoint presentation as an email attachment. Who on Earth does that besides people who are not as familiar as they should be with the IT resources available to them?
For the skeptics:
alt d,p,r,f - pivot chart
alt d,p,f - pivot table
alt d,f,a,o,r,t - filter unique, type the top cell to copy to after this sequence and cells must have a header row
alt w,n,w,a - tile two windows of the same workbook (Excel)
alt w,a,t - tile windows
alt o,c,h - hide column
alt o,h,h - hide sheet
alt o,h,u - unhide sheet
alt o,c,u - unhide column (select around the missing column first)
select some text then alt o,p,n,down,down, - change the paragraph format to double spaced (Word)
I've done far too much Office.
btw, Office 2007 breaks some 2003 keyboard shortcuts too - specifically freeze panes takes an extra F.
Yes, I've opened two different presentations in PowerPoint, spreadsheets in Excel, and documents in Word in multiple windows for viewing side-by-side.
OO must be able to save documents back into the original MS format if it wants to take market share from MS. When you get a document from a client, they want it back in an MS format - they're not going to open it up in OO just because you want to use it.
Macros: OO still has issues with MS' macros.
For my personal analysis, my OO/Linux box is wonderful to produce an end product (printed things or graphics for web pages), but if I have to share stuff with corp America, OO is not an option.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Sounds like astroturfer bullshit to me. I've used complex documents on mac, windows and linux for years with no problems going between them.
Obviously: when the oracle starts to offer total solutions form the database servers over the Fileservers to thin clients, all based on their own/former suns products an a little bit of open source, and support from one hand - hmmm what could possibly go wrong for MS?
I've wondered who at Microsoft has allowed some of the recent changes in their products. From moving the buttons around in IE, to removing the menus in Office. I just don't appreciate unnecessary change, especially when it decreases my productivity. We've had word processors and spreadsheets for decades. Why would I want to spend > $100 for a new word processor every couple of years? OO does what I need it to, although it has some limitations (ever try to use Calc with a large sheet?). For the majority of the things that I would need OO for, it does the job well.
... well, there isn't even effective deployment documentation for oOo.
Official OpenOffice Deployment Documentation
If you're using KDE:
'sudo apt-get install openoffice.org-kde'
If you're using Gnome:
'sudo apt-get install openoffice.org-gnome'
Glad I could help.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Ribbons look good, but are a pain to use.
If you think Outlook is an email client, that might explain why you have no idea why there is no substitute. I've been waiting for 7 years for an open source replacement for Outlook and nothing has even come close.
Not if your company pays for it or if you write it off as a business expense.
Plus there is one important part of MS Office that neither OpenOffice nor any other software in existence has matched. OneNote. Yes, I've tried stuff like Evernote, but it's all crap compared to OneNote.
Apparently you don't work at a corporation that needs it.
Let's be brutally honest here at the expense of karma. The ribbon was created to accommodate the growing population of MS office users who do not have the mental capacity, focus, or experience to utilize the existing menu structure that has been used on all substantial GUI based computer programs for 15+ years. It was preceded by a toolbox panel in the OS X versions of Office which was actually useful since it allowed quick access to basic formatting options but also kept the pull-down menu interface intact for the more advanced commands. But MS actually decreased their program's functionality and efficiency with the ribbon.
Very few who were actually competent in the advanced Office features prior to the ribbon liked the change, because it meant that they had to go hunt for options that they knew used to exist. People who were never very familiar with Office loved it, because there were no large menus to get lost in. MS is happy because now your grandmother can probably work out how to use Office and you still will (unhappily) pay for it as well.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that MS is willing to whore themselves out to the lowest common denominator. Office is no longer specialized software... it's for the masses. However, if you want to write a 5 page memo without images or plot a few points on a graph, it allows you to do that with little initial setup. But if you want to write a 300 page Ph.D. thesis or work with an array of more than 65K points, you'll need to explore other options... unless you like the M in S&M.
We should meet up some time. then. I find the ribbon vastly superior to the jumbled menus of OO.o and Office '03 (and, indeed, most other complex applications). And yes, ThePhilips, I use Word for more than just simple word processing and Excel for complex financial and physical computations, not just making a bar graph with three sets of data. While the suite doesn't justify $400, I find $75 (academic price) quite reasonable.
Me: Argh! I'm trying to write a poster and They have moved everything around on Powerpoint 2008 (Mutter) I liked it how it was.
Wife: Why don't you use Open Office thats more like the old powerpoint?
Me: (Facepalm) but but but I'm the one who is supposed to be banging on about Open Source (hands in geek card, stalks off to write poster).
Good post. I do the same, but I figured that was just me not havign enough experience of using the ribbon. Fortunately, I managed to just figure out where the stuff I use often was before the company upgraded me to Office 2010.
One thing of note in 2010, the orb 'menu button' is now a .... coloured 'File' tab. It appears the adage "nothing sensible ever goes out of fashion" is still true.
Or you can hold down the ALT key and it will display the key to hit for each element on the ribbon.
But for a 'Power User' that uses the keyboard shortcuts, one has to remember the 2003 menu layout and type away blindly
Or use the new keyboard shortcuts, of course, but they're far less intuitive than the old ones precisely because they retained support for the old ones. What would be the intuitive keystroke for a selection often isn't available because it's already in use for back compatibility. One of the very many annoyances of the 2007 interface -- it's not only the ribbon, which is fine eye-candy but a usability nightmare.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
It is. But it's a pain in the ass. You have to open one, then go start a new copy of Powerpoint, and then open the second presentation. Same thing with Excel. Otherwise they're all locked to the same window.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Outlook? There are tons of email programs, and Outlook is the very worst email client I've ever used
IAWTP. Thing is, people don't care so much about that. They like outlook for its calendar and meeting functionality.
I'm >< this close to springing for an MS Office license for my Mac.
I frequently need to take documents home from work, work on them, and send them back to work, work on them the next day, etc.
Without fail, OOo screws up my documents. Header/Footers are AFU, continued bullets don't, bullet styles change, general document styles change, page breaks become section breaks, Visio-4 inserts become ugly, etc, ad nauseum. It's gotten so bad I sometimes just stay late at the office to avoid going home to OOo.
It's really quite frustrating.
And it's not like I'm living on the bleeding edge of MS-land, either. I bought an Office '97 license, and rather like the product. It is snappy as hell on modern hardware, and does everything I need.
I want to like, OOo, really, I do, but, man, it just does NOT interoperate with my current work flow - and I don't want to have give up Word-97 just to be able to use OOo.
Maybe WINE is the answer?
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Thanks to the Ribbon interface I spend much more time in the Microsoft Office products.
So, your productivity took a plunge too?
If OO has an equivalent to PP, someone please correct me.
OpenOffice.org Impress. It works fine for me (scientific presentations). I've had no problems with OOo Calc (Excel equivalent) or the word processor either. To me there's really no difference as far as ease of use or features between any of the OO programs and their MS equivalents.
But for a 'Power User' that uses the keyboard shortcuts, one has to remember the 2003 menu layout and type away blindly. The idea that the ribbon makes things easier for hard-core Excel is laughable.
I would generally agree with you. It is just as laughable as thinking that Microsoft should be placing most of its attention on catering to 'Power Users'. Power users were able to obtain expertise in the previous UI, and they will be able to gain expertise in the new ribbon UI.
Good UI design is primarily about making it easy to use for the masses, and hopefully catering to power users too if possible. I am one of those 'Power Users' and I love the ribbon when working with Word and PowerPoint. It is much less useful in Excel and Access, but it doesn't get in the way after learning the new UI.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
It shouldn't come as a surprise that MS is willing to whore themselves out to the lowest common denominator.
Yes, how dare they make their software more usable and less opaque to the users instead of the other way around! That's clearly the antithesis of good software design.
If ChiefMonkeyGrinder can draw these conclusions, what in tarnation could make you believe even for a moment that Microsoft PR is unwittingly acknowledging anything? Corporations make dumb decisions by committee, but they aren't actually staffed by... monkeys.
They are tacitly acknowledging their competitor, and Moody is pointing out that he has taken a few marketing workshops.
Did you just say hard-core Excel? You just said hard-core Excel, and you're speaking of laughable.
My office of approx 50 people is about 50/50 OO.org and MS Office. The more technically-minded people took to OO.org. We still save in the MS format for compatibility. For the most part, the MS Office users have not migrated simply because they "think" it's going to make their jobs harder. There have only been a handful of incidents where there was a compatibility issue. Culturally, the two camps feel they are superior to each other, so it is an interesting social experiment and mimics the dichotomy you see on /. posts.
Sierra Tango Foxtrot Uniform
Was not aware, thanks for the info.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
I can't stand the way Microsoft changed the top bar on Office since 2007, but that being said it is still infinitely quicker and more powerful than Open-Office, even on beefy desktops Open-Office drags I can't imagine actually putting maths into a spread sheet and asking it to do some real work.
I use OpenOffice at home and MS Office at work. I would see that trend increase. The bottom line is that MS charges way too much for Office. Business will likely justify it for some time if only for support reasons. For Personal use however it is insane.
The video, while obviously biased (and sort of unprofessional [slamming other products to make your own look good, really?])
That's the standard Apple formula, and it seems to work well for them, so why not?
I can't say I love the ribbon but I do think it is an improvement over the older toolbars. Problem is that many people are used to the older toolbars and as most people know gratuitous changes can be frustrating to existing users even if they are better for newer users.
That said, Open Office has a user interface only a mother could love. It's like the last ten years of progress in user interface design never happened for Open Office. It's not task centric enough, unintuitive, unforgiving, frustrating and in some parts borderline unusable.
I'd still recommend Open Office to anyone thinking of buying MS Office, but it needs a serious usability makeover.
posting anon for my reasons. I know parts of SCEA deploy laptops/desktop with OpenOffice instead of MS. There is a company name for you and it is big... I don't know about company wide but I do know that.
Impress is quite usable; I've created presentations with it before. One particularly useful feature was the ability to export as PDF--that way, I could present on a computer that had only Adobe Reader. (It includes slide transitions and everything and is by default set to open in full-screen mode. It's really nifty.) The only bad thing is that, at least a few years ago (and probably still today), OO.o comes with only two templates, both of which are incredibly ugly (the default is black and white Arial; the other is some ugly purple or blue and yellow crazyness).
Luckily, you can import templates from PowerPoint, which I have done a few times when I wanted something that actually looked good. Of course, most of those aren't good, either, but there are many that are. And, of course, this doesn't matter for the unfortunately large number of people who might as well not use a template in the first place because all they do is change fonts and colors all over the place (you know, the same people who haven't discovered styles in Word or OO.o Writer).
R.Mo
It pain me every time I sit with others writing/correcting a document to wait for them to walk through the whole ribbon thing to find an option or a button. Before they had to simply move mouse over the toolbar and read the tool-tips.
Not quite true. In the past, you just had to mouse over the button on the toolbar if that option happened to be visible on the toolbar. However, most of the toolbars would be turned off by default, and only magically appear in certain circumstances which the users might not understand. If the toolbar you wanted was not visible, you either needed to understand the circumstances which would trigger the appearance of the toolbar, enable the toolbar manually, or find the option in the menu system.
On top of that little bit of possible confusion, Microsoft had a habit of silently hiding things. Menus would hide options that you did not use actively, and the toolbars would drop buttons if the screen was not wide enough to accommodate all of the buttons. This can still happen with the ribbon interface, but it's a little more clear, in my opinion.
I have yet to meet someone IRL who *really* likes it.
I use it for 2-3 hours a day and I *really* like it. And there is your black swan.
I take my children to see Madonna(..), but I never for once ever thought I was in the same business.Chris Rea.
You don't admit "in my office"-anecdotes after providing one yourself. Very nice.
Outlook is horrible for email. But it's about the only thing out there that integrates calendaring and email cleanly. Zimbra makes it possible, but it's still clunky. And I'm saying that as compared to Outlook.
