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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.
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".
Yeah, let's go straight to, "someone was bribed". Whatever you do, don't think about what they said in the article.
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 :).
extremely crazy spreadsheets that would create ai if the wrong bit flips. at least that's the only thing i can think of.
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.
Probably use some proprietary software that ties into an office suite that probably only works with MS Office.
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.
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.
It's proof of nothing.
All we really have is mindless "fragmentation" rhetoric.
> "does not even have a ribbon yet"
That is only a good thing.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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!
If anyone disagrees with this, could they please write or direct me to an article on "why the ribbon is A Good Thing"? If it has an advantage that I just don't understand, I'd really love to be sold on it.
The usual problem. Interoperability issues. They try to open MSO files on OO and it doesn't work properly. They blame OO, then, for having adhered to open standars that MS won't adopt in order to create that sort of lock-in and for not having thought of making the necessary adjustments ahead of time (like converting old documents) when you're planning on changing your working platform. It's understandable, but still speaks volumes about their IT stupidity.
Excel will connect to MS SQL Server, Cognos and lots of other products for data and then let you do some transformations on the data on the client
does OO do that?
THe internet was 40% IE 6 only in 2003/2004 too. Just like when .doc was the default file format. PDFs are gradually taking over and MS will loose its file compatibility format too.
I hate keep bringing up the Browser analogy (like the car one), but it is relevent. People wont change and will resist unless there is something in it for them to do so. Once Firefox had 10% to 15% of the market in 2008/2009 it quickly went up to 50% in 2-3 years! Why? Website makers gave up and supported it and now there was a reason to change.
RIght now if you build a better mousetrap all you need is 10% of people to use it. Once that happens it will balloon as the file compatility will be broken.
http://saveie6.com/
Not OO, but libreoffice has plugins to do that stuff.
No one should be using OO anymore.
It has been stated over and over again that without exact formatting and file compatibility it will not be useful
Where can I get an office suite that supports this? Even microsoft Office fails this.
If you want people to switch you need to give them a reason
If you want people to switch, especially office workers you have to give them the same interface. Have you ever seen training materials used to train people for office applications? They are step by step guides what to klick, no explanation about how it works or alternative ways of doing something, any change to the UI will stop these "trained" users from accomplishing anything. The result is that OpenOffice/LibreOffice are not a drop in replacement until they have a one to one copy of the MS Office UI.
Ribbons are only marginally useful, and mostly just clutter-up my interface. And since I'm unsure of the status of the Ribbon patent that would be a fight best left out of an Office Competitor. Open office works much like Office 2000, and gets the job done without much clutter. It defiantly needs work but that's mostly due to the Collapse of Sun, the Acquisition by Oracle, and then the Open Source Limbo Oracle put it in for nearly a year which resulted in a Fork, and then they handed it over to Apache. If they were just going to do that then they should have done that sooner to when they got the go ahead on the Acquisition. Personally the competition between two Open Source projects should help spur things on.
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?
exactly, its like the MS Access issue. everyone can make a database then it become's IT's problem to make it work when it reaches the size limit or user limit. if you are making a spreadsheet so complicated that it takes forever to load you are using the wrong tool for the job. for so many years we had documents on a typewriter, now everyone wants to waste time picking fonts, color schemes, tables .. its SO lame.
Proof again that LibreOffice is no MS Office replacement.
No, this is only proof of the strength of Microsoft's vendor lock-in.
It has been stated over and over again that without exact formatting and file compatibility it will not be useful.
Which it would have, if only Microsoft adhered to standards. Somehow open source software is able to accurately render HTML, PDFs, SVGs, but not DOCs? The only reason this would happen is if someone is playing fast and loose with the specs.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
If you want people to switch you need to give them a reason.
Cost.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
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?
It has been stated over and over again that without exact formatting and file compatibility it will not be useful.
That would be an argument AGAINST Microsoft Office. All too often is exact formatting precisely the thing you *don't* get when moving file between machines.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
“On the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The tech nerds are/were the ones building the websites in 2003/2004 that decided to use w3c standards in favor of proprietary Microsoft code. Those same tech nerds could create their documents in .odf, but it won't matter when everyone else is creating .doc(x).
I doubt blame has anything to do with it. It cost them too much money/time to use OO. They're switching. It doesn't matter to them why OO costs more to use, just that it does.
I don't respond to AC's.
Yeah, let's go straight to, "someone was bribed". Whatever you do, don't think about what they said in the article.
What they DID say in the article is that Freiburg is using OOo 3.2.1, which is two-and-a-half years old. It also mentions that the city didn't consult any open source software experts. That may or may not add up to "someone was bribed", but it sounds at least a little bit fishy to me.
The only way for the Freiburgs of the world to throw off the yoke of MS oppression is to support FOSS. And no level of government has any business conducting OUR affairs using propietary data formats that can be easily held hostage.
I get seriously pissed off with LibreOffice, (and with Linux for that matter). But I stay the course because ultimately, freedom requires watchfulness and maintenance, and we'll never be truly free if we give up control and autonomy for the sake of ease and convenience. It's easy to be seduced by the latest bit of shiny, and that's a good part of the reason why our world is so fucked up.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
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.
I'm using a 5 year old version of Office and not having problems.
Serious question, why do you discount Apache Open Office?
