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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.
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'
I think TFS laid it on a bit thick, but it does have a point...if a company doesn't feel that another product similar to their own is a threat, they completely ignore it. Making a video with people talking about why they switched from the competitor's product is hardly the same as ignoring it.
Living With a Nerd
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.
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'
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.
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.
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?
Can I remake this video with the names changed around ....It makes more sense that way
Familiar Interface : Yes OOO has that .. Office 2010 does not ...
Malformatted documents : Yes OOO to 2010 does that, whereas 2010 to OOO does not
Interoperability : OOO loads more formats the Office 2010
Expensive support : a) what support is needed for either, b) both seem equally expensive to me
etc
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
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!
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like the standard and ancient Microsoft attack on everything not-Windows. Actually, that is what this whole video sounds like -- a standard tactic that Microsoft has used for over a decade now.
Palm trees and 8
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.
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.
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/
Interoperability : OOO loads more formats the Office 2010
Just a little niggle here, but this is the kind of thing that F/OSS advocates bang on about while totally missing the point of the real world.
Nobody cares if OO.o will open ObscureFormat 2.1 (which was only ever used in one product, was last sold in 1992 and never even ran on anything more recent than Windows 3.x).
ObscureFormat 2.1 is the one that gets attention because some developer somewhere discovered some ancient document s/he wanted to open, and so wrote the code to import it. Which is great for that developer, but don't for one minute think of it as a selling point because it isn't.
What people care about is:
If the answer to either of these is no, they'll buy Office and damn the price. This is what helped get Microsoft a monopoly in the office products market, and it's what's kept users on the upgrade treadmill for fifteen years or more.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I easily run up to 3 gigs of email per month. I use auto-archiving, but there's just a lot of stuff I need to keep in my inbox for searching and reference. Most of these are pdf files going back and forth: 10, 20 revisions of the same 6MB PDF file isn't unheard of, so that's between 60 and 120MB just on one email thread, per day.
Now take into account I get between 150 and 250 emails per day, and archiving becomes a very nasty thing. I usually chalk it off as admin work, and it takes me about an hour or two to weed through it every month. I have a hard drive that is dedicated to email backup.
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
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
+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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
"Temperamental idiots" still do productive work. We do not rate their performance based on what office suite they prefer.
Sierra Tango Foxtrot Uniform
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.