Outlook's value proposition isn't in email. It's in scheduling and calendars combined with your emails. And I hate that I have to say that.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Very few who were actually competent in the advanced Office features prior to the ribbon liked the change, because it meant that they had to go hunt for options that they knew used to exist. People who were never very familiar with Office loved it, because there were no large menus to get lost in. MS is happy because now your grandmother can probably work out how to use Office and you still will (unhappily) pay for it as well.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that MS is willing to whore themselves out to the lowest common denominator. Office is no longer specialized software... it's for the masses. However, if you want to write a 5 page memo without images or plot a few points on a graph, it allows you to do that with little initial setup. But if you want to write a 300 page Ph.D. thesis or work with an array of more than 65K points, you'll need to explore other options... unless you like the M in S&M.
OK, I haven't used MS Office in a long time -- at least not any recent version. Are you saying that MS removed the old interface and replaced it with one easier to use for beginners? Having an easy-to-use interface for beginners is a great idea. Also great for people who just don't need to use the system -- or even certain parts of it -- often enough for them to be practiced and expert at it. But why the heck would they remove the old interface entirely? Maybe it's the "Design of Everyday Things" talking, but why wouldn't they keep the old one for more sophisticated users. There's nothing wrong with having an easy interface for casual use and an advanced one for the advanced users. It's actually a very good solution in this kind of case.
I am not a crackpot.
Somehow it reminds me of part of the prophecy in the Harry Potter series: "the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal".
I know some people who don't like the ribbon, the vast majority have a clear preference for it.
I'd bet that there's a correlation between dislike for the ribbon and how may features of Office the person uses. The person who only uses Word, for example, as a Notepad replacement (as ThePhillips called it) can still use it like that and might spot some interesting things on the Ribbon that they find useful. The person who was already making use of a wide range of features finds that many of those features are now harder to access (especially if they don't want to have to keep moving their hand between mouse and keyboard -- the Ribbon is heavily biased towards mouse use) and doesn't get those nice surprises of discovering features they didn't know about.
That fits the anecdotal evidence just fine. The majority of Office users are probably just punching out internal memos, reports, personal letters and the like, all using simple fixed templates. The majority of /. users who use Office, though, have probably explored deep into the menus and make use of esoteric features, because that's what geeks do. The 2007 interface was a poke in the eye for the power users, but Microsoft are unlikely to care because those making purchasing decisions tend not to be power users, and they probably expect the number of new users coming in at the bottom end to dwarf the number of users lost at the top end. And they're probably right.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
IBM
Is Microsoft intentionally citing OpenOffice.org as a serious competitor to draw attention and resources from LibreOffice?
My main frustation with MS Office is that numbered lists simply don't work. It is a nightmare to put anything between itens, sometimes it is hard even to edit old itens. That said, OO write works quite well for me, but I can't stand using calc (luckly, my Linux computers have perl, R, Scilab, and lots of other replacements, so I don't miss Excell there). There is a long time since I have last used PowerPoint or Presenter, so I can't say what they are like now, and I have long replaced Draw (is there a MS Office equivalent?) with Inkscape, and never looked back.
I still hope to see Libre Office being stable, and including those usefull programs at the package, like Inkscape, and GIMP. Maybe even integrating them with the current tools. They are going into a nice path, but only time will tell if they'll go far enough into it.
Rethinking email
The main one IMO is that it is cross platform. If your browser is cross platform, and your office suite is cross platform, then chances are your organisation can be cross platform with a small shove. This could result in huge savings on administration / IT and licensing in the long term.
I can believe it just fine. I just opened a 3 page paper I'm working on, and my citations moved around on me between saving the document on Tuesday and opening it today - all on the same machine. Somehow, the kerning grew in the intervening time. It was noticeable because it shunted a word down to the second line, and MLA requires the second line of a citation to be indented. I'd have been dinged a few points for that if I hadn't checked before turning in the paper.
you know the irony here? That if MS were to charge $20 or $30 a license for office, people would buy it. It's only pirated because their price they charge vs the value it actually has is so out of wack, and that they also did a shitty job developing it (ribbon is hardly the only issue).
Libre Office (didn't you get the memo?) has Presenter, that should solve the same problem (whatever it is) as Power Point. I can't say what is better, since I didn't use them in a while. Last time I used, Presenter was very weak, but was getting better fast.
Rethinking email
Classic troll.
Someone took a legitimate complaint and completely invalidated it by inversion. Basically changing OpenOffice (ODF) to Office (OOXML) and Office to OpenOffice.
Give the OO users half the cash from the cost savings of the software license and then see how many people think MS Office is superior.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
It's more opaque, not less. The ribbon hides functionality to coddle morons, that's its main purpose. By contrast, good UI design exposes functionality in such a way that users can actually use it.
Microsoft's solution to "hey! 90% of people use only 10% of our product's features" wasn't "Ok, let's try and expose at least another 10% to these guys in a way that makes sense so maybe they'll use and appreciate it" but rather "Ok, let's hide that 90% so our stupid, stupid users don't get lost picking through the remaining 10%".
Software design, btw, has very little to do with where all the buttons are hidden.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
> I don't know how much of OO is still built on java,
Next to nothing; it's all C++.
The java bits are entirely optional, OOo will run happily without java installed. Except for some wizards and `macros', you won't even notice or miss anything.
Odd - I love the thinking behind the ribbon UI. It's a modal editor, which makes me feel more at home when I come to it from Vim
Except it mainly isn't modal; there are just a couple of tabs that come and go. And it decides what mode I ought to be in rather than letting me decide, and consistently gets it wrong. When I was editing a diagram in Word 2003, as I moved around the different diagram elements various toolbar buttons would become disabled and enabled, and when I wanted to use one it was simply there. Doing exactly the same job in 2007, as I move around the diagram options go away completely when they become unavailable, and don't come back when they become relevant unless I jump through hoops to bring them back.
The 2003 interface was modal and got it right. I set up custom toolbars, and I decided which ones were relevant to the task I was performing and opened them. 2007 took that away from me. Instead of having all of my tools tidied away in drawers and just getting out the ones I needed, Office 2007 threw all the tools in a virtual pile on my workshop floor and took the drawers away.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
For some small places, OOo may work. But for any serious business that wants properly formatted and compatible documents, you either use MS Office, or ... Google Docs. OOo has absolutely no place in business. Anyone who thinks it does is just deluding themselves, or an OSS zealot of the highest order.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
I also like the idea of just using HTML as a document format, but then you run into problems with embedded stuff and having to manage multiple files. Something like a compressed archive that contained the HTML document(s) along with all associated files could probably work. Maybe a bit like CHM, but probably closer to CBZ/CB7/CBR files.
+1. Ribbon annoyed me for the first day or so I had to use it, but once I got the hang of it I realized that I was spending at least 1 and usually 2+ fewer clicks to do what I needed. It is actually very well-designed and provides a considerable productivity boost.
really all i need, is to print avery labels or the occasional pdf. ooo does the labels fine
Outlook? There are tons of email programs, and Outlook is the very worst email client I've ever used.
Agreed, because Lotus Notes is not an email program.
If OO has an equivalent to PP, someone please correct me.
Impress. And it exports nicely to PDF, Flash and a bunch of other formats. I used that when giving training as fallback....
Still, I prefer using a PDF to underpin a course over presentation software. Prevents one from using distracting animations, transitions etc.
Then the non-technical users swtich, get frustrated (because they *think* they're going to be frustrated), and the cost savings disappear.
The right answer here is interoperability. The concept that you need a specific Office suite to open a document is just insane - much like requiring a specific browser to view a website.
Learn about Photography Basics.
I can't consider OpenOffice a serious competitor to MSOffice when the first can not even draw the text correctly when the system freetype has LCD support and bytecode enabled (cause gross errors in design and kerning of text, and this happens only in OO, all the others applications shows the text fine). Even when the first uses about 110MB of RAM to open a document, when the MSOffice works with approximately 30MB to show a document of the same size.
I like to have options, but please, when you try to make a "MSOffice Killer", do it right.
Note: I tryed Abiword to open the OpenDocument format and then do the job fine (no ugly kerning errors, small footprint, crispy and clean text rendering like the rest of the system), but seens the ODF format from Abiword is not the same thing from OpenOfficem, and vice-versa. Ouch.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
well, you do, if you are Microsoft. We are talking about the company that claimed that Google Chrome was insecure while pushing Internet Explorer.
The printout is nice and colours of the text sublime, the bureaucrats in Brussels will surely like it.
For real work instead of meaningless reports nobody probably reads, I use tex with git to track changes. That is productive, no ribbon needed, just a keyboard.
I don't think there is going to be an OSS replacement for Outlook. I've been looking and waiting for years along with everyone else.
That said, I've been using Google Apps for my personal business, and find it *superior* to Outlook for tasking, scheduling, and email. While there isn't a libre solution right now, there is an alternative vendor, and a free one at that.
Learn about Photography Basics.
You should also be brutally honest in that people fear change, and so those people who want to think the horrible menu structure is better are old dogs who don't want to learn new tricks.
I tried OO 1.04, w2.x and they sucked. I had a general goal to be operating system agnostic. So I went to Vuze, Audigy, Gimp, Firefox, etc. Word didn't work on other operating systems. But OO sucked too much and was too painful to learn.
Then, as of 3.0 AND windows 7, suddenly a bunch of my hundred page word 2003 documents wouldn't print. No reason- just hung. Various fixes were tried. WOuldn't print.
I loaded the documents into 3.0, formatting was mangled. Not a lot, but too much for me. OO was drawing little grey boxes around everything which was confusing. But then with the little grey boxes, I could see the problem. The overlapping boxes of tables and graphical elements were confusing Word 2007. I fixed a few of those over in word "blindly" since i couldn't see the problem when in word and the document printed one more page. And some things took several tries before they were really fixed- each attempt cost me a few pages plus toner.
This was painful so I decided to fully reconvert/reformat one document to OO. I had my long term OSagnostic goal and I had a lot of word 2003 documents that wouldn't print. Fixing them in word was going to be a long slow manual process.
It took about 8 hours to convert the document, I learned a lot about OO in the process, I understood the little grey boxes, formatting menu, styles and it printed wonderfully. I also found features in OO that I really liked which were MISSING in word (visual cropping! was the one I remember most. In Word, I type the cropping value, exit, see the effect, then go back in... in OO it displayed cropping in real time).
So... I decided to convert another document. It took 2 hours. The next took about an hour. convert, save, strip all formatting, TOC and Index, reapply proper heading formatting, reinsert TOC & index, add back in the sections, columns. It became a process. By the time I finished, the last two documents took me about 40 minutes each to convert.
I have only used 2007 for short word documents since. I'll even type things up in OO and then take them to Word at the last minute. Even after 18 months, I still stumble over the new ribbon interface. I wasted 40 minutes looking for "auto adjust row hieght" the other day in excel.
So I'm OO and there for life. Once you go OO, it's free. Why convert back unless there is some critical feature gap? And word does have some features OO lacks-- to me they are mostly noise. OO has just about everything up to Office 2003 at this point.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
You'll be happy to know that using an F-22 stealth fighter pilot is basically the same as using a lear jet for flying back and forth between two cities.
Sure, the F-22 has all kinds of stuff you don't need to fly back and forth between two cities, hell even two continents.
But you never know-- you just might need to launch a satellite guided air to air missile at a target 35 miles away .. some day.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I'm probably going out on a limb here, but when I had to do a 100+ page paper before I graduated college, the one tool that Word 2007 had which was indispensable was the citations/Manage Sources database. I could drop citations in that and it would keep track of everything automatically, formatting the works cited page in exactly the MLA [1] format. Because Word 2007 made keeping track of hundreds upon hundreds of citations reasonably bearable, it has become my word processor of choice.
[1]: Since one of the profs was a MLA associate, MLA format was not good enough. It had to be the proper MLA formatting style of the current year, or else it was an automatic letter grade off before the paper actually was read.
Heh. That isn't brutal honesty, it's rampant insecurity.
If you're smart, then a new interface isn't a challenge. If you're focused, then a new interface won't interfere with your work. If you're experienced, then you'll know that even after 15 years you can find better ways to do things - and that the more you've invested in the previous method, the more effort the change will take. You'll also have noticed that resistance to change is strongest from those who fear their superiority is being challenged. The smarter they are, the more excuses they can come up with. The less confident they are, and the more pathetically emotive their language becomes (the ribbon interface is "whoring"? Seriously?) .
