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German City Says OpenOffice Shortcomings Are Forcing It Back To Microsoft
The city of Freiburg, Germany adopted OpenOffice back in 2007, mostly replacing the Microsoft Office software it had been using previously. Now, an anonymous reader tips news that the city council is preparing to abandon OpenOffice and switch back.
"'In the specific case of the use of OpenOffice, the hopes and expectations of the year 2007 are not fulfilled,' the council wrote, adding that continuing use OpenOffice will lead to performance impairments and aggravation and frustration on the part of employees and external parties. 'Therefore, a new Microsoft Office license is essential for effective operations,' they wrote. ... 'The divergence of the development community (LibreOffice on one hand Apache Office on the other) is crippling for the development for OpenOffice,' the council wrote, adding that the development of Microsoft Office is far more stable. Looking at the options, a one-product strategy with Microsoft Office 2010 is the only viable one, according to the council."
The council was also disappointed that more municipalities haven't adopted OpenOffice in the meantime. Open source groups and developers criticized the move and encouraged the council to consider at least moving to a more up-to-date version of the office software suite.
Too late for criticizing now, someone has or someones have already been bribed...
Well, libreoffice could fullfill their all dreams. It's amazing! Using it every day with my cute Ubuntu 12.04
"Open source groups and developers criticized the move and encouraged the council to consider at least moving to a more up-to-date version of the office software suite."
Newsflash: Government department can't figure out alternative software solution - geeks say "just download the update".
What in the hell do they need to do in a city office that OO isn't sufficient for?
OK, I'm not a word processor or office suite user in the slightest. The most I do with OOo is read other people's Word documents perhaps once every few months (and even then Textedit usually does the job). A simple text editor is all I've needed even for my longest articles.
What is it in a decent wordprocessor like Word that users of wordprocessors find useful, and that OOo doesn't handle?
I ask out of curiosity - and knowing there have to be a few geeks who also use WPs in the real world to translate for me :).
Proof again that LibreOffice is no MS Office replacement.
It has been stated over and over again that without exact formatting and file compatibility it will not be useful. If you want people to switch you need to give them a reason. Make it lighter, faster, and features regular MS office doesn't have.
Under the same token Mozilla failed in the face of IE 6 too. It was not until they fixed the horrible Netscape rendering bugs (which were worse than IE 6 even) and made a "Firefox" fork that had tabs, security, and a much quicker and better renderer that people switched.
I have not used OpenOffice nor LibreOffice in a few years but what I do remember is it is behind the times with a menu and does not even have a ribbon yet. I know some people who are Office 2k3 and LibreOffice loyalists will jump on me on this! But, think of it from a users point of view who hate change? The ribbon is better once you learn how to use it and especially true if you are visual such as myself. Anything that looks different is threatening from a product everyone has used for 15 years. So why change?
http://saveie6.com/
If you want to beat MS Office, start with natively reading and writing their formats. I don't mean importing from and exporting to the formats. I mean adopting at least the older formats and all their issues in your core.
Why, you ask? Because everybody else is going to send you .doc, .xls and .ppt. And that's what they expect to receive back from you. And as you load and save these documents in your respective Office suites, it's not acceptable for them to degrade like a jpeg.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
It’s interesting and probably fatal that none of the arguments in favor or Open Office mentioned in the article provide justification in terms of constituent service. I’d like my local government to user FOSS software, but I’m much more concerned with their ability to communicate with the public and provide services. Given the public’s commitment to MS software, Open Office may just not be a realistic choice in this case. It’s a shame, but the government’s first job is not software policy.
Part of the problem with Apache OpenOffice is that IBM refuses to do proper IP Clearance of the code they donated.
http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.apache.incubator.ooo.devel/28225
"In order for volunteers to choose to work on this code, even to repair difficulties building it and to
exercise interesting components for potential integration in AOO, is problematic since using the
current code and committing changes to it leads to IP provenance issues. The community should not be
confronted by such a sustained ambiguity."
So Apache Office is deliberately held back by IBM.
I can understand the first part (OO didn't perform as expected, causing trouble to people accustomed to office)
But the rest of the summary seems MS marketspeak.
"stable development?" LOL office is the most unstable, both format and GUI wise, project that I know, its development phase can be the most disciplined and careful process in the whole sw industry, but the end product is anything but stable.
Of course, no argument is necessary now that they reverted the decision. Have fun with your MS and macros, citizens.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
The article mentions two issues I concur with. The excel clone "Calc" is not in the same league. And importing/converting between MS and open document isn't that good either.
I've tried to get people to use LibreOffice in the office, but it seriously sucks balls when you need to edit an existing Word document. It might be great if you are making a new ODF from scratch, but that's not reality.
Yeah, they must be holding it wrong.
And out of all the applications I use, it's the one I dread the most, to say it's slow and unwieldy is an understatement.
I've no idea on MS Office's performance in recent years, but I can feel Germany's frustration!
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
Sadly , that is the goatse site of a MS Office user..
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
NSFW do not follow link.
does OO do that?
Yes. I use OO to connect via ODBC to our company database daily for financial statements, receivables and the like. Works rather well actually. You can connect OpenOffice Calc (and LibreOffice) to all kinds of databases rather easily.