I haven't used it yet, but I was assuming that Apache will fix whatever was wrong with the Oracle Open Office license, and whatever else is wrong with OOO.
The merit of the software being primarily measured by interoperability with Microsoft Office. That's how strong Microsoft's vendor lock in is.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I doubt blame has anything to do with it. It cost them too much money/time to use OO. They're switching. It doesn't matter to them why OO costs more to use, just that it does.
I wonder how much cheaper it is for the city to send money to Redmond for licenses than it is to hire a German to fix the file format problem.
Or ... does this city get "whatever you want to pay" pricing because it's an OpenOffice user?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
>if only Microsoft adhered to standards
What you fail to understand is, like it or not, altruistic or not, Microsoft *is* the standard.
Yes, it's blame. Things aren't working properly, so you have to diagnose the problem to fix it. They went with "Open Office isn't up to par", instead of the equally plausible alternatives "we forgot about retraining", "we refuse to keep current", "we do not specify document formats to third parties", "out IT department should have thought about these quite obvious caveats and prepared for them".
I have not used OpenOffice nor LibreOffice in a few years but what I do remember is it is behind the times...
And this gets modded "insightful"? It's been a while since I've used a mac, but what I do remember is that OS9 didn't even support preemptive multitasking...
Like Office 2010?
Because all the Devs moved to libreoffice.
Oracle poisoned the name. As we should have all expected.
Mine's ten years old and still useful. Neener neener.
No sig today...
>with a menu and does not even have a ribbon yet
Thanks for bringing up two of the most important reasons for which I'm a happy LibreOffice user.
Cosplayers.net - The Cosplayers Network
I think also what I failed to emphasize more above is office politics (no pun intended). People hate change and with Office can do what they were doing before and it looks all pretty and familiar. Everyone I have shown LibreOffice hates it within a few seconds because it doesn't look exactly like Office.
I mentioned it needs to do something more substantial to entice people to switch.
The browser analogy is perfect. I showed my ex Firefox in 2006. She didn't like it at all initially. IE 7 just came out and she was showing me she had tabs too. After seeing how much quicker it was she started using it and within one week never touched that foul POS again. She was even happy when she got a new job and they had Firefox on all the computers and only then turned into an IE hater.
My point? Unless it does something new people will give into their fear of change and oppose it. My guess is the workers were the ones fighting for Office back and the government gave in. We had vendor lock-in too with the world wide web a decade ago too. It went away and will do so again if anything can get that magical 10% of the market. PDFs are the obvious replacements for now unfortunately.
http://saveie6.com/
More likely, the Microsoft-indoctrinated employees don't want to learn a new interface, and have spent the last few years whining about it. This happened to even the M$ lock-ins when Office transitioned to the "ribbon" -- I was having to cover for desktop support during that time, and fielded at least twenty calls a day from people who wanted to roll back to the previous version.
Never underestimate the power of concentrated whine.
"the yoke of MS oppression"
I present People's Exhibit A showing why everyone thinks open-source zealots are completely nanners.
The only time I've ever felt oppressed by things MS does is when they do their idiotic "version-specific upgrade" thing, and when they do that, I can always just wait for the next iteration of Windows that doesn't suck. Office in particular is probably MS's best product, and definitely the best of its kind. Anytime I've ever tried to use something that is not Word or Excel, which is frequently because I am poor, I have felt nearly imprisoned by the poor interface, missing functionality, and lack of anyone else to ask when I can't figure something out.
It's good that FOSS exists, because competition is important, libre projects lower the barrier-to-entry for aspiring devs, and computers are important enough that gratis options should be available. However, demanding that others use an objectively inferior product on the ideological basis of opposing the industry standard's producer for the cardinal sin of being and acting like a business is much more like what I'd call "oppression." People don't use OpenOffice because it sucks. Leave them alone.
Agreed - Office 2007 working fine here. LibreOffice 3.5 is working fine for me, but there's no way in hell I would use OOo 3.2.1 in 2012 on a production machine.
Ahh OK. So they simply force all other organizations to use a format that they have little to no support for because you don't want to support formats that the majority use. Simply out of principle.
I wish I lived in your imaginary world.
If Microsoft Office formats are the norm in your industry, you need to support Microsoft Office for inter-operability. It's a practical solution, not a principled one. Sometimes people just need to get shit done.
I wonder how much cheaper it is for the city to send money to Redmond for licenses than it is to hire a German to fix the file format problem.
i suspect the city doesn't want to be in the business of software development.
that, and it's an unbounded problem. they could hire someone and still not have an adequate solution a year later. or they could hire 5 people. who knows? common sense says that if it was an easy problem to solve, the OO developers would have fixed it straight away since interoperability is the single biggest complaint about FOSS office software.
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.
If interoperability was a feature that customers were willing to pay more for than the lost value of the worldwide Office monopoly plus the additional moral value of getting to kick the user down, M$ might possibly consider have put more effort into it. Truth is, Excel's not done till OpenOffice don't run..
There FTFY.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
The first thing that was wrong with the Sun / Oracle project was that they required copyright assignment. This meant that they could choose to license the code however they wish
* Reassign the license of the code from LGPL to Apache 2.0
* Sell the code as a proprietary product (StarOffice) without providing source
* Reassign the license of the code to commercial only
etc.