People focused on outcomes rather than self-aggrandisation tend not to bother with excuses or complaints. Stick with familiar tools for the duration of the project, or set aside some time to learn a new set of keystrokes. Either way, stay focused on the things that matter.
Office has never been specialized software, and certainly not for thesis work. The 65K limit was removed at the same time the Ribbon was introduced. You probably shouldn't be doing a Ph.D. if a new interface is more than you can cope with, and with that disregard for actual facts you really should ask yourself if research is the kind of thing you're suited for.
Outlook is the best when you have an Exchange backend.
You'll be happy to know that using an F-22 stealth fighter pilot is basically the same as using a lear jet
okay, you win the absurdity contest, comparing a pilot to a plane is way better then mine...
(i was just pointing out that comparing a to b while at the same time admitting you dont really know a is a bit weird)
People, what a bunch of bastards
Yeah, it's a troll....
The poster claims they did a migration to OOo, and the one document they opened and saved in OOo was corrupted. Think about this. They did no testing before doing the migration because the only document they worked with was corrupted, and that was after the migration. IOW's, they migrated before anyone had even tried the software, and they had machines running Linux.... Ask yourself, is this a likely scenario?
Either someone is completely retarded, is a very poor liar, or both..
You'll be happy to know then that OO.o is pretty much about as exact a copy you can get of the Office 2003 interface... at least AFAI can tell, never used 2003 much.
No. It's more like the Office 97 interface, I think. Except - thank FSM - without "Clippy".
Office 2003 used to infuriate me. It wasn't bad enough that it would hide the File/Print menu. It switched off the freakin' "Ctrl-P" print key!
I guarantee that any non-geek will pronounce it "libber-office". For christ's sake, choose a name that the masses will "get" without having to think. If they have to think, then you just lost their attention, as well as raised their suspicions ("what else will I have to think about?").
Is it possible you were saving files with OO.o 2.x on any systems? ODF 2.x did not save some things in proper ODF format. One place I know you will see this particularly clear is saving a presentation on OO.o 2.x and then open it in 3.x; don't confuse odf versions with openoffice versions and oo.o 2.x not saving odf documents in compliant format; even the versions it was saving in were not correct and because of that 3.x would not render them correctly. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=527933
I have used both Open Office and MS Office over the years, and my only gripe is that I've learnt excel shortcuts and native behavior and Calc does everything a bit different which is very frustrating. I've searched before but not found an easy to apply plugin or config file update that will make Calc act like Excel (DEL to clear a cell, CTRL SHIFT + to insert a row etc.). This would really make may day if someone could suggest such a solution.
As a matter of personal taste, LibreOffice is my preference at home, but I'm a dev who works a lot with .net and MS databases and MS Office users in the normal course of my day.
I'll agree that the price for Office is a bit high, but most people only use about 30% of the functionality that it offers, less, if they also use SQL Server and MS Exchange. There is an absolute crapload of stuff in Office related to integrating with the rest of their application stack, developer tools, and operating systems. Things that almost nobody outside of a large corp with an immediate need and no desire to retrain people will ever implement. That's what that price is all about.
With LibreOffice, there's less cruft, to be sure, and there's an actual, published, verifiable spec for document format. There's an army of volunteers. There's no financial reason to implement feature X for some incredibly small subset of users.
Could MS spur adoption of Office by dropping the price? Sure, but I'm sure that it wouldn't be worth it for them with their current development and revenue model for MS Office.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
Exactly.. Sure.. I don't like suspending myself on hooks through my flesh, but thousands of people around the world do. It's even appeared in some movies now.
Likewise, I don't like Green Melon... but lots of folks do.
Someone always likes everything.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
* No "draw borders" functionality in the spreadsheet program (and the addon/plugin kinda sucks). Doing cell borders is a pain in OOo but very easy in Excel.
I used this feature a few times this week, no difficulty at all. OOo 3.1.1.
* Asking me every single time whether I want to delete everything in the cell, or just the formula, or the formatting, or...
Use backspace to delete just the data/formula.
I suspect you're right - I've seen people go shopping (for software, in a real bricks and mortar store!) for Office and end up using some no-name third party product just because it was a a quarter the price, even though there's a free alternative that's probably massively better than their second choice. It's not like MS would even lose out by having a different pricing model for commercial versus consumer users - they pretty much only bother going after commercial users for piracy already so that model would still work plus they'd sell some more stock into the consumer market (and perhaps halt the migration to cheap/free alternatives). I guess they don't want to "cheapen" the product in the eyes of their target audience by offering it for less elsewhere.
The Word manuals and help files used to be quite out-spoken about that being the right way. Used to! And anyone writing texts on a regular basis also knew that you don't use tabs or blank space as indent.
Now auto-format just corrects tabs into indents, creates new styles on the fly and hides anything that could help you to write a consistent document.
This trend didn't start with the ribbon, the ribbon is just the next step.
Virtually all the issues raised are, quite simply, because Microsoft programs its software to purposely not adhere to an open standard. Were it to do so, interoperability would not be an issue. The support questions would, mostly, go away.
*** Don't be dull.***
hehe. I hate it when I make a mistake like that. Which I do more frequently as I get older.
I hope the F-22 fighter pilot is a hot female pilot like in the movies in this case.
I use word daily, I use OO a little less than daily (work reasons). I know OO lacks features that word has... which I don't use in word. That was my point.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Well I'm using Office 2007 (Outlook, Word, One Note) and am still ambivelent about the ribbon. Some of what the Ribbon has done is useful and then I find that some of the features I used on a regular basis are now buried three+ menus deep, so there's lots of trade offs that are still taking time to get used to.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
I really like OpenOffice's ability to export in PDF without having to purchase Adobe Acrobat. This is a killer feature IMHO.
There's bound to be other commentators leaping down on this, but I'll put my £0.02 in.
Are you saying that MS removed the old interface and replaced it with one easier to use for beginners?
Yes. Let me be absolutely clear - in Office 2007, there is no way to revert to the Office-2003 style menus except for using third-party add-ons, as other users have commentated.
But why the heck would they remove the old interface entirely? Maybe it's the "Design of Everyday Things" talking, but why wouldn't they keep the old one for more sophisticated users. There's nothing wrong with having an easy interface for casual use and an advanced one for the advanced users. It's actually a very good solution in this kind of case.
If this had been the case, I'd expect you'd have less hate from power users against Office 2007. If I were able to just select an option in Tools -> Options that did this, I'd be using 2007 at home (as it is, my copy of office 2003, cold dead hands, and so forth). However the option was completely denied us.
This makes the (IMO) stupid design decision of auto-hiding menu items (introduced in Office 2000? XP? It's certainly in 2003) look relatively painless. That was another example of Microsoft hiding functionality which detracted from the usability of a product.
I had heard that Office 2010 would allow a 2003-style interface, but a quick search suggests this is also via add-ins - anyone know whether this was the case out-of the box?
Also, anecdote time. A while ago I was testing Office 2007 (pre-SP1) and had need to use a custom Excel add-in I'd built myself under 2k3. Not only could a substantial amount of ferreting not show how you added add-ins to Excel, but the Help file was a direct copy of the 2003 help file content, referring to a menu that no longer exist. It's things like this that novice users won't find, but bug the hell out of power users.
People shouldn't have to re-learn the tools of their trade every 3 years at the whim of a company. The whole point of software like this is to make people's jobs easier so they become more productive. Now, maybe ribbon is better for new users, but if users of older versions are more productive on those versions, just give them the choice to switch out the UI - surely that's not so difficult?
Well... that might be for your self aggravating ego; for the majority of users it means an interface that gets out of their way.
quoting from TFA:
Apparently 'gets out of their way' means 'put an orb as big as my nuts in the upper left and consume 1/3rd of my screen real estate'.
There's no place like
Those "little grey boxes" are the bounding boxes, showing you where the image ends... OO shows them by default but word does not.
OO also shows you your defined page margins, which again word does not... It's quite disturbing how many people send around files where they have blindly placed stuff over the defined margins (and print borders).
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Is it for MSOffice document compatibility?
Personally, I just write documents in OO and then export them to pdf if I am sending them somewhere. I've never had a problem this way. I suppose this is a problem if you want the recipient to be able to edit the document but why would you want that? If it is a collaborative work then an office suite is the wrong tool for the job. I have worked in places where this is done. It is horrible regardless of the office suite. Two people editing a document at the same time means one writes over the other's changes. Or, you end up with multiple versions of the same document scattered about the network drives. Worse yet they may be on the hard drives of different people's PCs. Before long no one knows which is the latest version or where it is. In all probability there is no latest version because no one document has everybody's changes in it. If you collaborate using an office suite then you need to first, slap yourself across the face twice (once per cheek). Then do it again harder. Harder again. Again!! Now, go get a wiki. If you must use Windows Server it now has a nice automatic server installer (looks like a Linux package manager) which will set one up for you with just a couple of clicks. Of course if you care at all about security Windows isn't allowed anywhere near your place of business anyway. There are Linux distro's that have similar easy methods for installing web tools including Wikis. With either OS just keep it behind the firewall, preferably on a NAT if you don't have an expert to configure the security settings.
Maybe OO doesn't have all the features you need which Microsoft Office does?
WTF kind of document are you creating anyway? Either one has 1000 times the features I ever want to learn for creating office documents. Maybe you are creating some kind of fancy art or advertising posters? Shouldn't you be using a publishing program? You probably learned Word back in grade school and have stuck with what you know. You probably put lots of work into learning to bend Word to do what you need it to do. It was hard and you don't want to go through all that work again just to switch programs. It was hard for a reason! It wasn't made for what you do. Go find a program that is and it won't be as difficult to learn in the first place plus you will probably put out a better product in the end. There is this saying, 'If the only tool you know is a hammer then everything looks like a nail'. Well... stop hammering in those screws!
Maybe you prefer MSOffice's user interface?
You must be on an old version from before they got the ribbon. Good for you! You realized that there is no reason to shell out your money every couple of years on the upgrade cycle if it isn't going to clearly make you more money back. Enjoy your savings! Some day though, when your hardware finally dies as it eventually does you will find that you can't buy that version of MSOffice anymore. The new versions use this awful ribbon thing which will be like starting from scratch to re-learn over again and will never allow you to be as efficient as you once were even after you know it well. Open Office on the other hand really isn't laid out that different from what you are used to. You will have to learn a bit if you switch to Open Office but trust me it will go better than dealing with that @#$ ribbon.
No, you really do use and love the ribbon?
I'm sorry I have nothing for you. At least nothing to say regarding computer software anyway. I do have some very important words of wisdom for you though. CRACK IS BAD!!! DON'T DO ANY MORE CRACK!!! And please, wear long sleeve shirts. The tracks are creeping me out. Now go away and don't come back until you have had a bath. You reek of crack and BO.
Uh, it's software. There development costs are fixed and so are the distribution costs. Lowering the price would simply make them more revenue at a lower profit margin.
Why do you think they allow people to purchase MS products over the net? Just convenience? No. Because all they have to do is pay for bandwidth (which is already paid for, thus zero cost), and charge a credit card transaction.
By not lowering the price, they let the free solution which (granted, is missing a few things in their eyes) become the primary solution - exclusively because it is that much cheaper.
Even at $10 (MS has deals on office for exactly that at times), what's the point if the free product (libreoffice/oo) delivers close enough value? The free product still becomes preferred because it's free.
Oh yes, it absolutely did. Sun proved to be a major hinderance to the development process
Sun and the "clique"-culture around it.
I had to edit an article for a book project and one requirement was to have the per-article footnotes at the end of the book (but numbered and separated per article). Word can do that, StarOffice/OpenOffice can't.
On the StarOffice forum I got attacked for claiming, that there is something StarOffice can't do, and then ridiculed as someone, who apparently can't use footnotes the correct way. -Needless to say, we switched back to Word.
And that is at a university. - The place where OpenOffice could easily gain popularity.