I use LibreOffice/OpenOffice almost exclusively, and my experience is that it is more than adequate as an MS Office replacement. In fact, I find Office rather annoying to use now.
That said, I think TFA has a valid point about the split between LibreOffice and OpenOffice. If nothing else, the fork makes it more difficult to try to push either as an Office replacement to new users. Searching for help is more annoying, and they are different enough that you might not be able to apply a solution for one to the other. And yet, they are almost the same in most ways, and it seems there is some effort to keep the two in sync. Given all of that, continuing with the two separate products seems more detrimental than beneficial. Now that the original problem with Oracle that led to the fork is behind us, couldn't we refocus our efforts on a single office software suite?
Your blog is half assed and there was a massive hole in your main argument, must try harder.
basically admitted it could do one of two things:
1. increase training and awareness of the openoffice suite and ensure operating procedures and support is available during its use.
2. switch to libreoffice with the well established and functional upgrade path.
the third option, "fold like a chair after microsoft cuts you a closed-door deal" is not a real option unless you're lazy.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Story is tagged "shills" and "msshills"? If you put the monetary cost aside, how can you still say with a straight face that OpenOffice is superior to MS Office?
Sounds like someone is dreaming about his fix.
Sounds like a fanboi can't accept that not everyone is happy with a patchwork substitute for a real office suite.
Reading the report, they state that Writer can only be used for 80% of the tasks; Impress and Calc even less.
That sounds very fishy in the ears of someone who has made complete layouts for real books and real publishers (no Internet-crap), of hundreds of pages, including automatic TOC, blabla, plus articles in traditional Chinese and Japanese.
Now tell me, please, what sorts of daily work a municipality needs to do, what sorts of letters need to be written, that can't be written in Writer!? I bet a 5-digit-sum in € that this is simply untrue. I cannot exclude, though, that some templates created in Word cannot be filled in Writer. But then the numbers would be misleading, and some wishy-washy of hands could not be excluded. I correct myself, I take a bet of 6 digits of €, that all writing work of a municipality can be done in Writer, if done in any proper manner; if and only if done from a proper set of basics of OpenOffice. Nobody expects the OpenOffice Writer to run 100% compatible with Word Macros, to give an example.
Invite me, pay me a reasonable fee, and I'll show those half-wits 'wo die Glocken hängen'.
The problem is that people fail to understand the difference between records and documents. The transition to effective digital communications is still in process and has some way to go before it matures.
I help attorneys transition to paperless offices and I would make three comments.
1) PDFs are the only fair way to share written and graphic records, yet people continually share word processing documents as records. A record is different than a document. A record might be commented on, but the base information should not be changed because it is a record of an informational transaction. A document is used more for a data gathering or information organizing process. A document will become a record when it is completed. For example, I might write a letter in a word processor and share the drafts with a co-worker, but when it is ready for printing/emailing I turn it into a PDF and save the PDF as the record in a folder of, for instance, the client. I would then delete the word processor document unless I want a template for further work (in which case the template is not stored in the same place as the record).
2) Almost all documents are over-formatted using proprietary software. That's the main reason why PDFs work best to turn a document into a record. Good OCR software can take just about any PDF record and turn it into either a Word or a RTF document. RTF is probably the most universally readable document even though it allows moderate formatting.
3) Many documents in a modern business or government agency have macros and/or database connections for automatically creating records. These macros and database connections are not easily transferred from one word processing program (or spreadsheet) to another. Most of the attorneys I work for use WordPerfect because they always have and they have hundreds of little macros. This is where the transition from one office suite to any other suite becomes technically difficult.
Story of open source software...
Forks lead to dilution and eventually to unusability.
While there is some advantage to not putting all you eggs in one basket (e.g. the existance of multiple distributions or forks), in the end it leads to the waste of effort in development that makes products fall behind the commercial competition.
THAT SAID, it is a freaking OUTRAGE than in 2012 there is not one open standard for document creation. As much as I find Libreoffice disappointing and sometimes find myself going back to MS, it is absolutely unconscionable that Microsoft still has a monopoly over the file formats in which we save most common office documents. Frankly, I don't understand why the EU spend so much time on the browser issue without combining it with the equally significant problem of office file formats. How is it that MS has been able to get away with this for so long? I mean, WTF???
It is just deeply, deeply sad that the work most people spend their days doing is subject to the control of proprierary formats.
I hope you die of cancer.
I know the OO/ libre office implementation of metafiles basicly covers the really simple portions, and silently fails drawing anything complicated, or just outputs garbage to the screen. I wouldn't be surprised if this also happens in other sections of the software, which is quite frustrating to a nontechnical end user. "I exported this image from software XYZ to a emf, and importing it doesn't work"
Copying MS's standard won't get anywhere (purportedly open or not). HTML is the strongest format for ending proprietary formats and the lock-in they guarantee. Its dissimilarity to Word is a strength. I think the CKEditor would have a better chance there than OO: It can edit any (non-interactive) web page, anyone can view it as intended.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
THAT SAID, it is a freaking OUTRAGE than in 2012 there is not one open standard for document creation.
There is one. It's called Open Document Format, or ODF. It was ratified as an ISO standard 6 years ago. It's just that Microsoft has so far vehemently refused to support it because having an open standard threatens their lock-in. So far, no version of MS Office properly supports ODF--even the later versions that say they support ODF introduce subtle (and probably deliberate) problems when opening or creating ODF files.