The downside to this is that it discourages contribution. Firstly, people willing to contribute to an LGPL project may be a little lairy of their code being rolled into a commercial product. Secondly, it's a hassle - you have to sign a contract. If your employee lays claim to your output, you have to ask their permission. There's been no sign so far that the Apache foundation have chosen to change this policy. LibreOffice lets you retain your copyright - the happy side effect of which is that the project can now never be "taken closed" like OpenOffice could still be.
Ironically, because of the Apache 2.0 license they have chosen for the code, LibreOffice can roll any good patches in OpenOffice into their project, because Apache 2.0 permits you to add the extra restrictions of LGPL (those permissive licenses, eh?). OpenOffice can't do the reverse. Even if all the core developers hadn't jumped ship (they have), LibreOffice can continue to stay ahead of OpenOffice because of this.
Calling potential open source users stupid is not going to persaude them to use FOSS software.
Yes, it does if it's their bosses who make decisions. What in this case is true.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I see the same phenomenon when my wife is writing her academic papers - she uses Word, and spends ages fucking about with formatting instead of writing content, like all the formatting has to be perfect straight off, completely destroys productivity.
I keep meaning to learn LaTeX, but I don't do enough writing to justify it at the moment.
OpenOffice was set up by Oracle precisely to knife the OpenOffice devs (who had almost all moved to LibreOffice) in the back. Anyone who works with them is a scumbag. That includes the Apache foundation who should be ashamed for being used like this. That's not the best basis for an open source community and definitely doesn't suggest that the OOO people will be honourable in future. Right now the LibreOffice people look to be the best technically, but even if they weren't, I'd rather have someone I feel I can trust than someone who might have the technical edge but is a psycho.
Look at how Linus refused to integrate patches from ESR (for a new config mechanism) and Reiser (for newer filesystem versions after he failed to support the older ones) because they weren't community players. Notice how this turns out to have been the right decision.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Yeah... it's also had lots of patches since then. Would they not install updates for that too?
I get seriously pissed off with LibreOffice, (and with Linux for that matter).
So you're using these products not because they make you more productive but because of philosophical beliefs? Fine and dandy if you have the luxury of the time/expense to be able to do that. It doesn't work that way in business.
The only way for the Freiburgs of the world to throw off the yoke of MS oppression...
Plays well to the masses here on /., of course, but this kind of statement does come across as a little extreme to people who don't automatically see big corporations as evil and instead work on dollars and efficiency. (I know, you can come up with all kinds of examples as to why MS is more expensive. You should use those, rather than this inflammatory language.)
And no level of government has any business conducting OUR affairs using propietary data formats that can be easily held hostage.
Oh come on. Do you really think Microsoft is going to blackmail world governments, or leave them without any recourse? Not to mention the fact that there are entire cottage industries that have grown up around the concept of third party interaction with these data formats.
If you want to be taken seriously, you need to act seriously. Don't throw around stupid accusations. (At the very least, you automatically start scaring the lawyers who will see any mention of bribery as libel. Got some evidence? That'd be different.) Don't throw around shrill political angst. And don't tell governments that they positively must use a product, and in the very next breath rail about how terrible it is. That weakens your argument quite a lot.
Then it will be made not a standard. It was done with their HTML, it will be eventually done with everything else they produce.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
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.
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 ----
They don't want control and autonomy. They want their computers to be easy and convenient to use, and they will follow the path of least resistance to that end. They are computer users with a specific job to do, and that seems to be the thing that FOSS developers in general are forgetting. It's a little like expecting airline passengers to make sure all the airworthiness directives on the airplane they are flying in are complied with.
Maybe silent updates would have mitigated this problem.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
Everyone I have shown LibreOffice hates it within a few seconds because it doesn't look exactly like Office.
That's funny, that's exactly what I used to say about Office 2007. It's also worth noting that they switched to OO in 2007. The change averse users that you are concerned about would have been averse to the ribbon at that point in time. Moving to OpenOffice would have been an easier transition from a UI standpoint.
But that's beside the point. If you actually RTFA, the complaints have nothing to do with the UI. It's the rendering inconsistencies between the two platforms that's the problem. And Microsoft is 100% responsible for that problem.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Replying to this post instead of the AC below so you get the email. Here is a presentation where the UX guy goes through the design process of the ribbon. It's been a few years but I remember it being really informative.
-1 overrated isn't the same thing as "I disagree".
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 doesn't work that way in business.
That statement demonstrates the same sort of bone-headed mindset that's driven companies into the vendor lock-down the city of Freiburg was trying to escape from.
Do you really think Microsoft is going to blackmail world governments
Influence is delivered in many different shapes and sizes. Ironically, governments are machines that are almost universally fueled by influence. To think otherwise seems foolish.
Oh please! Now how many times has it been said here "The first 90% is easy, its that last 10% that is hard"? Anyone who has worked in an office for any length of time knows there are about a dozen features that the employees use...problem is its a DIFFERENT dozen for each bunch of employees. some might be Excel jocks and thus need the VBA macros, some might be hooked on Access and thus need the DB support (and I'm sorry but Base is a crashy POS, it really needs some of the love that Writer has gotten) and I'm sure a lot of them are using headers and footers and tracking changes...which lets face it LO/OO just don't do that very well.