Hopefully this changes with the wider base in LibreOffice. More support for their slow Bibliography group and some emphases on optional "expert"-things (irony-quotes), and they could become the standard Office suite at universities.
but they are now quantum tools, that is, you never know if they are there or not until you try to use one
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I have yet to meet someone IRL who *really* likes it.
Because we all know that your subjective anecdotes comprise the entire userbase of MS Office, right? It's funny that you claim that so many people hate it yet the entire foundation behind the ribbon was based on feedback from users during usability and UI tests.
It's funny that your subjective user tests comprise the entire userbase of MS Office, right?
There's no place like
But if you want to write a 300 page Ph.D. thesis or work with an array of more than 65K points, you'll need to explore other options... unless you like the M in S&M.
You mean, there are people who write their Ph.D.s on something other than TeX? Perhaps in Psychology...
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
What i don't see, is why calendaring and email need to be integrated, they are two separate functions...
The biggest problem tho, is that outlook doesn't support the same standards as everyone else for calendars, and very poorly supports email standards like imap.
Zimbra we use at work, but i don't use the zimbra web interface or fat client - instead i have a mail client which talks to the imap server, and ical which talks to the caldav server. I also connect a jabber client to the xmpp server built in to zimbra.
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Like lada (russian brand of car, always had a very poor reputation in europe) parts are best when you drive a lada...
Exchange is designed to make using any client other than outlook extremely difficult, just like outlook is designed to force people onto exchange. Neither are especially good and are completely unusable on their own.
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i have not had problems going between calc and excel, at work i made some fairly complex spreadsheet tools for manipulating and transforming strings and distributing case numbers across different dates (yea yea a spreadsheet is not a database and it sure as hell isn't a programming language) but it was the closest thing to a scripting host i had available to me and passing around html files loaded with javascript would have pissed off IT as the security software would false positive on that as malicious content.
anyways i would work on these files interchangeably on excel and OO.o without problem, though i did not use macros, all my code was done in the form of string functions in cells.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
If 50% of your office are temperamental idiots, then your problems go deeper than how much you're paying for their word processors.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
So your argument amounts to change is bad, and making software more accessible and easy to use is not worth while. Do you have any actual criticism? How does the Ribbon actually stack up against OpenOffice's menu?
Let's take changing page dimension for instance. In Office 2007, it's 3 clicks (Page layout > Size > Select). In Open Office 3.2, it's 6 clicks (Format > Page > Page > Format > Select Size > Ok). To change the size again (if you don't like it for instance) in Office it's 2 clicks, and in Open Office it's 5 clicks (you save a click since the page tab is pre-selected).
Or consider footer, for instance. Say I want to add a footer and adjust its height. In Office, I double click on the footer, and the footer ribbon is brought up where I can adjust all aspects (including height) and see how my document changes. In Open Office, I have to go to Format > Page > Footer > Footer On > Adjust Height > Ok. The footer ribbon at the same time gives me helpful options I might need. If I didn't know how to add automatic page numbering in Office, I can easily find out because that option is made obvious. For open office, (I actually had to search online where to find this option) you have to go into Insert > Fields > Page Number.
These are all low level, basic operations any user might want to do. I haven't even addressed things like, how do I change the color and style of fonts in the document. In Office you simply hover over the options to see how they look and pick one. In open office styles are represented by text, so you can't quickly see what each represents.... needless to say it's a pain.
I think I've made my point. I could probably choose any given task or function in Office and Open Office and demonstrate how it takes more time or is inefficient in Open Office. The only thing you can say about the ribbon is it's different from before. Through converting, I hardly had to hunt for options as they are not only logically displayed (I want to change the page layout. Maybe I should go to the page layout ribbon), but also only 3 levels deep at maximum. With a menu system, related options are only sometimes found together (The bibliography database and insert citation options in Open Office are in two entirely different menus), and there is no limit to the depth of the menu. You admit yourself that novice users easily get lost in large menu structures, and that only expert users find this system workable. Why should a consumer office suite only be usable by experts?
Open office even implements some of the features of the Ribbon. Go ahead and insert a table, and you'll see a context box for table formatting options, just like the ribbon. It's kind of nice, since you can access the menu with this toolbox open, but the ribbon address this in that the options you want are still on average less clicks away.
Personally I haven't stated my Ph.D. thesis, but I've written plenty of term papers and research papers in Word. I find the auto index, ToC, Bibliography, and caption tool very useful for longer documents, however I don't see how Open Office is any better for this application. I also use Excel for some of my research (not all) because it's easy and accessible, leaving me more time to do research. I'm very happy with the 2007 ribbon interface, as it's drastically increased my productivity and introduced me to features which are either new, or at least new to me.
Thanks for the link to that. I hate that damn ribbon.
yes it has - it's called 'Presentation'.
When OpenOffice has an Outlook equivalent, it will be a contender.
ROTFLMAO.
Contender for WHAT?
World's best virus/trojan vector?
...or work with an array of more than 65K points...
Since Excel 2007 (the "ribbonized version"), the maximum number of rows is 1,048,576 and for columns it is 16,384.
"Microsoft .. Office .. infinitely quicker and more powerful than Open-Office"
Not actually true, once you enable the OO preloader, it starts and runs just as fast as msOffice. And msOffice displays the first page while still loading the rest. Try and scroll down a long document to see what I mean. You can try out the Windows version for yourself. link
How is bringing all 90% of the functionality within 3 clicks hiding functionality? Common tasks like page formatting are brought front and center in Office, whereas in Open office it's buried in a tab in a sub menu of a sub menu.
Further advanced functionality, like ToC, Indexes, Bibliography, are made accessible to the user, rather than languishing unused in the menu system.
You state the ribbon doesn't make sense, but you don't back that up. From my perspective it's perfectly logical. Want to change page dimensions and orientation? Page layout. Want to insert a picture? Insert. Want to add a citation? References. There are some odds and ends out of place, but it's not as bag as putting Bibliography in "Tools" and Citations in "Insert > Indexes and Tablet" as in Open Office.
I have both OpenOffice and MS Access + Office. I would love to move over to OpenOffice however there are some "features" I've yet to find in OpenOffice that I use at work with the MS solution. Maybe I haven't researched it enough...
I have a customer DB at my job. MySQL runs as the backend and using ODBC MS Access acts as the front end. The reason I'm still using Access is because I can quickly and easily develop forms and code them using VB to interface with the other MS Office apps. Someone at my job can pull up a customer record in Access and with a click of a button compose an Outlook email with the customer data in it. Another click they can generate a contract in MS Word or an Invoice in Excel. The DB frontend I've written in Access interacts with just about every application in MS Office.
Does OpenOffice's Base program have similar capability? I've only given it a cursory look so far. Would love to know if I can somehow port this frontend over to an OpenOffice solution.
What I would really like to hear is equivalent quotes of companies who successfully migrated from MS Office to OO.o. Is there any? (no, not /. pseudonym-"in my office"-anecdotes, but real company names)
You get the pseudopseudonymous version anyway, but: in my 50-person company, everyone gets OO.o. A few employees, such as the owner and bookkeeper, get MS Office, but those are generally accepted as "legacy" installations for people who have very specific backward compatibility needs. We were always saving docs in MS Office format for the sake of trading documents with our customers until we found out that quite a few of those customers were also using OO.o, so for them (and general internal use now), we save in native OO.o format.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The orb is less than 1/2" in diameter...oh, sorry about your luck.
If people are using only 10% of the features, why not make those features easier to get at? Why keep them nested away in multiple layers. Their job isn't to sit and fuck with menus all day looking for buried features. It's to produce something for the company.
If they're getting their job done faster, wouldn't that be seen as a good thing? What features in that 90% no one uses do they need?
This is like a Tim Allen situation. If a hammer will get the job done, only an idiot would use just a hammer. No, we need a fuckin' POWERED HAMMER.
No sig for you!!
See, I use LaTeX and BibTex for this. that way I don't need to worry about anything, I put all the information into the Bib file, make the appropriate citations, and it takes care of the rest... as an added bonus, with BibTeX on my mac, I can import the whole document into the DB, and never worry about "where did I file that" again.
I will not give in to the terrorists. I will not become fearful.
Or you could hold down Alt and have Excel show you all the Shortcuts available, some power user you are! ;-)
Lets meet for coffee, then you will...
What do you know I wrote a novel
You can pin any option you want to the top of the screen on the title bar, next save, undo, redo. Click the down arrow, then click more commands. You can see you can go through the tabs and add whatever you want.
Alternatively, Office 2010 lets you customize the ribbon itself..
For anyone complaining about speed issues with the ribbon, please note that pressing 'alt' and about five keys will do just about anything you want. It's much easier for me than carefully scanning down long menus that only provide keyboard shortcuts for a few options...
I'm still using OO.o...
MS Office targets the office manager and the clerical worker.
The features that work for them are what sell the product - and it sells very, very, well even at retail.
In the top 25 software bestsellers at Amazon.com, versions of MS Office rank 1, 2, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, and 17.
No. 1 is the 3 seat version of Office Home 2010. No. 3 is the 3 seat Win 7 Upgrade Family Pack.
No. 27 iWork '09. No. 41 iWork '09 Family pack.
Bestsellers In Software
That is really quite an achievement when you look at the free "Office Web" apps and the many discounts available for Office home and student use: Take Office Home! for only $9.95
---- and it is a practical, real-world, validation of the Ribbon UI, whether the geek is willing to admit it or not.
But the geek spends far too much time praising the virtues of OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice as a stand-alone office suite. Where Microsoft excels - if you will excuse the pun - is in the development of integrated office solutions that scale to an enterprise of any size.
To me, the ribbon is a bad interface; menus are much clearer. However, the right-click format menu makes life a lot easier. I find myself more productive b/c of that, not the ribbon.
Also, if these companies want support, can't they go with StarOffice?
So how well does MS Office open documents on linux in comparison?
Then the non-technical users swtich, get frustrated (because they *think* they're going to be frustrated), and the cost savings disappear.
Awful big assumption there. The reason to give them half the savings is because they currently have no skin in the game. As it is now, there is no value to them for the effort of learning something new. But there is value to the company for them to learn the new software. So you got a choice - carrot of a splitting the savings, stick of threatening to fire them or do nothing and let it meander along as currently described with the worst of both worlds.
The right answer here is interoperability. The concept that you need a specific Office suite to open a document is just insane - much like requiring a specific browser to view a website.
Not within a single company it's not. Two office apps means double the effort for support and half the expertise among the users.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
This is fixed in PowerPoint 2010: PowerPoint was converted to be true SDI.
Every 3 years? Are you kidding me? The ribbon interface replaces the menu driven interface that they've been using in office since it's inception... so you're being asked to learn something new every 15 years. In the field of computing, doesn't 15 years actually seem pretty generous? I mean, the iPod Touch must have REALLY sucked, because it forced people to learn a new interface after only 6 years!
"Temperamental idiots" still do productive work. We do not rate their performance based on what office suite they prefer.
Sierra Tango Foxtrot Uniform
Depends on the extent to which you use the office suite. Our business is not built on the documents we provide; they are merely a tool in which we communicate data and ideas. In this case the OO.org people tend to be the kind of people who figure it out for themselves, while the MS Office people just want to get the work done. So support still goes to MS Office. Until there is an absolute reason to support both products, there is no need to consider diverging on a particular office suite.
I think the parent's comparison to browsers is a perfect example for our case. But it might not be for yours.
Sierra Tango Foxtrot Uniform
You must be hung like a badger...
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
I love the ribbon. Everyone I know loves the ribbon. The only people I've ever met who hate the ribbon are people like my Grandpa who have trouble adapting to a new system regardless of its quality.
I'll probably get marked as a troll for the headline, but I've got karma to burn.
Let's put the interface aside for a minute. (That's mostly a matter of preference; the research that drives their designs seems to indicate this.) Writer is pretty good for typing up simple documents. However, my biggest problem is that it's been very unreliable in opening Word 2003-2007 documents and even more so with documents from Word (Mac). Sometimes, it'll open up just fine; most of the time, it blows up. In fact, my lab partner yesterday had this exact experience when he tried to print his lab; he typed it up in OpenOffice, but had issues printing it on the machines that use Word 2003 (or maybe they use 2007; I forget). Furthermore, the equation editor is not very intuitive (where are the keyboard shortcuts?!), nor is it as pretty as the equations I get from Word. Now, I won't lie; the Equation Editor built-in with Office isn't much better...but at least they have MathType.