A more important question is, why government employees are allowed to edit presentations made by non-government employees? Presentations are marketing and propaganda materials, government may issue or receive them but is not supposed to assist anyone in producing those.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Every time there's a story that mentions OpenOffice, I check to see whether this bug has been fixed yet. It hasn't. The comments are probably TL;DR, but the idea is that if you attempt to join two paragraphs into one paragraph that would be longer than 65535 characters, it discards all text beyond that point. No warning, no way to undo, and worst of all, absolutely no interest from the developers in fixing it. The standard response? "You shouldn't make paragraphs that long". It's a word processor - it should handle text. Microsoft Office has no such issue.
I've been railing about my new Libre Office 3.5 installation lately here as well as on my distro and the Libre Office boards. I've filed several bug reports only to have them closed as duplicates or previously resolved when they still existed or were regressions from years prior. In all cases I have been shouted down for not knowing how to use it, using the wrong distro, using the wrong printer(LaserJet), having too large a document(2 pages) having a weak system (i7), what do I expect for free, Microsoft cheats to make their seem faster, blah blah blah.
Now, an OpenOffice/Libre Office show case installation is abandoning OpenOffice/Libre Office and the drumbeat of fail goes on. WIll Open/Libre Office realize their problem in time? Will they merge development efforts and make a concerted effort to eliminate the issues? Or will they continue to deny their issues and whither away?
This kills a lot of 'alternatives', that people refuse to stop accepting the proprietary standards and paint themselves in a corner of failure.
If you also switch to an open file format, the 'issues' that these alternatives have mostly melt away.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Yes of course I know that. I also know that docx is *supposedly* an open standard. What I am saying is that 1) either docx should be made fully transparent, or 2) that all word processing software should support one standard, be it ODF or whatever, in addition to whatever bullshit formats they want to dream up. That is what I meant by ONE standard.
As an IT manager, about 15 years ago I considered moving my organization to StarOffice, but we had major file format issues. When MS Office 2003 came out, I considered making the move to OpenOffice but there were file converter issues. All of our support agencies used MS Office and documents were just not transferring between the two properly.
Last year I looked to migrate to LibreOffice instead of MS Office 2010. Again, file format issues. Our government overlords require us (as a government agency) to support full Office 2010 format files starting next year (not 2003, as we were on). We were forced to buy Office 2012 because of the normal bullshit LibreOffice does to people and files.
This not any one group's fault. This is everyone's fault. Microsoft does things it's own way because it's Microsoft. Open Source community does things it's own way because it doesn't want to be like Microsoft. This is the contention that forces organizations like this city to swing back to the general standards of their supporting organizations.
See, no vast conspiracy. Just people making questionable decisions that everyone needs to adhere to in order to GET SHIT DONE. If you've got time to ponder how your office suite defines you as a person, then you're not doing anything worthwhile.
Whenever I'm forced to use a version of office with the ribbon, I end up spending half my time trying to figure out which ribbon a particular function is hidden on. Searching the menu is orders of magnitude easier. This menu? no, next, next, Bingo. With the ribbon. Is it this, wait, open up a ribbon, scan decipher icons, nope. Open next ribbon, scan, decipher icons, nope. Open next ribbon, scan, decipher icons. Wait is that it?
I just think its right up there with microsoft bob and Clippy.
Other cities like Munich (LibreOffice) and Leipzig (OpenOffice) are doing just fine with the same family of office software. Without further information it is moot to guess if a) the Freiburg admins were not willing or capable of installing and configuring OpenOffice in a way that was satisfying to users or b) the users were unwilling to use the software (something different? something new? no way!) or c) some city managers decided to rather put some money in Microsoft's purse for any number of reasons (similar things happened to other public offices in Germany before).
I like my spaghetti with source.
It's right up there with microsoft bob and clippy.
It takes me twice as long to get anything done. I spend more time opening and searching the ribbon for an icon that looks nothing like the function that I'm looking for.
Add a google-like feature finder where you type in the name of the feature and a list of options come up. Menus, tool-bars, and their cousin the ribbon are only useful if have relatively few options. When you have more than say 50 options, for the less-frequent features I'd rather type in what I want to do and have a list of suggestions. Good synonym association would increase the match success. Being able to easily customize the tool-bar positions may also win people over.
Table-ized A.I.
How about some of the bugs? Or are you posting as AC for a reason?
I like my spaghetti with source.
and TFA is even worse...
using OpenOffice for word processing alone is not possible, the council said, adding that they estimated that only 80 percent of the word processing could be done using the open source suite. "With spreadsheets and presentations this percentage is significantly lower,"
if they can't get word processing done in OpenOffice, perhaps they should check their keyboard connections or hire staff that aren't complete morons because they will likely also have difficulties with Microsoft Word
i wonder if they have actually compared the number of developers working on either of LibreOffice or OpenOffice with Microsoft Office. i would think that either of the free office development teams would be comparable to Microsoft's, especially given the lack of financial or geographic restrictions for involvement in FOSS projects.
i know that the real reasons have nothing to do with the software and everything to do with bribery, but surely there should be a trigger at some point for a higher level investigation of corruption
excuses yes, but only on the part of the idiots in the city of Freiburg council
http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/11/a-tale-of-two-lock-ins/index.htm
It's a policy issue. Here's the solution to the Gordian knot: The city sets the policy that all government documents received externally or written internally must be written using the ISO/IEC 26300:2006 standard format (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument) or pdf format. That way the Microsoft people can use their Microsoft office, and everybody else who doesn't want to be forced to use Microsoft products can use OpenOffice/Libre Office/Google docs/whatever. After all, that's the point of open standards -- everybody can use their own software to implement the standard. See? One big happy family and no bitterness. Now after having solved their painful and expensive problem, when do I get my consultant fee of 50000 euros for solving their problem so quickly?