Its all about using the right tool for the job, and like it or not for many businesses the right tool is MS Office. Does that mean LO is bad? Nope, in fact its part of my standard install on every HOME unit, because home users aren't using the funky features and thus only need the basics, which LO is great at.
And let us not forget the Open Document Foundation has only had control...what?.. a couple of years now? Its gonna take a LOT of work to fix what Sun screwed up by keeping strict control. Hell anybody that thinks LO is ready i invite you to go download and inspect the code...its a mess, those guys have got their work cut out for them.
So how about we give the Germans some slack, maybe LO/OO just isn't ready for their use case at this moment. I have no doubt in 4 or 5 years, once they have had a chance to make the code modular and clean up the cruft, that LO will be a dozen times better and may even have all the features that the SMBs want. But until then you can't expect someone to go with a tool that doesn't work because its "free". To use a /. car analogy that would be like you going in to buy a jack to fix a flat and someone goes "You don't need that, here is a free screwdriver!"...uhh..not really helping change the tire there, free or no.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Because it abandons the idiotic digging through 3 levels of dropdowns into a modal dialogue which obscures the formatting I'm trying to alter, and requires me to jump into another modal dialogue because the thing I want to do has multiple settings. I hated the ribbon when it first came out, I nerd raged about it, then I used Office 2007 for 3 months to learn what my users were going through, and now I look at that menu paradigm and I shake my head at how poorly designed it is.
The ribbon also allows features that I had no idea existed, but have complained about not existing, to be brought forward without ruining the UX. With the ribbon, I can hover over a confusing icon and get a valuable tooltip rather than having to either open the help menu or click the thing and hunt around the new modal dialogue to determine if it's the right menu item I clicked on. It's also customizable in a way that the old menu system is not. If you don't want to have it taking up valuable real estate, collapse it and you'll
The old menu system makes sense, but keeping it is skeuomorphic and bad UI design. When computers were first designed and primarily navigated by keyboards the menu system made sense. There are much better ways to do things that require less clicking, less hunting, and less frustration caused by "Was that edit>file>format>paragraph>spacing, or page>printing>setup>paragraph>spacing?" Now it's "Page Layout tab> spacing" for both. The old way of doing things was annoying before there was an alternative, it's just stupid pig-headed stubbornness of the old guard to talk about how great it is.
Keep on knockin'
https://robbiecrash.me
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.
Can the tainted code be re-written, or is the project too tied to it now?
Table-ized A.I.
THE MENU SYSTEM IS ABSOLUTELY USELESS.
Whenever I'm forced to use a version of office with the menu system, I end up spending half my time trying to figure out which menu a particular function is hidden in. Searching the ribbon is orders of magnitude easier. This tab? no, next, next, Bingo. With the menu. Is it this, wait, open up a submenu, scan decipher one word descriptions many of which may have to do with what I'm doing, nope. Open next menu, scan, dig into deeper level, select item scan tabs of new dialogue box, nope, exit, forget which menu item I just looked at. Open next menu, scan, dive deeper, dig deeper, dig deeper, select item wrong item. Wait is that it?
I just think its right up there with microsoft bob and Clippy.
Keep on knockin'
https://robbiecrash.me
The ribbon is not an upgrade. at best it should have been an optional menu enhancement. It together with new Excel 2007 and 10 bugs killed my productivity to no good affect, and I am still constantly hitting the wrong ribbon tab and wasting my screen real estate. And I have barely used OO, so I am not one of those OO lovers.
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.
It looks better and uses space more efficiently. Why is it not better?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Whether or not The Ribbon is a Good Thing is immaterial at this point. The point is that Microsoft put it there and if you want to beat Microsoft in the word processor game, you have to either have The Ribbon, the Not-Quite-A-Lawsuit-Ribbon-Replacement, or something that's just plain better (on both a usability and a marketing level). For individuals, who cares? It matters when you're trying to pass off your Microsoft-Word-Alternative.
The Ribbon is not the worst thing ever invented. I reserve that for everything that got tacked onto Word after v5.1 for the Mac, except maybe multi-column editing. Frankly, The Ribbon is only the smallest part of that mess now.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
MS does is when they do their idiotic "version-specific upgrade" thing, and when they do that, I can always just wait for the next iteration of Windows that doesn't suck.
Doesn't seem to work with Office. Office 2007 had the ribbon interface, Office 2010 still had it. Office 2012 has BOTH the ribbon and "the design language formerly known as metro". Still waiting for the iteration that "doesn't suck".
Absolutely true! - I only miss the mod points.
I have tried to use Word for academic papers (or whatnot else), but it just doesn't work (without a lot of hassle). I work in academia and people are sitting in front of Word for three days (we did, few month ago), to format some 12 pages properly. All my suggestions to use anything else were shot down. I was informed that Word was just 'the' standard, and the problems my/our mistake, and so forth. People are willing to spend unlimited amount of time for their beloved office software.
There is one thing that is lightyears better in Word, compared to Writer, to be totally honest: Bibliography. This point is lousy-lousy in Writer.
Though in a municipality, this is no demand and no argument.
Sorry, it's one thing to argue a point.. it's another thing all together to flat out tell blatant untruths.
People hate change and with Office can do what they were doing before and it looks all pretty and familiar. Everyone I have shown LibreOffice hates it within a few seconds because it doesn't look exactly like Office.