Like Writer, Calc has good for simple stuff like maintaining budgets and recording simple data. However, it dies with larger and more complex datasets that Excel handles really easily...and its support for VBAs is limited at the moment. I'm glad to see that it's improving, though!
Last time I tried Impress, it didn't have nearly as many animations and presentation options as PowerPoint did. This could've changed now, though.
For a free office suite, it's decent, but nowhere near as powerful as Microsoft Office. The only problem is that it's not that hard to get a *legitimate* copy of Office for free or cheap; university students and corporate employees usually get heavily discounted or free licenses. Competition is always good, though, so any improvements to Open(Libre)Office will be good for everyone.
Word implicitly forces you to use styles when you are doing numbered lists (especially outline numbering)
Numbered lists work, but they are idiosyncratic as hell. You absolutely must use styles, because once you get your styles just right, you can then rely upon them.
Word sucks when it comes to deciphering just what the formatting is in any one place in your document. You've just got to abandon that paradigm. Just think in terms of character styles and paragraph styles. Format the styles to be the precise way you want them. When you have a string of text or a paragraph that doesn't conform to what you think it should be, impose your predefined styles upon it. That's the 'Word way,' for good or bad.
Is there an easy way to change the background on a single slide?
Office 2010 doesn't have an option for restoring the Classic menu. Office 2011 for Mac switched to the ribbon too (but restored VBA --- huge plus!). The past ain't coming back.
I have to agree here.. honestly, I catch myself digging around once in a while... about the only MS Office apps I use regularly are One Note and Outlook (and I only use them at work)... I have Office installed on my home PC if I ever need it though... just don't use it much.. it doesn't bother me. I have no inherant use for it on any regular basis. My desktop at work and home both run Windows 7, I have a Macbook Pro for my laptop, and use Linux on my server, with Linux VMs for other stuff. I pretty much always find myself hunting for one thing or another, as nothing is truly the end all be all. I actually appreciate that the Ribbon interface gets the crap out of my way, as I'd have to hunt anyhow if I was looking for something... Drop-down one, nope.. next, nope.. next, found it... Same goes for the toolbars... a hundred 16x16px icons doesn't really do much for me. I tend to just hide it all.. I even hide the dropdown menu in Firefox... tapping Alt brings it up when I need it.
Most of what I use throughout the day happens to be in a code editor, and a web browser... that's 90% of my computing day... most people are probably in an application that's web based most of their computing days as well... I love Chrome and IE9's UI, there's a few things I miss that Firefox plugins give me though.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
That's a terrible idea that proves nothing. If someone payed me at works to use a slower system I would do it. But the company would lose money on the deal if my productivity suffered. If we charge $300 an hour and over the course of the year I lose an hour of productivity using a slower tool I don't see the cost but I got a "cheaper software" bonus.
Uh.. what? There's no such thing as "three menus deep" in the ribbon. It's all at the top level. One level deep.
You might argue that the various "modes" might be a level, but even so that's max 2 "levels".
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If it were strictly about superficial preference your comment would make sense. The point being made is that hiring people who can't learn/adapt or are superstitious and petty is the real problem. The problem on /. is an excessive amount of strawmen, inflated egos and other various types of temperamental idiocy.
Just personally, I don't find keyboard shortcuts to be all they're cracked up to be,and I do quite a bit of coding and office stuff.
Granted, I use them SOME (searching for stuff, saving the active file, etc), but realistically, I don't just sit down to a keyboard and beatiful code stars flowing out from my hands as fast as I can type. If I did that the end result would look like crap. There's a lot of pauses and pondering involved during the process to think about what I'm doing, and why I should be doing it that way. Many others are much the same. I read an article once (and I'm too lazy to track it down) that once stated that the average professional programmer generates at most a few dozen lines of useable code per day. The thought process and evaluation was the hold up - not entry speed.
With that in mind, while it might FEEL nice, I really don't see the uber-leet keyboard shortcutification of every possible function as really gaining much in true efficiency. It's the equivalent of punching the gas between 2-3 minute stoplights placed at every city block.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I think you missed the point.
If you gave the user the choice of
a) stick with Microsoft Office
b) Get a $200.00 bonus for switching to LibreOfice and not complaining about it.
I think they were saying that for $200 the average office worker would admit that Libre Office can do everything that they do on a daily basis, and if they have experience with Office 2003/2002/2000/97 it will not be an overly difficult transition.
vi +
Much like Photoshop, Office's price is dictated by the majority of its customers, large corporations. Obviously Microsoft (and Adobe for that matter) knows that the price increases piracy, but they don't care because:
1) The amount of piracy is trivial compared to the volume of corporate sales
2) The high price corporations are able/willing to pay makes up for the piracy many times over
3) There's no basis for charging a vastly different price to consumers than to corporations-- you'd just end up with corporate IT guys running to Best Buy whenever they needed Office copies. Plus you risk lawsuits.
Comment of the year
(Cannot log in from here)
I have long been an OO.o user and even got my last office to switch to it completely. All the arguments about the extra cost of MSO vs. OO.o are valid, and I do believe OO.o is a great product, one which I continue to use at home.
However, I have recently (past year) been forced to use MS Office 2007 regularly at a new worksite. And I have to say that there are definite advantages to this package, both in usability and efficiency, over the latest stable OO.o:
1. Interoperability between components. Transferring tables between Excel and Word and vice versa is a dream, so is cut and paste between documents. This simple requirement is not done well in OO.o, and seriously impacts on my efficiency when I have to use rtf pastes as go-betweens, reformat tables, etc.
2. OO.o is only seriously a spreadsheet and word processor - the other components (database, presentation, draw) are near useless for anything beyond the most simple applications, and I usually turn to other (OSS) solutions, or MSO equivalents when available. While I am not a fan of powerpoint, when I need to get a presentation done quickly, I end up spending a fraction of the time that OO requires just to get everything formatted in a consistent, visible manner. And again, for transferring tables and graphics? No comparison. And Access, while not a real database, is fantastic for RAD of small, forms-based data access problems.
3. The ribbon, despite everyone here bashing it, is actually an improvement once you have spent enough time with it. No, it does not help the unfamiliar user in the hunt for that feature you know is there somewhere. However, for day-to-day usability I find the context-aware feature drastically reduces my need to switch menus over the messy menu systems of OOo and older MS products. And anyway, all of my keybindings still work, and I'd rather avoid a mouse altogether - OOo actually has many features that for some reason cannot be bound to keys. Very annoying. And very inefficient.
I find that whenever I'm back to my OO.o suite, although there are features that I love (regex in formulae ftw!!!) I'm using my mouse more, fixing formats more, using intermediate scratchpads more, generally spending more time and effort than I should be, getting things right.
So in conclusion, yes it's evil, yes they still do the clippy-hold-your-hand thing, yes there is little reason to upgrade from previous versions, but when it comes down to it MSO is still the one that has the *basic* requirements of an office suite - interoperability, efficient work flow, consistency - down pat.
Where do you see an "orb" in this UI?
http://www.winsupersite.com/images/office/office2010_outlook_preview.jpg
It's not there. They removed it, precisely because people complained about it. So stop whining about something that's already fixed.
And if you think the ribbon takes 1/3 of your screen realestate, you either have a very small screen or a very large tendancy to exagerate. Even so, there is an up arrow in the upper right corner that hides the ribbon, or ctrl-f1. Again, problem solved, and that's been there since the beginning.
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Just a tip:
You might find Gnumeric useful. Whereas I also find Calc to be really crappy, I usually use Gnumeric or fast non-serious data analysis, before going to awk/python/rkward. I found Gnumeric quite useful and complete.
Now, if I am in Windows I definitely use Excel instead of Calc. Of course for the other work I still use awk/python/R, etc.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
What I would really like to hear is equivalent quotes of companies who successfully migrated from MS Office to OO.o. Is there any? (no, not /. pseudonym-"in my office"-anecdotes, but real company names)
The Dutch government uses OpenOffice. It's saving them millions.
Have you tried talking to Red Hat? I don't work for them, but I have attended meetings at their facility and all the briefings were done in OO.o.
Where are the Java classes for each of the formats OpenOffice reads/writes/renders, including the Microsoft formats?
With those classes I could easily embed all kinds of docs as executables that run anywhere a PDF runs. That scenario would really compete with Microsoft.
--
make install -not war
There are literally hundreds of reasons that the ribbon is superior to menus. Perhaps many of those reasons don't apply to you, or you are simply stubborn and don't want to learn something new. There are of course reasons why the menus are better than ribbons, but too many people act like it's all or nothing... That either Ribbons are better or menus are better, for everyone. Period. What's worse, most people argue reasons that aren't even true, like there being no keyboard shortcuts or that they're different keyboard shortcuts than they used to be. Or that the ribbon takes up more space (which it doesn't, especially if you auto-hide it)
But, here's a few examples.
Menus are hard for people without fine motor control to use. If you are old, disabled, or simply not very well coordinated, ribbons will be much easier to use than trying to make your mouse follow the narrow paths that make submenus show up.
The menus have become monstrous, with more and more features being added to apps, it's harder and harder to find the items you're looking for. The ribbon allows better organization, and "context sensitivity".
The ribbon is far more intuitive to new users.
The ribbon scales to your screen, making buttons smaller if you have less room and changing various other sizes.
The ribbon provides live previews of changes before you apply them.
Etc.. etc.. etc.. The ribbon is a net win if you give it a chance. Most people that argue against it have not given it a chance.
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I'm a big-time excel user...almost all day every day. I moved to excel 2007 a year or so ago and I love it. I hate going back to work on computers with the older versions.
I disagree that the ribbon is biased towards the mouse. It works quite well with the keyboard, with all the old shortcuts that still work exactly as before. If all the old shortcuts work, how can it be more biased towards the mouse than the old way? Unless the utility with the mouse has greatly increased, which is not quite a good argument in favor of the old way.
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If we're talking menu / dialog depth, try fixing the indentation on a bulleted style some time. :) Or tweaking a color in MSO 2007 to match what used to be the default color choices in 2003 or earlier (when trying to match the established house style).
That brings me to one of the many annoying inconsistencies with Word 2007 (might be fixed in 2010, don't have it so don't know) -- some functionality that's essentially identical, and was in identical or nearly identical dialogs in 2003 is now spread around in haphazard places in 2007. Bulleted/numbered versus outline numbered style indentation, for example -- the indentation for bulleted or plain numbered styles appears to be in the old Paragraph Format dialog, while outline numbered style indentation is defined from the Outline Numbering -> Customize dialog. The plain numbered and bulleted dialogs have been "simplified" to the point of being much less useful.
Meh. The biggest issue I've noted, purely anecdotally of course, is that those of us who were already competent with MSO versions 2003 and earlier find 2007 a royal PITA for all the apparently arbitrary changes, while new users seem to like the ribbon just fine.
I've yet to actually meet a new user of MS Word.
But then again my work is very document-intensive (in-house translation and documentation production), and none of my colleagues would be qualified for their work if they were not power users.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Saying that every Action is within N Clicks is not a sufficient proof. The other question is how many Thinks you have to make per Click. At the present, many of the comments here are from folks who are much more efficient in Thinks per Action with the old system than the Ribbon, and I am one of them. I had extensively customized my menu bars to meet my exact uses, and could achieve many of my desired tasks with one click, not 3 or 6, so I am seeing a two-fold loss: more clicks, and more thinks per click.
I'm surprised I haven't seen folks talking about Wordperfect's efficiencies or the beloved command line in this thread.
Over time, the balance of folks who think the Ribbon is wonderful versus horribly inefficient will shift as old users die and new users are born. Bloatware will become the norm. And they wonder why Americans are so fat and resource-demanding. It's not our sodas, it's our software.
Actually, Excel is also still MDI and hides them. It's very annoying.
This is probably my #1 thing i hate about MS Office. You can open two copies of excel (or PP) but it's a bit of work, and you have to change the default actions for the shell if you want it to work that way automatically.