There, I fixed that headline for ya.
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
OpenOffice derivatives (nobody uses the original from that stupid database company anymore, right? RIGHT?) nowadays have quite evolved compared to the ancient version they were using in Freiburg. No wonder they wanted to replace it, because at the time of 3.2.1 it really wasn't that compatible. Nowadays I can even open Visio files quite fine in LibreOffice Draw.
The real culprit though is the evil file format from hell which got through the standardization process like George W. Bush got through his elections - not by being better but by heavy lobbying and in some cases in court. In some countries (like mine) the standardization committee mostly worked after the "agree with the (MS-cult) committee leader or leave the committee" principle. That never works out right, at least not for the users. Hell, they got a passus in there where they can insert binary blobs of (proprietary) old Word stuff that nobody who only knows the standards document even can *try* to render.
The ones who suffer under decisions like these are the users. They are the ones who have to learn a totally new user interface every other year, they have to battle incompatibilities that Microsoft in their infinite wisdom forced on them with no way back, they have to do the old print-retype-routine just because Word doesn't want to have anything to do with Word from two years ago.
And why does Microsoft change their user interface so often? I guess it's a mixture of "because we can" and "ooh, flashing lights". It certainly doesn't help the user *at all*. Wonder why eg. doorknobs all look and work about the same? Why shouldn't the way you set the font in your document be like that? And still following that analogy, whoever heard of doorknobs that move about the surface of the door just because some program decides it would fit better in another position? Or a door that doesn't open sideways at the hinge but now, in the new version, falls flat on the floor (and good luck to you if you happen to stand in front of it)? Yes, that's how Office is degrading from version to version, and I *mean* degrading.
Besides, I'm still pissed that our government (no, I'm not from the US) had the chance when they decided official documents had to follow an open standard, and Microsoft's isn't. Then they fired the head of that department and put the two words "or OOXML" in all the appropriate places. Way to go wasting our tax money.
Fun fact: while I am typing this, on a Mac, that "Microsoft Updater" popped up totally ignoring all UI guidelines and Excel begins one of its swap eating frenzies. Had to abort both to be able to finish typing this :/ Before you ask, I am forced to use Excel because there are people at my place of work who use every little aspect of Excel and I am glad it even works in the Mac version ('cause often I have to use LibreOffice because Excel can't read Excel files, go figure). And I don't exit it at the end of the working day because it loads half of Windows (or something like that), it's monstrous even if it works.
Of course this use of Excel is stupid, I have pointed it out to others, but the same people see LibreOffice (or any piece of open source software) as the spawn of evil and go pray to their Microsoft gods. Whenever I have to write some documents myself, from scratch, I use LibreOffice because it just works.
This has been the tale for as long as multiple operating systems have been around. I have seen it numerous times in my career. I have seen it in "creative" departments where some people want Macs and others want PCs. In that context, even the same versions of Photoshop had challenges displaying the exact same file on the respective platforms. It shows up here in the "office" workspace with word processors and spreadsheets. Does anyone remember ConvertIt Plus? That was a big one back in the 1990s that was supposed to solve the same problem that we are still talking about, nearly two decades later.
If Office were a static target, the rest of the industry might catch up. Microsoft continually introduces more functionality, and continues to refine what they already have. SharePoint integration is a big one in the enterprise. Documents are becoming work flow items. Issues like regulatory compliance are demanding solutions for controllable, repeatable processes. Centralized version control is another big one. In many regards, Google Docs is closer to replacing Office than any of the FOSS solutions. Google seems to "get" the enterprise, or at least the need to collaborate. But then it comes back to compliance and regulation, which all too many industries are subjected to. Can you do a full blown forensic collection on all of the docs that Custodians A, B & C are responsible for? What happens when a company gets investigated by the SEC and they can't produce evidence in a timely manner to satisfy the regulators?
The Office juggernaut is here to stay because cost alone is not enough to compel enough of the marketplace to change. If FOSS is going to succeed, it is going to do so in developing economies like the BRIC, where their entire enterprise culture is not beholden to Microsoft. They have the luxury of starting fresh. With American corporations, operating on razor thin margins and always focused on next quarter's performance, which CIO is going to be stupid enough to stand up and roll out an applications suite that is going to cause a wide spread productivity hit? Look at how hard it is to change accounting systems, email systems, ERP, etc. It happens, but they are massive, multi-year undertakings supported by massive organizations (SAP, PeopleSoft, etc) 9 times out of 10, those deployments are massive boondoggles and require contract extensions that take them way over time and budget. And that is from huge organizations with long histories of doing those implementations. Where is the SAP equivalent for LibreOffice? Is Accenture going to come in and roll it out?