Yes it does, in fact the reason that most companies refuse to migrate to Office 2K7 or 2K10 is because the UI is so different it will cost a fortune in user training to switch. Is the ribbon nicer? Not really, it's different. Libre Office looks more like Office than the Ribbon versions of M$ products.
Another blatant lie, is that users can tell the difference. Most users can not tell a difference. The icons and layout of LO and MS office are so similar, that people can not tell the difference. The give away is trying to open files with macros or formatting differences. Formatting differences are completely M$s fault. M$ has broken every standard ever used, from TCP/IP to document processing. Often just to generate lock-in and FUD. Look up the history of the bullshit crippled networks, caused by MS breaking networking standards.
The browser analogy is perfect. I showed my ex Firefox in 2006. She didn't like it at all initially. IE 7 just came out and she was showing me she had tabs too
Sorry, but hahahahahahaha you are fucking stoopid. IE7 tabs did not work very well at all, and were never faster than Firefox or Chrome. In fact there was a known memory leak issue in IE7 "tabs" which would cause your computer to lock up when trying to use said tabs. Tabs were not stable until IE8 and still so bug ridden that even our MS Admins would not use tabs.
My point? Unless it does something new people will give into their fear of change and oppose it.
Wrong, dead wrong. New is not a requirement. Stable, cheap, well supported are required. Especially in office type applications this is true. The piss poor migration to "Ribbon" should be proof that "new" is not required. Often, it's extremely frowned upon.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I agree. It is a gross over-simplification to make this type of technical decisions solely based on ideology.
Organizations are going to either pay MS for a (debatable) better product, or to technicians to bridge the gap of other solutions. We have to see the whole cost of ownership and the gains and loses in productivity. The case can be made that governments and non-profits should use FOSS exclusively, but they also have to be accountable for the productivity of their employees given their specific work flow (something that business should be more aware). (potentially) wasting man hours forcing an organization to use a solution that might not fit its needs basely only on ideology is far worse than paying a commercial company for proprietary SW.
I like FOSS SW, and try and use it and support it when I can (which isn't as often and as I'd like). However, I'm tired of false equivalences that get made when two products are considered equivalent because they do the same thing w/o any regard to how well they do it. We as technical users tend to just install something and move on: we're not always around to see how our users have to deal with the technical decisions we made for them.
Don't get me wrong. MS often leaves a lot to be desired, and you have to sometimes wonder what they were thinking (and sometimes you have to take it with a grain of salt and give it a try, and you might be pleasantly surprised) and it can take them a long time to react and make things right. But they seem to be trying, and hitting the mark more often than not (specially with Office).
On a tangent. IMO, the ribbon on Office 2007 was awful, and it took a lot to get used to it, and it was understandable to refrain from upgrading to it (and it was a good opportunity for competitors to close the gap and gain market share). However, Office 2010 is far more polished and the ribbon finally made sense (mostly the drop downs with common action items). I still go back to the documentation to find old and trusted menu shortcuts in old versions of Office, but I can see how Office 2010 makes life easier for most users, and specially for newbies.
You're reading comprehension could use a little work. They are currently using OO and are willing to endure learning a new interface (MS Office) because of the short-comings of OO.
That's not what I fail to understand at all. Your statement is entirely true, and only bolsters my assertion that Microsoft's vendor lock in is extremely powerful.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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
More likely, the Microsoft-indoctrinated employees don't want to learn a new interface, and have spent the last few years whining about it. This happened to even the M$ lock-ins when Office transitioned to the "ribbon" -- I was having to cover for desktop support during that time, and fielded at least twenty calls a day from people who wanted to roll back to the previous version.
Never underestimate the power of concentrated whine.
The sad part is that in the case of the Ribbon (from hell), it killed your productivity by destroying all the built-up muscle-memory and use of keyboard shortcuts. Without understanding the "new layout" you had to hunt and peck. Maybe Microsoft focus-group-tested the Ribbon interface, but did they actually pick people who used the current product?
Microsoft research notwithstanding, I have no idea how they could foist such an abomination on their users - I still to this day do not know anyone who prefers the Ribbon over the previous interface -- however, there are folks who don't know the old interface (ie, they're new in the workforce) and accept the shitty Ribbon and live with it less unhappily.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
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?
The only way for the Freiburgs of the world to throw off the yoke of MS oppression is to support FOSS. And no level of government has any business conducting OUR affairs using propietary data formats that can be easily held hostage.
No, the only way for the Freiburgs of the world to throw off the yoke of MS oppression would be for the rest of the world to, too, or for FOSS solutions to do an excellent job importing and exporting Word documents. Beyond basic text, it pretty much sucks. That means the users are going to be frustrated and waste time anytime their dealing with documents created by somebody outside of the city government, which is most cases in municipal government happens a lot more than you'd think.
Face it, the users aren't going to know or care if their frustrations are because of file format issues and don't care if the blame falls on OpenOffice or MS. All they know is that when the use OpenOffice, it's a bigger pain in the ass than when they use MS Office. Their not developers, they're not IT experts, and they shouldn't have to be. Until a FOSS solution can actually import Word docs perfectly, it's just not going to be an adequate replacement for organizations like this. Licensing might cost money, but so does personnel time.
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.
Hmmm...a tabbed word processor / spreadsheet application. I like it!