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Let's be brutally honest here at the expanse of nothing. The Previous Menu structure was created and has been used on all substantial GUI based programs for 15+ years becasue a growing population of computer users do not have the mental capacity, focus or experience to utilize the Ctrl and Alt Key Sequences that allowed for the fastest possible access to formatting and other options...blah...blah...blah
I work extensively with and in Japanese as a translator, and some in Chinese and Korean as a language geek. OOo has yet to properly support simple out-of-the-box features like word and character counts for CJK text.
Rather that word/char counts are absolutely vital for the translation business (it's how we gauge time requirements and figure out our billing), this renders OOo a no-go from the start.
FWIW, IBM's Lotus Symphony, based on OOo v1.x, *does* properly implement word/char counts that break down the Asian (i.e. CJK) character versus Western (i.e. alphabetical) word counts.
For reference, this was reported as Issue 17964 way back in August 2003, with the CJK problems first mentioned (in this bug report, anyway) back in March 2004. While the OOo team did deign to add a Tools -> Word Count menu item (it had been in the File menu previously), there has been zero noticeable movement on the Asian text issue in all this time.
For as much promise as OOo holds, Microsoft couldn't possibly shoot the project in the feet any better than the management team to date already has.
Cheers from a disaffected former OOo user,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Shocking fact - the old versions still run just fine; no one's forcing anything.
That's where MSO 2007/2010 really draws ire from the crowd who were familiar with MSO 2003 and earlier, and made extensive use of keyboard shortcuts to avoid having to ever use the mouse (a big plus if you're at the computer all day and would like to boost productivity and avoid RSI). The newer MSO versions have kept many of the old keyboard shortcuts for precisely this reason, but they haven't kept all of them, partially because some of the dialogs have been removed or consolidated.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Funny, I have yet to find anyone (except me...as I just hate it) in my workplace (research institute) who does not like the new ribbon interface.
How many IGnobel prizes do you have there? And in which field?
Well... that might be for your self aggravating ego;
...oh, psychology, I see.
On the contrary. Press alt while running office and watch what happens to the menu.
I'm the only computer savvy person in my family atm. About a year ago I got a few copies of MS Office 2007 for free and installed them on 3 of our computers. I hated the new interface and only used it for a few specific situations. My mom and my sister couldn't figure it out and asked me to put 2003 back on there. I installed open-office and told them it was ppretty much the same thing.
We're piloting putting OO.org on our thin clients in a computer lab we manage at SF State (California). The thin clients have four things on them, total: Firefox, Chrome, IE, and OO.org. Everything else can be used via remote desktop, but we rarely get anyone who needs anything other than a browser and open office.
I haven't found anyone who likes the Ribbon interface. I find it maddening to the point of rage. The office add-on that lets you search for ribbon buttons by name is a god-send!
I disagree. I use Thunderbird for its IMAP strengths, but for other uses, I think Outlook is one of the best apps MS has written. It works well, and is incredibly configurable even by semi-experts. Sure, it has weaknesses (PST files), but overall, it's a good piece of software.
... and if your time is free, you won't mind relearning things you already knew how to do perfectly efficiently before, and you won't mind the hassles of updating legacy documents and templates, and you won't mind having to tweak styles in the new format to match your existing corpus in the older (formerly serviceable) format...
Time is money. Microsoft's UI decisions in MSO 2007 have cost me many a pretty penny that I will never see paid back to me, certainly not by Microsoft.
Another 2p in the pot.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Whoever designed the ad deserves an A+, irrespective of whatever the biases in the content.
Ditto what Bert64 said here.
To add to that, in Word 2007, click the funky orb and open Word Options. Select Advanced on the left and scroll down to the Show document content section. Make sure Show text boundaries is checked. You might want to play with some of the other options listed here to see what you might have been missing.
HTH,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Waiting for KOffice.
There is the price, but then there is the horrible Ribbon interface. I have yet to meet someone IRL who *really* likes it. I recently installed Microsoft Office 2010 to recover emails from a corrupted system (Needed to open PST files, copied the mails to an IMAP server. No more Office needed... That what Trial Versions are great for!). Frankly, it comes over even more toyish, more "Please treat me as a dumb user". It's aggravating.
Interestingly, when installing 2010, it asked me whether I wanted to enable OpenDocument formats. I was torougly surprised by that. That's another admittance of Microsoft that OpenOffice is a treath.
I just wonder about all these comments regarding the ribbon...did you know you can hide it and not use it? keyboard shortcuts have always existed and still exist. Stop complaining about features you don't use and shouldn't impact your use of a piece of software when they provide keyboard shortcuts for those inclined to use them. No software can cater to everyone's taste and should be developed with the largest user population in mind.... not the niche user. It's a cold hard fact, get over it and stop bashing MS because it's appears cool. It's rather tiresome actually.
The real big problem is that a huge majority of people is not paid according to their productivity. I realise that would be non-trivial (near impossible in most cases), but as long as people who work at different speeds (and hence at different productivities) get paid the same per hour there is no incentive to increase the productivity. Because of this, the comfort of not having to learn anything new is more important than a slight increase in actual work done, or the savings from one less software license.
This, of course, is not related to only MS/OO.
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
There are satellite-guided air-to-air missiles? I have a feeling a satellite-guided missile trying to hit a moving target would be about as successful as a satellite-connected microtrading system.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Google:
tens of thousands of employees
Dropped:
pretty much everything Microsoft
It works quite well with the keyboard, with all the old shortcuts that still work exactly as before.
But without the visual prompts of the menus, which were the main way of learning the keystrokes and a huge help in finding the less frequently used ones. And with the knowledge that you're using an obsolescent feature, so you'd be well advised to learn not to depend on them if your employer is likely to keep upgrading.
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--
What would Loki do?
If it's Loki Stormbringer from _The Daemon_ he would order a bunch of razorbacks and AutoM8's into the area to kill them all.
The ribbon hides functionality to coddle morons, that's its main purpose.
Which is hilariously wrong. How does it hide functionality? Plus I'd love to hear how functionality which is hidden in multilayer menus so that almost no one knows it is even there is supposedly "exposing" functionality?
By contrast, good UI design exposes functionality in such a way that users can actually use it.
Yes, which is why the ribbon came out and was based on actual UI and usability testing.
Microsoft's solution to "hey! 90% of people use only 10% of our product's features" wasn't "Ok, let's try and expose at least another 10% to these guys in a way that makes sense so maybe they'll use and appreciate it" but rather "Ok, let's hide that 90% so our stupid, stupid users don't get lost picking through the remaining 10%".
No, Microsoft's solution was to actually listen to the users who underwent the usability testing that they performed. It's hilarious how often Slashdot seems to claim that everyone hates the ribbon and yet in the company I work for of 500+ people not a single person who has used Office 2007 since we upgraded has not liked the new UI. And quite a few of those people would consider themselves "power users".
Software design, btw, has very little to do with where all the buttons are hidden.
Usability has very little to do with software design? lolwut?
I attend a larger church of about 5000+ members. Earlier this year (Spring I believe) I was having a conversation with one of the churches IT guys and he was talking about how they were in the process of upgrading from Office 2003 to Open Office. They church decided that it didn't need to buy the 100+ licenses for each of it's employee's when there is a free alternative that will more than meet their needs. Switching to open office hasn't stopped the employees from doing their jobs.
You state the ribbon doesn't make sense, but you don't back that up.
That's because most people who complain about the ribbon are just parroting what others have said or are just whining about it to be contrarian against Microsoft. It's also an elitist thing because anything that helps average users use a program more effectively is always seen as a negative to snobs like the GP. These people think that software should be hard to use so as to exclude people rather than listening to feedback from the users and making the program easier to use.
I would suggest you are simply set in your ways and unable to make a change. I see this all the time. Whenever Microsoft allows the old version of something, the first thing 99% of the people do is disable the new one, and therefore very few people ever move to the new interface, relgardless of how beneficial that may be.
Microsoft doesn't want to support the old style interface for a number of business and usability reasons. So if you refuse to use anything but the old interface, you're prbably not part of MS's target market for MS Office. You probably wouldn't upgrade anyways, because you're too set in your ways.
This reminds me of the sad case of Wordperfect PerfectOffice for Windows 3.1. Corel, which owned it at the time, noticed that there was still a large population of Windows 3.1 users (this was around 1997 or 1998) and figured it was a perfect market to tap to gain extra revenue, because they would be offering them a modern office suite when everyone else was ignoring them. They'd own the market!
Sadly, they never bothered to actually ask any Windows 3.1 users if they wanted it. What they failed to take into consideration was that those who don't upgrade, are highly unlikely to buy new software for their old platform. What they have is obviously "good enough" for them, so why upgrade? They printed millions of copies and they sat in warehouses collecting dust. They lost a ton of money on it.
When you create a new version of your application, you are targeting a) frequent and early adopters and b) new users. Old, crabby, stuck in their ways slashdotters may be loud and squeaky, but they're not a sizeable portion of the people buying their upgrade software.
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There are satellite-guided air-to-air missiles? I have a feeling a satellite-guided missile trying to hit a moving target would be about as successful as a satellite-connected microtrading system.
Satellite-guided == GPS. You may have heard of it.It was developed for military purposes long before it started telling you how to drive your SUV into a lake.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
The trouble I have with the ribbon is that the set of features I use frequently is not the set of features displayed on the ribbon.
Word implicitly forces you to use styles when you are doing numbered lists (especially outline numbering)
Numbered lists work, but they are idiosyncratic as hell. You absolutely must use styles, because once you get your styles just right, you can then rely upon them.
You're right that it's most obvious in numbered lists, but I'd argue that any extended use of Word (more than, say, five pages) requires you to set up the styles you want (or use an included set). I discovered this when I was given the job of editing/rewriting a 200 page policy manual. (For which, to meet requirements, I now have a set of styles where everything is 12pt black Times New Roman.)
Yeah I know there are GPS-guided bombs, but air-to-air missiles?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
They still only have the 2 templates. It is pretty simple to set up your own styles though.
Not necessarily. Compare the idea to standard US keyboard to a Dvorak keyboard. Might be a good idea to start over, but the cost of the change might be too much, and if you learn Dvorak, it is hard to go back and forth between keyboards. Office suite interfaces have been pretty similar in the past so that one person using one office suite, could switch to another without too much difficulty. Now, with the ribbon UI, if someone got used to that, and wanted to switch to another . . . oh.
That would be bribery. In discussions involving the UI, disregard price. How much you paid for something is not important when determining which is better designed. Its only useful to factor in for the overall final purchase decision (which does NOT sit solely on "I don't like the ribbon").
Sounds like you need Latex to separate content from formatting.
Not if your company pays for it or if you write it off as a business expense.
Even if you write it off, you still paid for it. The write-off reduces your taxable income by the amount of the write-off, which reduces the amount of income tax you must pay by your tax rate times the amount of the write-off.
So if you're in the 30% tax bracket and you paid $500 for Office, you can write $500 off of your income, which means your tax is reduced by $150. In other words, you still spent $350.
Hey, thanks. I'll try it next time I create a document.
Rethinking email
Would IBM be sufficient?
which makes working with the documents in an actual publishing setting a fucking nightmare
Using Word .doc files in publishing? Ugh. A few years ago I remember one of the designers having to fiddle with the company sign up form in Word. The process involved several hours. Preserving form field spacing reminded me of untangling knotted christmas lights. I believe this was the case of using the wrong tool for the job.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
Interesting, I am the one who do not like ribbon toolbar too much. I actually have to answer people's questions about how to use it and how can I find the featurs from office 2003 etc.. Got so deep that we purchase product called Kingsoft Office 2010, has classic office interface and latest documents formats supprot.. what a deal. http://www.binarynow.com/products/kingsoft-office/
Your target is 500 meters away, turn slightly left.
Your target is 100 meters away, turn slightly up and left.
recalculating...