Why use a "standard" that is a big secret, and can only be supported by one vendor?
Have a read of ISO OOXML convener: Microsoft's format "heading for failure", from which I quote:
I would quote directly from Alex's blog, but sadly the "Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.3634; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.3634" serving the blog post has NullReferenceException.
Some other thoughts come from OOXML is defective by design, where this post Backwards compatible? One more lie by omission is worth reading.
This is huge. The OpenOffice document format is fully documented, so it will always be possible to access those documents.
Too late for criticizing now, someone has or someones have already been bribed...
"Your day in court, how did it go?"
"Someone got to the judge."
"The city council turned against you as well?"
"The same. It's all a racket ,you know --- another big payoff."
It's the argument the geek whenever he is on the losing side of an encounter with the law, government or politics --- and it alienates people he desperately needs to win over.
They should be sticking to LibreOffice. I use it without trouble, mainly on Linux Mint, and occasionally on Windows when I am forced. Maybe Apache will fix the Oracle debacle and bring the project around yet, but I strongly prefer what the Document Foundation have done with LibreOffice. When projects are forked, sometimes ya gotta make a choice, and I think Freiburg made the wrong one.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Don't overreact to this news, folks. While it is slightly disappointing to see a government dump OpenOffice, there are a few more things to consider. For one, they are not using LibreOffice, the best open office suite, in my opinion. And we are also only talking about Freiburg, a city with a population of less than 250,000. If this had said Akron, OH, Chula Vista, CA or Hialeah, FL were ready to go back to MS, I doubt anyone would blink.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
IMnsHO, corporate information systems have reached the level of complexity where they will either find simpler methods or they will collapse under their own weight. Most of the complexity comes from profit motives (both the corporation's and the consultant's).
There is a shift happening, starting at lower levels and in new businesses and governments, as you indicate. Being almost 65, I doubt I'll see the simplified versions ... but maybe!
Most people don't think about freedom at all while using software. For them using a particular software (or not) is not a political or religious this. When they get pissed off with Libre Office, they switch. That's the only way it works. You wouldn't drive a car if it pisses you off, just because it symbolizes freedom or whatever, right.
As a new user of Open Office on Windows I am left wondering what's wrong with it, So far i've only needed to use Write and Calc but they have random crashes anywhere from 2 minutes into the program to 20 minutes, the Auto recover only saved information once in all that good thing I staged saving every few minutes. The spell checker just stops at times and nothing will happen so you have to restart and the copy past is very hit and miss as in at times you can not past, not from with in or from outside of OO.. For any application where you are paying ppl to do a job, that costs you $.
I can run MW3 with out issues, and Kerbal Space Program (very CPU intensive physics based, that can bring my system down to 3 seconds per frame) with out issues and KSP is in Alpha, sure I can "Get the job done" in Open Office, but I would not use it in any form of Business. Also the chosen Macro langue is painful at best, it may make sense to ppl with a lot of programming experience, but your general office staff or average Joe? no way..
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
A more important question is, why government employees are allowed to edit presentations made by non-government employees? Presentations are marketing and propaganda materials,
They are also construction plans, proposals, schedules, and millions of other documents that need to be reviewed, and marked up, and forwarded to other government workers for further comments or for making a decision.
In powerpoint? Those should be dismissed without anyone looking.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
What a tyrannical government would you be if you dismiss documents without looking!
Besides, if you are proposing a school building with the adjacent territory, what tool would you use to present your project to non-architects? (The D size elevations and sections will not do.) An important feature of the presentation is that the file should be portable, since it will go through many hands before the project is approved. If some of those people cannot open it... sorry, man - other applicants sent me the files that I *could* open :-)
its too bad the only excuse apparent from the summary is the "divergence of the development community", which seems like a piss poor excuse for switching from free software to paid.
Indeed. It smacks of dirty tricks by Microsoft, coated in a thin veneer of quasi plausible spin.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
If your software is wonky and un-polished, people that have to use it every day don't care if it's free. They will happily pay for something that works right so they can do their jobs.
I will tell you what is wrong. I have Office 2*** edition and I try to open a file sent to me saved from OpenOffice. Oh shit, it won't open it because it is in a format of a previous version of Office, so I have to add its path to a trusted file location. Sure, a pain in the ass, but I'll do it. After multiple registry edits and multitudes of reboots, I can finally open this bastard. It looks like crap. Half of the formatting that should be there is missing. Fuck it, I give up.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
MS spokesperson N. Muntz issued the following statement today:
And bingo!
Microsoft has snared another victim with its proprietary formats.
Congratulations, TheRealMindChild. You no longer have control of your data, and you'll be running in the Microsoft upgrade hamster wheel from now on, shedding $$ every few turns.
Welcome to eternal mediocrity.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Three German municipalities (Munich, Jena, Freiburg) and some Swiss authorities just put together €140,000 to fund improved OOXML support in openoffice/libreoffice.
Improved OOXML support for LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Wouldn't it make sense to wait for the results before dropping openoffice?
Telling me they were going to audit me under their Software Asset Management scheme.
I use the bare minimum amount of MS software where I work because it has built in redundancy. If you buy Microsoft Office 2010 chances are it won't open files created with the next version. Libre and Open Office don't seem to share that failing in Microsoft's product. That's why I use them - and I pretty much use them interchangeably because my peeps aren't particularly sophisticated users (nor am I).