I think you're on to something there...I know once I found a tabbed PDF viewer, I dropped Adobe Reader like a (not so) hot potato...
Another feature for open source devs to lure userbase: integrated file comparison tools, so one can quickly review only the differences between two (or three) revisions of the same file (maybe with some buffering 'context' content shown, like in Google search results). I know they *try* to do this with the 'Track Changes' feature, but that is limited and often disabled when you need it most. Bonus points if it allowed the user to select 'Option A' , 'Option B' or 'Option C' for each area that was different and merge them to create a new, combined file with the best of everything, leaving identical areas unchanged. I know there are third party tools that will do this, but an integrated solution would be fine indeed...
And IMHO, feel free to stick the ribbon somewhere painful and unhygenic. I sincerely dread the day when my workplace migrates to the new MSOffice platform: we're still on 2003, and AFAIK it's for that very reason. I have had a reluctant taste of what teh ribbon can offer in AutoCAD, and it is still maddeningly useless to me after over a year of occasional-to-frequent use. If they decide to make the ribbon optional in Office, more power to them. Forcing it? Forget it. I'll be using LibreOffice instead and only opening Word briefly to test compatibility before sending it out. I have serious, grown-up things to do, and fighting with the UI ain't one of them.
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
yes... they type with special "government fonts" and use "government layouts" which are impossible for us plebs to comprehend, but there is a special department in Microsoft that has been specifically trained to understand the special needs of beureaucratic government processes (especially "word processes"), and they are here to save the poor German council from itself.
Heil Microsoft!
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?
What they DID say in the article is that Freiburg is using OOo 3.2.1, which is two-and-a-half years old.
The average Office suite cycle is more than 2.5 years. Youre saying that on top of their general aggravation with OOo, they need to do network-wide Office suite upgrades every year or so?
Get real.
So you're using these products not because they make you more productive but because of philosophical beliefs
Well, that seems to be the in-vogue thing here; certainly its what slashdotters seem to expect of the German city gov't in question.
The only time I've ever felt oppressed by things MS does
most people feel oppressed when they have to hand over an exorbitant amount of money when they feel they have no choice, and for most people that perceived lack of choice stems from microsoft's business tactics over the past 20-odd years (OEM bribery and extortion, monopolization, spreading FUD about FOSS, baseless lawsuits, rediculous software patents, etc).
its not that there is any demand that the german city council use FOSS. its that the actual users likely have absolutely no say and that the whole process it likely being corrupted by Microsoft, because that's what it does.
People don't not use OpenOffice because it sucks (it isn't "objectively inferior", which is itself an oxymoron, and it does plenty of things better than MS Office). Ribbons suck, which Means Microsoft Office 2007+ sucks, and more people would use and appreciate OpenOffice if they had a chance to use it. If anything, the german city council staff are being demanded that they switch to Microsoft products because of inflences they have no control over, but of course you wouldn't have anything against that sort of oppression would you.
If you are on linux, write your paper in markdown and use pandoc to convert it to pdf. If you are submitting to IEEE format, use the latex example in ieee as the template for pandoc, replace the body with $body$, use ieee csl as the style sheet and it would work fine.
More likely, the Microsoft-indoctrinated employees don't want to learn a new interface, and have spent the last few years whining about it.
Lets be clear here, the OOo interface sucks compared to MS Office, even if you ignore the lacking functionality.
Its a little unreal that people are unable to accept that some people find OOo lacking, and instead insist that "they must be doing it wrong". No, theyre not, and statements like this are why so many FOSS projects are hobbled by awful interfaces. Admit theres a problem, and fix it, dont tell the customer that theyre too stupid to use your wonderful product.
That. Probably that.
They certainly have a huge imposed bureocracy over everything, and can't write a system inhouse in less than half a year (and when it comes, it is already wrong). People there probably compensate that by writting the needed code in the form of spreadsheets.
Rethinking email
That is only a good thing.
Then I would rather use Office 2003, which is faster to load, faster to work in, less arcane, and more feature rich.
Pencils are cheaper than Office. Doesnt mean theyre a suitable replacement.
You know, we should create some kind of consortium, so that we'd all contribute with a bit of money and it could make those things that are good for everybody, but nobody want's to pay alone.
Rethinking email
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.
They have. Libre Office has old style menus, that are plain better.
Or do you have a link for that "why the ribbon is A Good Thing" article the GP asked about?
Rethinking email
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.
It doesn't work that way in business.
That statement demonstrates the same sort of bone-headed mindset that's driven companies into the vendor lock-down the city of Freiburg was trying to escape from.
Why?
If something doesn't work effectively, why do you want your government using it? Interestingly enough, you make almost the same point as I'm making in this post.
This leads me to believe that we need to start making basic economics part of the educational system's core curriculum and not just an elective.
You have a point.
I get seriously pissed off with LibreOffice, (and with Linux for that matter).
So you're using these products not because they make you more productive but because of philosophical beliefs? Fine and dandy if you have the luxury of the time/expense to be able to do that. It doesn't work that way in business.
Sounds to me as though you're advocating "short term gain for long term pain".
The only way for the Freiburgs of the world to throw off the yoke of MS oppression...
Plays well to the masses here on /., of course, but this kind of statement does come across as a little extreme to people who don't automatically see big corporations as evil and instead work on dollars and efficiency.