Your target is 700 meters behind you, make a uturn and proceed west.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
That's the problem with the classic IBM/Intel/Microsoft monoculture. On the old 8 bit computing platforms intended for home users there were word processors that cost under $50. When those u sers were finally able to afford IBM/Intel/Microsoft hardware, they were told that "you should use the same expensive Word/Lotus 1/2/3 that businesses use because you might need to bring home work from the office, so you need compatibility with the industry standard." Phooey, most of those users have never needed such capability. Most home users don't need Office, they don't even need OpenOffice, what they need is something like Wordpad or Geowrite.
Even Works is more than most really need.
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.org_Deployments
Google can really work wonders for information people would want to see...
You mean like how you can just hit the alt-key once and you see little tooltips over all the functions that point out their keyboard shortcuts?
The people that claim Office 2007-10 has no visual cues have never actually tried.
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Uhm, but that makes perfect sense. If 90% of your features are niche ones that people mostly don't need or use, you SHOULD get them the hell off the screen.
The problem is not the "stupid, stupid users". The problem is fuck-tons of feature creep over decades. I don't want to see it all, and neither to most regular office workers. They want a big, obvious Italic button. A big, obvious Left Justify button. They don't need to know what the shitty doohicky of the year button does. In the rare event they need it, they can still go get it.
You seem like someone that thinks Blenders UI would be great for word processing. The truth is, a UI that shows you everything in one place is a bad UI after about 20 buttons.
Hey, we didn't publish from Word, of course. The designer imported the documents into Indesign or whatever and took it from there. But still, the document needs to be ready; no superfluous spaces or newlines, not dozens of slightly different quotation styles -- which is what you get if you fiddle with margins for each and every one of them (or worse).
I would be inclined to agree with your argument (well, not the "hundreds of reasons" part), if not for the fact that Office 2007 does not give users the choice. Any user interface programmer knows it would be trivially easy to allow switching between the ribbon and a menu bar. But Microsoft has deliberately kept that capability out. There used to be a Knowledge Base article that flat-out stated "you can't switch from the ribbon to a menu bar, and we did it that way on purpose." But I can't find the article anymore.
A good user interface satisfies all (major) user groups. It's usually not that difficult.
You have heard of the mile high menu bar, yes? It's true larger buttons are better than smaller buttons, especially for people with impaired motor skills. This actually suggests not that ribbons are easier to use than menus, but that they are easier to use than the tiny little toolbar buttons on the vast sea of Office toolbars.
Yeah. That's not the fault of menus, that's the fault of the designers' inability to effectively organize the functions of the application. Rather than spend the effort to actually organize things, they tried "Personalized menus" (the visual equivalent of sweeping things under the rug) and when that failed, well, we got ribbons.
I haven't seen any evidence, or even anecdotes, that suggests it's more intuitive. What I have seen is a few decades of accumulated observations that report that a consistent and stable user interface is crucial. Users can't build a pattern of behavior, much less muscle memory, if the controls are moving around all the time. It's like trying to become a touch-typist when the keyboard wants to rearrange itself based on the words you've recently entered.
I have also seen a few decades of accumulated observations that users should be able to list or otherwise examine all of the functionality available to them. That's why it's better to disable or gray out controls than to remove them. The user can't try out a function if he doesn't know it exists because he never saw it in passing while navigating for other functions.
In fact, it's counterintuitive, because it's trying to second-guess the user's wishes by "smartly" showing the "needed" controls. I would have thought Microsoft learned its lesson regarding second-guessing the user with an amateur attempt at AI, after the debacle that was automatic outline numbering in Word 97.
The Internet is full. Go away.
But those shortcuts are for the new shortcuts, not the old ones, and the new shortcuts are non-intuitive and hard to learn because they can't use the keystrokes that the old shortcuts use.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
It should all of course be as easy to use out-of-the-box as possible though, with the option for menu customization. OOo allows customized icons, too. KDE in general allows customized icons...but seriously, from all GUIs, remove the clutter, put the stuff everyone wants to use out front, and bury the complicated options underneath someplace.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
I looked it up and there is satellite air to ground but no satellite air to air. (even for over the horizon stuff).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Yep. What MS have done in Outlook 2010 is incredible. In my experience, it's gone seriously downhill from 2003. The only reason I still use it is because it's so deeply tied into MS's proprietary Exchange server, and other Outlook clients' proprietary 'email' format, that I'm locked in to it at work. A couple of examples.
I used to be able to insert a signature with a single shortcut in 2003. In 2007, they forced the ribbon on me and the shortcut disappeared. It was then 'Alt-N G'. Unbelievably, they changed it AGAIN in 2010... and STILL prevent you from defining your own shortcuts. It's now 'Alt-N A S'. I wouldn't be surprised if they changed it to 'ALT-F U C K Y O U' in the next revision.
They also decided that the Outlook 2003 e-mail editor wasn't good enough; rich text and layout aside, there was a shedload of MS Word functionality users were just missing out on. The decision made was to basically send a Word document instead of an e-mail, which did 2 things. First, it made Outlook e-mails utterly incompatible with any e-mail client that wasn't Outlook. Second, it killed off the possibility of doing proper inline responses. I'm surprised more people haven't noticed this, but you used to be able to press 'unindent' to break the 'quote line' to the left of the quoted part of a reply. From 2007 when they implemented the MS Word e-mail editor, you can't. So, you see people using bastardized inline responses by colouring their response text red or something. Or just completely giving up on inline responses. Thanks, MS.
Honestly, I would be using something else if I could. And if I ran a business, I'd try to find a more standards-compliant (and preferably OSS) alternative to Outlook.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Yes see here And they are the largest manufacturer in their segment in the world. They got rid of ALL Microsoft products from their organization. And they mention huge savings also. Check it out.
Here's one example:
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/03/french-police-saves-millions-of-euros-by-adopting-ubuntu.ars
The article is a little stale (they are running over 7000 Ubuntu desktops today) but in terms of OOo, they migrated across the board from MS Office in 2005. We're talking well over 50,000 users, iirc.
OpenSore is at best a poor knockoff of Office 97. When OO finally reaches the functionality of say Microsoft Office 2003, I might give it another look. Of course by that time, Microsoft Office 2020 will be released.
Pigskin-Referee
Linux: Yesterday's technology, tomorrow
I'm confused; where does bespoke development come into it?
My main point, albeit left implicit, was that MSO 2007 brought nothing compelling to the table for those of us already familiar with MSO 2003 and earlier (everyone on staff here), and actually impeded productivity for an extended period. The decision to go with MSO 2007 was made for reasons that have still not been fully elucidated, and the shift continues to cause problems (albeit fewer as time passes) when we exchange documents with other subsidiaries or the parent company, which continue to use MSO 2003.
In a nutshell, my point here is that MSO 2003 did the job. "Upgrading" to MSO 2007 brought a raft of issues that lessened productivity, and the only noticeable benefit I can see in my department is smaller file sizes.
But I am confused about where bespoke programming comes into the picture. I have no argument against off-the-shelf software; my problem is with mindless upgrading without any proper cost/benefit analysis that factors in time cost.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Outlook? There are tons of email programs, and Outlook is the very worst email client I've ever used
IAWTP. Thing is, people don't care so much about that. They like outlook for its calendar and meeting functionality.
And those (been a while, might be the wrong term) shared folders that make outlook basically act as a network drive. A place I worked 10 years ago had so many of those shared folders in Outlook that it was basically the company's file server.
Outlook+Exchange alone fulfills 90% of an average corporate/medium-to-large business' needs.
then they fight you, and then you win
I would chose OO over 2010.
However, I have an old copy of Office 2000 and as much as I like OO the 2000 wins. At least for me. It has an interface that is very simple and efficient, beating 2010, and it's a bit more user friendly in small things than OO.
MS did a lot to debase its once great product.
I am willing to accept there are people out there who use MS Office, love it and will always use it.
I am willing to accept there are people out there who will never try OpenOffice.org because it doesn't have VB scripting or advanced features as in, say, Excel that they need to use.
I am willing to accept that some MS Office people have tried OpenOffice.org, didn't like it & stayed with MS Office - but then they never left MS Office in the first place.
MS Office is a Windows product (okay, put the Mac version to one side for a moment) so if you switch from MS Office to OpenOffice.org, it's either because OpenOffice.org has enough functionality for what you need such that it's a waste of money paying Microsoft for an MS Office licence or maybe you've been using a dodgy pirated version of MS Office and are just sick & tired of the security/keygen/virus hassles that brings with it.
But is there *REALLY* anyone out there who has made a conscious decision to use & deploy OpenOffice.org for any period of time, only to then decide to change to MS Office (or *truly* go back to using it)?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that MS is willing to whore themselves out to the lowest common denominator.
Since when is catering your product to fit the vast majority of your market the same as whoring to the lowest common denominator? One could say that Matlab with it's command line programmable interface is also whoring itself out to the lowest common denominator, just that the lowest common denominator in Matlab's case is scientists, mathematicians, and engineers.
Office was never specialised software. When Microsoft Word came out the very first thing microsoft did was attempt to directly show the typeface and layout on the screen to make it easier to use. Same with all other applications in the suite. Where Lotus 1-2-3 and VisiCalc were specific number crunching tools, Excel was the first program to allow you to format cells and make them "pretty" again appealing to the average joe to take up using spreadsheets.
LaTex is specialised always was, always has been. Lyx can be said to appeal to the lowest common denominator, providing a WYSIWYG interface to LaTeX. Word.... word is and always was for everyone, it was for receptionists trying to take control from Wordperfect to make the interface easier.
Excel 2007 (and 2010) support spreadsheets of 1M rows and 65500 columns.
And when linked to an SQL server or other data source through ODBC, it can handle infinite amounts of data using the Pivot Table features.
And as an advanced user of Microsoft Office, I do love the Ribbon interface. Sure it takes a while to relearn where things are, but I definitely find it faster and easier to use. Fewer dialog boxes and clicking are just some of the reasons why it's a better experience.
-David
As others have mentioned, LibreOffice (formerly OOo) has "Impress", which is its presentation application. It's really just the "Draw" program called with a different parameter, but it does the job.
Although for presenting scientific content, PDF is now the much preferred option. This is more often than not generated from LaTeX (with the Beamer or Prosper classes), but plenty still use a conventional word processor or drawing package.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Where do you see an "orb" in this UI?
I don't know, this big round thing keeps getting in the way of my view...
They removed it, precisely because people complained about it.
Really? It's still present in my copy of Office 2007--oh...you mean I have to pay to remove it. Classy.
And if you think the ribbon takes 1/3 of your screen realestate, you either have a very small screen or a very large tendancy to exagerate.
Nope--no exageration. At 1024x768 it's just under 1/3rd of the screen real estate.
It's tough to get management to approve 100 new 24-inch LCD widescreen monitors when OpenOffice and our current monitors save tens of thousands.
Even so, there is an up arrow in the upper right corner that hides the ribbon, or ctrl-f1. Again, problem solved, and that's been there since the beginning.
OpenOffice installed. It wasn't exactly as easy as CTRL+F1, but it was pretty easy. Problem solved permanently.
There's no place like
OO.org word files are twice the size of MS Office word files
after learning the UI.
Users leaving an older office suite behind must face learning the UI. Either it's the ribbon (a UI unique to MS products) or OpenOffice with a more standard set of menus and tool bars. As stated already in this thread: once a user is familiar with a particular UI, they feel they've mastered the software.
I've made my choice. I'd rather have a freely obtained office suite. For my needs, it does more than what I could ask for.
As someone once said to me (I have no idea how accurate this is):
95% of users use about 5% of what the MS Office suite can do.
Actually, the ribbon was created to expose more functionality. Most users of Office weren't aware that there were any new features added since Office 2000. MS had solid research to back that up. The ribbon really does a great job of exposing new, useful features. I'm amazed you aren't modded troll.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
... there is zero way anyone could exist in the 'real world' with it.
Guess those aren't 'real' books I've written using OO.org, then. Does that mean that the royalty checques I've been collecting for the last 6 or 7 years haven't been real, either? Good thing the bank's not been able to tell, eh.
Great question. Please sign me up for updates to this question!