So, having MS send me a letter basically accusing me of stealing because I don't use Outlook, Exchange, Office or whatever else they peddle, is pretty annoying. Why would I want to let myself get tangled up in that system?
Ironically, we're coming to end of life with our current accounting software (Sage Line 100) and are due an across the board refresh of the entire system. I was THIS close to buying into Outlook and Exchange and a limited deployment of MS Office because it integrates better (at all) with Sage Line 200 but that letter was a kick in the nuts. I am adamantly opposed to giving them money if that's how they treat customers - and I AM a customer. I've spent some proportion of my tech budget on their OS software, including the bare minimum server OS software to host our Sage installation. I must stress if I could go Linux I would but our accounting software, and in fact no accounting software that I can get local support for runs on anything but Microsoft OS's as clients and more importantly on the server side. There ARE web-based alternatives but they're clunky as hell, expensive and obviously vulnerable to downtime if t'internet goes down,
I'm not a tech guy, I'm an interested in tech guy. IT isn't my job, it's just one of the things I do here. Again, I don't have sophisticated users. Incredibly in a company with thirty people under the roof I am, at nearly fifty, the only geek. What can I say. We get our hands dirty, but Microsoft Office? Not THAT dirty.
Your use case as described may differ; butt!
It's always nice with a nice butt.
Anyway, most interoperability problems, though caused by monopoly, may be easily avoided if people started using PDFs properly.
If you want someone to read something, save as PDF.
(alternative spelling with an i avoided for fear of a fruit company lawsuit ;-))
Oh the irony, having had free(dom) in its (former) name...
I've been living in Freiburg for about 30 years and have seen this thing unfold.
My take is that you can't manage such a change (it's a city with >
200K population) with just one half-time employee. To have a chance of success you really have to *want to do it*; You'll have to put aside enough to cover transition costs (the lion's share of which will be hand-holding and helping out users who know how to by-pass the quirks of the old-known crap and are at a loss when presented with new quirks).
Of coure workers will hate any "new & shiny" product if things work differently (or don't work at all) and there is no-one out there to help them getting their job done. Transition without handholding => catastrophe.
Administration just didn't want (I can't say whether they collectively *knew* this was going to happen. There sure are individuals whithin admin who did knew -- which to my taste *is* evil behaviour, bribes or not).
So something very complicated and free is not as good as something very complicated costing several hundred dollars (with a huge team working on it).
Want to run a organisation professionally? Pay for the right tools to do it.
In one of my customer's sites which has open office but their main business involving using an ERP with its own interface, we know that the open suites are always playing catchup to the MS versions. But still for cost cutting purposes, we use only open office. OK
One reason why it's difficult for corporates to move away from MSO is becuase of Outlook - it's difficult to find a replacement.
Sharepoint will be the same - once companies stat using it, it will lock them into MSO in similar fashion.
Multipage document scanning from business office type scanners.
This single missing feature has caused me to require users to use Word instead of OpenOffice for day to day use.
Background: business type scanners not only come with a glass scanner for scanning single sheet documents, but also come with a multipage Automatic Document Feeder (ADF).
In Word, when you scan such a document, you get each scanned page inserted on a different Word page automatically, so that if you scan 12 pages, you end up with a Word document 12 pages long.
In OpenOffice OTOH, the first page is scanned from the ADF and then the scanning process terminates. There's a bug report filed against this behaviour, but the response is that it's a feature and not a bug. That kind of arrogant response means using OpenOffice for business office level document scanning is not a viable option, so people use Word.
Furthermore, Word (since 2003) now has a dedicated document scanning tool which renders .tiff files.
Well, powerpoint surely is not portable.
One should use pdf ("portable document format", duh!) or even save as html, which opens in most browsers.
Proprietary formats like doc or ppt are not guaranteed to open even among different M$ Office versions (in my experience, at least), so using them is a big no, no, no...
if they can't get word processing done in OpenOffice, perhaps they should check their keyboard connections or hire staff that aren't complete morons because they will likely also have difficulties with Microsoft Word
This is unreasonable. They explain the issues - formatting conversions, conversion problems, and missing functionality - which are common complaints of users of OpenOffice. They are the reason that I have paid for Office 2010 having spent years using OpenOffice; now that my work involves exchanging complicated documents with other companies the niggling bugs and the ongoing formatting conversion issues that I endured for years mean that OpenOffice is not a viable solution. Even ignoring the reputational problems if I send out documents that don't open properly or look bad, economically it makes no sense to use the free alternative - if I spend 10 minutes a week dealing with formatting conversion then it's more expensive using OpenOffice after six months.
Surely it's fair to say that while OpenOffice is a very impressive project and is fine for a lot of uses - as a student it saved me a lot of money - there are also a lot of professional users who need the extra features and polish of Microsoft Office. I don't think it's any criticism of the OpenOffice team to say that their free product is not as good as an expensive, professional and longer-lived competitor.
[I] know that the real reasons have nothing to do with the software and everything to do with bribery
It's very poor form to accuse public officials of taking bribes without solid evidence, much less with no evidence at all.
just because we call them "laws of physics" doesn't mean the physical universe is always going to obey them
That's why they are called "laws of physics" instead of "laws of the universe".