Your criticism rests on a faulty assumption. The possibility that what I said "does come across as a little extreme to people who don't automatically see big corporations as evil" has nothing whatsoever to do with evaluating its validity. As for seeing "big corporations as evil", I believe that power corrupts, that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and that big corporations have far too much power and far too little accountability. I also believe that people who argue "the market will eventually deal with corporate abuses" either are naive, or are shills. Note that these are *beliefs*, not *statements of fact*.
And no level of government has any business conducting OUR affairs using propietary data formats that can be easily held hostage.
Oh come on. Do you really think Microsoft is going to blackmail world governments, or leave them without any recourse?
I agree, that's not likely to happen in this specific case. But if you were to ask me "Do you really think that some large corporations can and will use proprietary knowledge and standards to screw over governments and their citizens in the name of power and profit?", my answer would be "You betcha!"
Not to mention the fact that there are entire cottage industries that have grown up around the concept of third party interaction with these data formats.
Just what we need - more "industries" whose only claim to usefulness is decoding and circumventing opaque proprietary formats, so the users get to pay twice.
If you want to be taken seriously, you need to act seriously. Don't throw around stupid accusations.
In reviewing my initial comment I see that I may have "thrown around" suspicions and opinions, but I don't see that I uttered any "accusations".
And don't tell governments that they positively must use a product, and in the very next breath rail about how terrible it is. That weakens your argument quite a lot.
Then allow me to repharase: "Governments, you must not use software that holds data in proprietary, non-open formats."
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
The download links with multiple formats and sizes are right below the video. There is also a menu to pick the streaming format on the bottom right of the video. I enjoyed your silly rant though.
-1 overrated isn't the same thing as "I disagree".
You can use addintools Classic Menu for Office. It isn't too expensive (costing $22 to $35, depending on the edition), and last I checked, it can be deployed by GPO using an MSI. After paying $130 to $500 or more for Office, it might feel like adding insult to injury (you'd expect MS to provide an optional menu alternative, at least with Office 2007). Yet, it is an affordable alternative to increase your productivity if you can't stand the ribbon (or maybe a way to selectively give users on your organization that aren't comfortable with the ribbon a way to transition).
Seriously, how does using MS Office not result in performance impairment frustration and aggravation. Most of my students issues stem directly from use of MS Office. That's all they know, but it's still their main source of aggravation and frustration. From very poor iteration procedures (seriously, you can't force recalculation of cells past a certain point once Excel has decided that it's just done, however many times you try to recalculate), to handling in Word of figures, arbitrary variables (for template automation) to little things like an actually usable mail-merge, or compatibility with older .doc formats MS Office just sucks. The article is disengenuous at best. MS Office has nothing (useful) that OpenOffice doesn't have, and lots of things that it's missing.
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
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.
That's the case in any organization, private or government, of a decent size. They will create huge monstrosities of Excel spreadsheets that end up running the business for them.
Or like Google Chrome 5 or Firefox 3.6.
The Unity shell hadn't been introduced to Ubuntu at that point, either. GNOME 3 was still about a year away.
The most recent version of Android at the time was 2.2.
Two-and-a-half years is a pretty significant amount of time in terms of software development.
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!
yes anonymous moron, if you employ software developers to write software, you are in the business of developing software. you are paying money to have someone write software for you.
are you able to differentiate that, from someone who purchases software and uses it?
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..
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When you license in volume, one copy of MS Office will be under $100. A simple secretary with $40K/yr salary costs the company about $38/hr (52 work weeks, 100% overhead, as it is typical.) This means that the tool costs only about two hours of her time. This is totally irrelevant when people are employed for years - not even counting loss of time on issues with OpenOffice and on training. Battling MS Office on cost is a losing proposition; just a chair for that secretary probably costs more; and her Polycom phone; and her computer. MS Office is on the level of staples and white-out.
I tried to use OpenOffice to run a business, and I gave up. I simply couldn't afford the free software - it ate my time hour after hour after hour, and I never was sure if what I see is what my customers see. I'm using MS Office 2010 now. It just works.
3 years old? HAR! After recently getting sick of using office 97! (For those who cant do maths, that 15 years.. every thing but Access still works) I though I would give the latest OO a run, the issues with random crashes, copy past not working more often then it would, spell checker stooping altogether for no reason and the chosen macro langue being about as intuitive to someone coming from Office as Sand script is to a Native modern English speaker.. I nearly went back to Office 97...
Oh another one I just remembered, Open Office likes to hide its popups under everything, so you don't see them and wonder why your chosen document is not opening. Oh well on the bright side, I might just update from my ANCIENT out of date 3.3.0 to 3.4.1 and see..
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Hi!
I really like the ribbon, it's a fantastic, (largely) intuitive interface. When I have to use Office 2003 on our Citrix farm, it makes me want to scream in frustration and how badly laid out it all is.
But then I started using it after a number of years away from Office, so didn't have a built-up attachment to the old way of doing things.
FGD 135
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.
And?
10 years ago I was very much the functioning adult I am today. I got a bit better at living.
10 years ago my brother couldn't wipe his own ass. He got a lot better at living.
I fail to see how being an older project makes it a better one. Take OOo when it's as old as Office was in 2007 and see if it has some staying power.
