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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.
Short answer: No.
Longer answer: OpenOffice (and LibreOffice) chokes on documents created in newer versions of Office (2010, possibly 2012). It can leave out parts of the document entirely. The elements are usually the geometry objects (line arrows, word balloons, etc). This little problem actually got a customer pretty pissed off at me because I referred to the document missing some key components that were actually there when viewed in MS Word.
For personal use, advanced users, or environments where you can strictly control document formats, OpenOffice can work. However, if you need to be able to read documents coming from uncontrolled sources, it still has a very long way to go to become viable replacement for Microsoft Office.
I use both M$ Office and Libreoffice. For personal reasons and bias, whenever possible I use LO instead of M$O, for the following reasons:
1. To see whether LO is ready for daily use;
2. To determine what differences exist between both;
3. To test which features would recommend one suite over the other;
4. To test if documents can be created and use in a mixed environment and
5. To better understand the actions of a monopolist in trying to avoid competition.
Now for my opinions and conclusions:
1. LO is ready for day-to-day use wrt the things I do (text documents, spreadsheets, presentations _and_ drawings.
Most of my documents are read and created using LO.
2. Differences between LO and M$O do exist. In about 1% of documents I receive, I may need Excel for some weird feature; in most cases, the suites are equivalent. But compatibility is greater in text, ok in spreadsheets, usually good enough in presentations and LO is better than M$O wrt drawing (has anyone heard about the ancient M$ Draw?)
3.Now, the best "feature" of LO is being easier to use than M$O (because of all the problems the "ribbon" creates). Also, LO is more object-orientated: click on something to change its properties, which is easier than some hidden menus in M$O to reach some desired setting. M$O imports better html, though, both in Word and in Excel, but I suspect Firefox could help here. LO is a lot more versatile with free standard formats, so usually I use it first to open any file, including M$' proprietary ones.
4. After editing, as a last operation odf documents are saved as the equivalent M$ format. No one complained till now, but I have the extra care of opening them in M$ apps before sending. I assume in an LO-only workplace things will be simpler; this "M$O is the standard for external communication" reveals extreme lack of IT knowledge, since documents can be sent as pdf files to external parties. Nothing can be easier.
5. Regarding M$ actions, not much in that regard -- or the LO guys are really good with countermeasures. Actually, most of our problems arise from incompatibilities among versions of M$ software, thus I believe Freiburg won't have a happy life after some 3 to 5 years in the future when M$ decides their new Office won't be compatible with the previous one.
Specifically regarding your question, there's nothing special about Word. Other apps, F/oss or proprietary, do more or less the same with little variations -- one of the reasons being that word processing is widely understood after all these years and there's not much to add anymore. In fact, it annoys me to no end that some fellow coworkers still move the cursor one character a time (with the keyboard arrows), so I suspect even basic Android apps would be more than enough to replace Word.
People who want to buy M$O, I suppose, are doing the blame game (it's not my fault, it's M$'!) or believe in old golden days when life was better and maybe spending money could bring those days back again... well, for me it's the opposite: I remember when there was a lot of word processors and Word was not one of them -- and people worked quite well, thank you very much.
But then, I'm biased and pro-F/OSS...
Word has an understandable formatting model. That is, all the formatting for a paragraph is stored in the paragraph mark. You can select a paragraph mark, copy it, paste it somewhere else in the document, and you have a paragraph formatted identically to the original. In OO, your text may take on different formatting depending on whether you backspace away a paragraph mark vs deleting it. No kidding. Also, there's no way to reliably copy a paragraph from one place in a document to another and retain the formatting without adding sacrificial paragraphs before and sometimes after the text you are trying to copy. Seriously. OO's formatting model is just broken.
Until this basic problem is addressed, people will -- rightly -- prefer using word. I've been fighting oo's formatting for years, and frankly, I'm sick of it.
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.
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.
If you think you're wasting time fucking around with formatting in Word, you probably don't want to move to LaTeX. LaTeX is for typesetting. It's sole purpose is for designing how a document should look. All it does is formatting. Conversely, it contains very little to aid a writer in producing or editing the content of the document. The only reason I can think you'd really need to move to LaTeX for is if you have very complex layouts such as those in mathematics textbooks.
Honestly, your wife probably just needs to rethink her workflow. She needs to draft the content without worrying about formatting. Then she should revise it. Then format the document. Then do a final edit. You should never be writing and formatting at the same time. That is a tremendous time sink that tends to produce haphazardly written content with haphazardly presented layouts, and using LaTeX will not help. I had to make this change myself when I started doing a lot of documentation. It is difficult at first, but tremendously improves the quality and enjoyment from writing. In Word, you should just use the default font and headings until you know that the content is done. Use inline footnotes temporarily. Use things like [Insert picture here] when drafting. When your content is done you do layout and make things look good.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.