Physics is a science, a way to understand the universe. Physics != universe. (IAAP.)
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
This entire thread is a perfect example of the disconnect between IT and the user base.
The users have work to do and they need their tools to work without interruption so that the users can get their *JOB* done.
It doesn't matter to them if Open Office is better because it is not Microsoft. It doesn't matter to them if it is cheaper, they don't have pay for it. They only want to get through their work day with a minimum of hassle and disruption and focus on their responsibility which is serving their constituents.
They don't like problem solving on computers. They don't want to learn new ways of doing things. They just want to be able to do their job.
Regards, Chris
Do any firm supporters of OO/LO deploy them in a medium sized business to enterprise scale? The bulk of the comments I read regarding this tend to sound like personal use. I'm curious if someone has had success with a sizable deployment.
There may be a bunch of things it can do well, but there are some it can't do at all. And when something as basic as handling .rtf files doesn't work properly 'out of the box' the program is still 'not ready for prime time'.
Yes, people still do use .rtf files: professional authors use them quite a bit actually.
I can easily imagine how this German town ran into similar problems along the way - maybe file formats, maybe localization, maybe something else.
You can use a WYSIWYM editor like LyX, you just write and you have about the same level of format control as semantic html without style sheets (I.e. list, ordered list, paragraph, table). Then you tell it to typeset (which it will do using LaTeX, Omega, etc) and adjust the final typesetting to taste.
Try it, it is very good for the productivity. And the end result is extremely good looking PDFs/print outs, as expected.
you obviously don't know a lot about the laws of physics
google perpetual motion and maybe you'll begin to understand my sig... not that i'll hold my breath
there's a lot of people who misuse formatting features of both OpenOffice and Microsoft Office, and slight differences in each package will likely always result in quirks (perhaps this is why Word doesn't read ODF so as not to look bad when ODF document formatting gets all screwy - the reverse of your complaint).
for example, using spaces to align text, with a Microsoft proprietary font, and then opening the same Word document in OpenOffice and wondering why the alignment is off (because the font substitution doesn't match exactly). these people shouldn't be hired for word processing anyway, and if a document must be sent to someone with the assurance that the layout is the same, then the document should be exported to PDF anyway (OpenOffice handles PDF but Word requires a plugin or external Acrobat/CutePDF/etc). i'm an engineer and a lot of my reports have specific formatting and layout requirements to be met, but i've been trained to use the right features (such as tabs, indents, line spacing, etc). the types of issues you are complaining about would be the same between any two different word processors (such as WordPerfect and Word) and has more to do with font substitution and formatting laziness/ignorance on the part of the user than the software.
if everyone you deal with uses Microsoft Word and formatting/layout of your documents is important and you are lazy/ignorant of proper formatting techniques and you need to use Microsoft proprietary fonts, then sure it makes more sense for you to go with Microsoft Word, but the likelihood that the german city council meets all of those conditions in low, and even if they did it still looks bad for them anyway and their priorities are still wrong (they should be investing in training and looking at why they need proprietary fonts).
Spreadsheets shouldn't be much of an issue though, as formatting is much more limited (if you use a spreadsheet for word processing you're already doing it wrong).
and finally, this is slashdot, so i can accuse anyone of anything. it is obviously my opinion that there is corruption. if you disagree, that's fine, but i don't need to convince you with evidence or anything. if you're interested in past business practices of microsoft, try groklaw, otherwise google is your friend.
Without a list of bugs this is bogus..
I can see an annual process where they request
bids to maintain a document system and one bidder
far away on a coast near the Pacific Ocean complained
that their bids were not being correctly considered.
This is no different than code portability. sizeof(something) differs
so 64 bit OSs are excluded. ANSII C is not C++, FORTRAN 66 is not FORTRAN 77 is not FORTRAN 90.
If the OS does not support vfork() it is toast and rejected. Folks writing open bids where exactly
one vendor can qualify understand this. Since quality engineers that write quality RFPs that are
all inclusive and fair are rare or unemployed this never happens.
I once had a boss that could not cope with a text file that did to end in .txt. As stupid as he was ... he was the boss.
For a hardware company interested in big iron sales this is folly, but hey they sold the HPC related business.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Everybody is blaming the alternatives for being unable to work with the secret Word formats, but it's the secrecy (and crappy-ness) of those formats that make the competing products seem to suck.
Yes, breaking a heroin habbit it hard, and harder still is breaking vendor lock-in.
Friends don't let friends send them Microsoft doucments.
The rub is that there is no standard behind the documents so you get the same thing every time there is a major revision in Word anyway.
People need ot just start rejecting .doc and .docx (etc) files universally and demand PDFs or the like.
Since Microsoft doesn't actualy or accurately use or support OOXML, what difference would making LibreOffice et al more compliant make?
I've seen this from the outside and as the CFO. Politics is 90% of these kinds of problems. Some bitching users with an ounce of evidence can blow things out of proportion to push their agenda of going back to what they know. They may have valid points but it really doesn't change things, if they have nothing then the fight is minimal but if they have some real evidence then the GAME is on. Proper training and IT support can help prevent a revolt from forming but not always.