I can believe it, as I just had to get my oldest Office 2K7 because he would do OO.o docs at home and then bring them to me to print and for some reason the SAME OO version would fuck with the formatting between our two machines, and that don't count the 5 points he got dinged on a paper because a doc that looked fine in his OO fucked up the formatting when opened in the teacher's Word 2K3. I have NO idea what the Open Office guys are doing, but why a file would be perfect in Open office on XP x64 and fucked on Windows 7 X64 when opened by the same version is something I just can't explain. Hell he could write them in the old MS Office 2K I gave him on XP X64 and they would present and print just fine here with Office 2K7, but not Open Office. We tried ODF since we both had OO and it was just as bad with formatting.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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I despise Microsoft... MS Orrifice 07 was the last of the last straws... That IDIOT shit for brains ribbon was REALLY fucking stupid, but what compounded the stupidity of it all was the fact that THEY refused to have the functionality of reverting to menus in the program.
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So we all have to put up with stupid corporate types, forcing shit software upon us, that panders to people who have shit for brains.
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Fuck them - dickheads.
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And you MR Simpleton - you condone that crap?
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Voting up, Voting down - If I really gave a fuck about your approval or not, I'd come and ask you.
"Office is no longer specialized software... it's for the masses."
Since when Office was specialized software? What world do you live in?
All this back-and-forth argument about the benefits or failure of the ribbon interface misses a very obvious point: Microsoft made a terrible mistake by not providing a "classic" menu option so people could choose.
For the record, I hate the ribbon and stick with older versions of Office or use OpenOffice.
Tools --> Options screen isn't quite set up the same way
True, although I prefer OOo's version (just a personal preference, most likely). And I particularly like Format -> Page instead of File -> Page Setup (in 2003) or Round Orby Thing -> Prepare (if you're getting rid of menus in favor of ribbons, why keep one unlabeled menu?!?).
Doing cell borders is a pain in OOo but very easy in Excel.
Really? I use both (Office 2007 and OOo 3.2) on a daily basis, and I've not noticed any difference in border management ease of use. What I actually notice more is cell shading - 2007 keeps my color selection when I click on another cell, making shading disjointed cells easier than in OOo. 2007 also has better style management IMHO, although bizarrely they don't use the same palate as 2003, which makes switching between them an exercise in frustration (some of the conference rooms at work are still at 2003).
The big purple lightbulb box
Die, die, die! (I turned it off, of course.)
Asking me every single time
You must be right-clicking to Delete Contents..., or pressing the Delete key? The purpose of that is to ask you every single time what to delete (it's a feature). Try hitting the key on your keyboard marked "Backspace". It just deletes the contents, no dialogs. I hadn't really noticed this before - I've always used Backspace to clear a cell (on 2003, 2007 and OOo), and I've always used a right-click menu to bring up a dialog. Interesting.
Really, unless you're a math power user who needs obscure functions or Excel plugins, the differences between the two seem to come down to preferences. I like the customization of OOo more than 2007 (which has little - 2003's was better than either). I LOVE the consistency across the suite in OOo, which is lacking in 2007 and 2003. Overall, I feel comparably productive in 2003 or OOo, and a bit stymied in 2007 because of the ribbon - but I've only been using the ribbon 18 months. Fans keep telling me I'll get used to it...
Please tell me when Office was a good tool to "write a 300 page Ph.D. thesis"
See, I use LaTeX and BibTex for this. that way I don't need to worry about anything, I put all the information into the Bib file, make the appropriate citations, and it takes care of the rest... as an added bonus, with BibTeX on my mac, I can import the whole document into the DB, and never worry about "where did I file that" again.
I am 100% with you... but in many offices you need to use MS-Word-compatible software for creating and editing group documents. Most casual MS Office users don't like editing your TeX source files.
Any company that does not try to widen its clientele is a company that is not doing his work correctly.
It always amazes me the spite of /. commneters against the nontechnical user. It is an irrational hate that frankly is idiotic.
Of course MS realizing that they need to provide something simple to his users lowers the cost of entry for competitotrs, who can aim equally low (or lower) and have a change to compete.
Only in the derided mind of the /.er it is bad to try to cater to the needs of the non technical user.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Open Office Impress is the PowerPoint replacement
Why pay $600 a seat for OfficePro when most of your non-business users only write memos, resumes and do simple spreadsheets to track their checkbooks or hours anyway. This is total overkill for most users, home or at work .
Not to mention the sheer fact that if you accidently buy an OEM version, its dead if you upgrade your hardware. So you have to buy it all over again and get the official Microsoft version and continue to pay exorbitant software assurance fees to continue to read the newer formats. This is like legal black-mail, I’m stuck with hundreds of versions of OfficePro that only work on Gateway machines because we didn’t know at the time it non-transferable and if I miss my software assurance renewal I still have to buy it again.
Not only does OO cover the basic office tools, let’s not forget about Draw the Visio replacement, Impress the PowerPoint replacement and Base the Access replacement.
As stated elsewhere, all it needs is an Outlook replacement for calendars, tasks and contacts and maybe a hook into Google Docs/Apps and the differences become minimal.
I paid full price for MS Office just because of the Ribbon interface.
I'm sure once OpenOffice manages to copy it, you freedom lovers will say it's the best thing since sliced bread.
Yes, I installed the Europe Student Edition of MS Office 2010 and it asked for the format to use default. Anyway, the implementation of ODF is not really peoperly.
I created a simple table and formatted some of the borders in Word, then saved it as ODF and opened it on Linux in Openoffice. The result were that about 50% of the formatting was lost. I guess MS didn't make much effort to proper support it.
AFAIK, MS implemented the ODF format to prevent fees from Europe, like they had to make IE optional in Windows.
OO.o has a Powerpoint analogue called Impress.
I use it for all of my presentations, unlike most of the OO.o suite it is not playing catchup to PPt but is FAR superior, the only drawback is if you want to send a presentation to someone else you'll need to not use those features if they are going to open it in PPt but for dazzling audiences the OO.o Impress tools are simply outstanding.
I'm surprised no one else has mentioned this yet, starting at 0:25 they have silhouettes of saluting soldiers while they talk about open source systems. Is it just me or do the uniforms imply Soviet soldiers? As in, you know, communists (gasp!) Yes, that old malarkey again. Am I reading this wrong? I welcome other explanations of what the soldiers are supposed to mean.
Sure, but one time you'll make it past the next light.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Gee, they don't allow comments on their video rehashing out of context phrases harvested from various places.
Almost as if there might be a legitimate counter-argument to teachers talking about how they knock off grade points because Microsoft Word isn't capable of rendering a standardized, well documented XML formats properly, and they wouldn't want to see that posted.
Or that people might mention that Microsoft Office *Itself* doesn't render MS-Office Documents consistently across versions.
Or follow-up on the long ignored complaint that Outlook 2007/2010 relies on the Microsoft Word HTML renderer, which ignores vast swathes of standard CSS dropping people back to 1995 HTML practice, let's not even pretend it's not a piece of crap.
Naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah
'We're used to it' is in fact a legitimate argument for MS-Office. But lets not pretend it's an argument of deeper depth than the apocryphal retired sanitation engineer that kept buckets of sewage in his home because he's gotten used to the smell.
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
Personally, I love the ribbon. There, I said it. From a learning-curve perspective and access to higher-end functions, the ribbon is a superior UX IMO, and while /. folks might not like it much, most of the real world does. I remember being in a .NET user group for a WPF 3.5 presentation, and out of the 100 or so folks who were there, something like 97 of them raised there hand when asked if they were dying for the ribbon controls in WPF. Customers are demanding it, I guess.
Also, just for kicks and grins we should count the number of logical fallacies in Glyn Moody's comments: 1) false premise--companies indeed do compare their products to competing solutionseven if they aren't comparable. Often times, particularly in case studies like these, companies do the comparison specifically because they want to point out just how incomparable they really are; 2) Another false premise--companies do indeed make videos like these about upstart products that may someday be a significant threat. They would be stupid not to. The premise of these ads isn't to admit weakness or equivalence, but to nip the threat in the bud; and 3) simply because someone makes a case study or a video about a competing solution doesn't make that competing solution immediately compelling. In fact, the whole point of these sorts of stories is to demonstrate that other "solutions" are not compelling. Only an anti-fanboy or a kneejerk contrarian would take that position. After all, if I were to make a case study demonstrating how a BMW is superior to a Kia for BMW, I don't think he would argue that I was stating that the Kia was a compelling competitor to BMW. He would rightly point out that I was highlighting how the BMW wasn't an econobox that didn't have the driving experience of BMW.
And for mdda below, I know a good number of power users (I work with FinServ customers) who like the ribbon, but they're doing a lot of stuff with PowerPivot and other tools like that where doing that through the old menu->pop-up->see results->do it over cycle isn't efficient no matter how well you've memorized the Office2003 menu structure.
>> If someone payed me at works to use a slower system
Your analogy is broken right there. It's not slower, or inferior in any way for most use.
To be fair, the GP's scenario is also broken.
The only true way to evaluate it would be for a person to compare their work on both systems (allowing a short time before measurement to become proficient with each). After quantifying the added value of the MS product in man-hours, if there's any added value at all, you multiply that by the estimated life of the product and divide that by the license cost. MS wouldn't have to provide a ton of benefit to justify it's cost, but I have a feeling that for a large majority of users it provides no benefit at all.
So (if my assumption is correct) the ideal solution would be to pay for MS Office only for users where it makes a real difference. You know, the ones that need to spell-check Hebrew-Klingon contained in embedded spreadsheets in a presentation in a letter. Have everyone else use OO.O, and standardize on an open file format so that no one wastes any time on conversion inside the business.
Somewhere in the Dark Tower of Redmond, some former medium-level marketing manager is paying a price, in unendurable pain, for that decision by his superiors.
(Yes, that is utterly unethical. Which is why I believe it is true in spirit, if not in detail.)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
All thanks to Google! Now go get Google Earth and watch the bombs fly!
I cracked laughing when I listened to the word "reliability" applied to MS Office. Try to open a document produced by an old version of the MS Office and you'll see what is reliability! Even among new versions there are not reliable at all.
But if you want to write a 300 page Ph.D. thesis or work with an array of more than 65K points, you'll need to explore other options... unless you like the M in S&M.
If you're writing a 300 page PhD thesis, I'm fairly certain that LaTeX is a given.
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
How does it hide functionality?
Umm. By only exposing a very small, poorly-chosen subset of what the product can do and obscuring everything else through its very existence?
Yes, which is why the ribbon came out and was based on actual UI and usability testing.
Your point being?
That testing was performed mostly on existing MSOffice users. If you've used only rocks to bang on stuff before before and I give you a left-handed hammer, you will use it in that way and like the fact that you can finally hammer stuff as opposed to bashing it with a rock. The loss of flexibility (rocks can be swung with any or both hands) won't bother you as much as if you'd have ever used a normal hammer beforehand.
Usability has very little to do with software design? lolwut?
I'm accustomed to thinking of software design as that discipline which determines how a piece of software must be built to perform its stated job. UI design is a very very small subset of software design and may be missing altogether, in the case of software which is not designed to interact with users - yes, there is a lot of such software around you.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
in Open office it's buried in a tab in a sub menu of a sub menu.
Straw man. I wasn't discussing Open Office as an example of good UI design. It's atrocious, if you ask me.
Want to change page dimensions and orientation? Page layout.
That right there is a sterling example of everything that's wrong with MSWord. Why is changing page layout and orientation a commonly-performed task? Could it be because, oh, I don't know, it comes with piss-poor defaults and no easy and coherent way to define , distribute and use document templates in a collaborative setting?
You should NOT be fiddling with layout. Writing a scientific paper (this seems to be the usage scenario you're coming from)? Faculty (if you're in school) or the journal you write for (if you're not) should provide a template.
Generally speaking, layout and design should be rather strictly separated from text editing. Adobe does a decent job of this with InDesign/InCopy.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
or if you write it off as a business expense
If you wrote it off, you can only count the tax savings. You still paid for it. If your business paid for it, then someone still paid.
I've been using OO for many years now and I've yet to run into a limitation at our company of 200. Some use MS Office because that's what they know. I haven't run into an Excel spreadsheet I couldn't read or change and send back. And they've had no problems with mine, so I think OO has done a pretty good job at compatibility.