I would argue the cost issue. They used to manage with older systems and before that paper. If they must go backwards for a while to SAVE MONEY with less services during this bad economic situation then so be it. If they want a feature they should consider investing in open source development instead of spending a bunch of money transitioning AGAIN with training and purchases--- MS Office has changed a lot since the old version they had.
if they can't get word processing done in OpenOffice, perhaps they should check their keyboard connections or hire staff that aren't complete morons because they will likely also have difficulties with Microsoft Word
Yes, how true. I work with Libre Office and I do anything my cohorts at work do with their MS Word and Excel. I don't do much in the way of presentations so I don't know there.
I'm not talking about tiny quirks or about using spaces to align text. Even without getting into features that Writer simply lacks - and there are enough - trading complicated documents between Writer and Word introduces a lot of problems and errors. This is not controversial - every review of LibreOffice notes them and the developers provide guidance on their website to help people correct by hand the most egregious errors. You may say that this is as much as problem with Word as with Writer, but that's irrelevant for a lot of users; when I'm at work I need to trade documents with other firms who use Word, and the result is that my job is a lot easier and quicker if I use Word. As I noted before it takes very little time for these slight delays to add up to more than the cost of Word.
Even where errors are due to the original author, if I have to correct the formatting in an execution clause before I can send it to my client that's just as much a cost to me if it comes from the original user not having used formatting properly as if the problem comes from a bug. In both cases Word gives me the result I want immediately and Writer does not. Why may be interesting to the developers but it is irrelevant to me when the delay costs me money. The German local government seems to me to have acted entirely reasonably here: they thought that the advantages of free software would outweigh the inconveniences and so tried it; the inconveniences were greater than expected so they have switched back.
and finally, this is slashdot, so i can accuse anyone of anything. it is obviously my opinion that there is corruption. if you disagree, that's fine, but i don't need to convince you with evidence or anything. if you're interested in past business practices of microsoft, try groklaw, otherwise google is your friend.
You cannot say that officials took bribes in your opinion. It makes no more sense than to say that in your opinion the Great Wall of China is in Mexico; whether they took bribes is a matter of fact, not opinion. Traditionally it has been considered at least impolite to make entirely baseless accusations of serious criminal conduct against public officials. The fact that you make your specious claims on Slashdot makes no difference.
Paid software yes, but who is paying to whom ????
You cannot say that officials took bribes in your opinion. It makes no more sense than to say that in your opinion the Great Wall of China is in Mexico; whether they took bribes is a matter of fact, not opinion.
you were actually going pretty good till here, at which point i laughed and wondered where i could get hold of some of what you're smoking
at this point neither you, me or anyone else except those directly involved know the facts, so everything about it is opinion and conjecture. even if proven in court i can still have an opposing but still valid opinion of what i think happened, and my opinion is no less valid and reasonable than anything in the newspaper, slashdot or court documents. just because you accept that there is a great wall of china doesn't mean that there can't be one in mexico... how could you or i say for sure that there isn't. you are welcome to disagree with my opinion and have your own differing opinion, but if you think you can oppress me with some entirely subjective and rather distorted and out of date (traditional at best) interpretation of what is right or proper, you will be disappointed. public officials are public officials because their lives are in the public and open to public scrutiny. if you go into politics or have any level of celebrity status nowadays and expect your privacy or image to be respected regardless of what you do (particularly if it involves even a remote chance of corruption), you will also be disappointed. you don't get out much do you? try turning the television on once in a while to a news or current affairs channel and see how public officials are treated in the media.
Opinion is not the same thing as conjecture. Neither is something a matter of opinion just because the truth is not known for certain.
I could try to describe the difference but I think that the easiest way to explain it is to ask what an opinion is. The key is that opinions are subjective; they are a matter of personal judgement and preference and while two people may disagree neither opinion is wrong. It flows from that that where something can be wrong it is not an opinion - it is a fact. This is the case even where the truth is not certain. It simply makes no sense to say, for example, that in your opinion 2 + 2 = 5 (if you don't agree try to articulate what that statement could possibly mean). Your claim that there might be a second Great Wall of China in Mexico illustrates the point nicely - even if that is possible it is still a question of fact; there either is or there isn't, even if we don't know. If you are inclined to disagree, once again answer the question: what could it possibly mean to say "in my opinion there is a Great Wall of China in Mexico"? The statement is meaningless because this is a matter of fact, not of opinion. Equally it makes no sense to say that objectively, red is better than blue - because that is an attempt to make a statement of fact about a matter of opinion.
If it were meaningful to make statements of opinion about matters of fact you could say things like "in my opinion there is a Great Wall of China in Mexico, but there isn't". Again, what could that statement mean? What would an opinion be in these circumstances?
You are right that we do not know the facts. They are, however, still facts; either the public officials took bribes or they did not, even if we do not know which is the case. "In my opinion" does not simply mean "without reason or evidence I choose to believe the following". It makes no sense to say that in your opinion they took bribes, because that is a matter of objective truth and not subjective judgement. Once again if you disagree I defy you to articulate a coherent meaning of the phrase "in my opinion they took bribes".
And finally, I don't know where you live but here (the UK) it is certainly not the case that the media - or individuals - can make baseless accusations of criminal conduct against public officials, as is illustrated by the substantial damages being paid to Lord McAlpine after wrongful allegations were made against him without any foundation.