Most ppl feel oppressed?? You've go to be kidding, most ppl don't even know their is a choice outside of Windows and Apple, looking over the prices most ppl feel relieved that there is a cheaper option than Apple!
This is part of the problem, FOSS has for too long dealt with geeks who know what they are doing, who really do live in a different world to the rest of computer users.
What do stranded computer users want? Two things..
One, It works.. Start the installer, get annoyed about having to enter anything.. at end of installation the program should work. No question or options should pop up that would confuse a 4 year old or a 90 year old.
Two, It continues to work. Auto updates, does not have a lot of bugs that are day to day issues, is not more complex than the last one they where using.
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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 :-)
Oh yeah? Well I'm using WordStar and VisiCalc! So there!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
"Sorry, but hahahahahahaha you are fucking stoopid"
Yet, smart enough to know it is spelled stupid.
http://saveie6.com/
Part of the article dealt with employees complaining about it.
They felt it was inferior. I used my silly sig below because their were actual employees who had state of the art smart phones and used Firefox at home, but whinned like a baby and threatened to fire me if I dare upgraded their apps from IE 6 to a modern version because it was not percisely the same. Pffft.
These same users bitch about the ribbon YES. But if it is Microsoft they feel more comfortable (doesn't mean they fully agree) with the upgrade. LibreOffice after using the ribbon for a year will freak them out further as menu's are something they no longer do everyday and therefore a negative. If you have Office2k3 they will then complain about its quirkiness and the fact the menus are not identical enough to find everything.
It is a losing battle and every IT's nightmare. If you must upgrade using MS is a must! Want people to be less hostile? Make it a better mouse trap? Put things in that make it faster and do things with sleeknes and elegance that MS office does not. Otherwise why change what works?
http://saveie6.com/
That statement demonstrates the same sort of bone-headed mindset that's driven companies into the vendor lock-down the city of Freiburg was trying to escape from.
And your statements indicate the kind of tin-foil hat wearing, high horse riding hyperbole that is the primary reason why people outside the community don't take FOSS particularly seriously.
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.
Incidentally, OpenOffice was originally developed in Germany. It was called Staroffice at the time, before Sun bought it and GPLed it just to bother Microsoft.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I present People's Exhibit A showing why everyone thinks open-source zealots are completely nanners.
Sure you do. Only Microsoft shills use the term "open source zealot".
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I use the Mendeley plugin for citations and reference list in Writer. It works a charm, I can generally just point it at my folder of PDF papers and it automatically imports them, looks up their details on Google Scholar, and adds them to my references database. When I want to insert an in-text reference I just click on the button, a popup asks me to type keywords, and a list of relevant papers appears. Click on the relevant one, voila! Usually some of the details of the papers might need some fixing, but it is much less effort than doing the entire thing by hand!
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
If you haven't used it in a few years... why are you even pretending to be unbiased? There have been huge improvements in document handling and rendering in the last few years. Give LibreOffice another try.
As to the ribbon, I can do with keyboard shortcuts what you can do with your precious ribbon in less than half the time. Insert page break? Alt-I-B-Enter. I did that in the amount of time it took your hand to find the mouse. Ribbon works for people who maybe use a word processor once every two weeks - any more than that and learning a few keyboard shortcuts in the old system will save you more time than ribbon ever would. Not only that, ribbon takes up precious screen space even when I don't need menu items - hence the concept of collapsible menus, they were invented for a reason!!
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
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."
Good to know that is the only part of the argument he made that you don't agree with.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
why are you using anything but Linux then?
Linux does all the things you mention and more.... oh hang on you're a M$ fanboi so you're stuck using Windows.
don't let me interrupt your dreaming then...
If you've hit the limit of Excel's calculation capabilities, and you're not using out of date hardware, then perhaps your app would be better suited to something besides a spreadsheet application? Excel spreadsheets run many, many companies, and, while I've heard this complaint before, it comes up very infrequently.
And, mail merge has always been a bit of a pain, but at most of the shops I've been to in the last decade, the office assistants are in charge of doing that, and it works fine for them.
Oh, and as far as Office having nothing useful. I recently pulled in a dataset from a government website that had about 6 related tables. 5 were lookup tables with between 10 and 1000 rows, and the last was a fact table that had ~16 million rows. I brought it into Excel, and created pivot tables and charts based on the data. Performance was incredibly fast. Can OpenOffice do that?
Top features of LO that make it better than MS Word (MSW 4 for Mac which is maybe not a fair comparison) for me:
- Autocorrect (fingers don't hurt as much)
- Draw (awesome. The other day I opened a PDF, made a text layer to annotate it, print as a new PDF works great! But everyone on the net thinks there is no way on earth to annotate PDFs in LibreOffice! Sheesh.)
- Free
- Often updated
I have LibreOffice and Microsoft Word 2004 both installed. MS is a dog on the Mac but I haven't needed to upgrade.
I use LO because of the autocorrect feature which saves me a lot of keystrokes by figuring out the word I am going to type.
But I cannot trust it on formatting. If I make an outline and then open in MS it will have wrong numbering.
The way things go wrong is easy to figure out, all you need is a compatibility mode that makes it go wrong the same way as MS.
I switched from OOo to MS several years ago because contracts could not be shared with a client. It has caused me trouble.
So now I use MS Word for all documents with layout, but type long texts and my stuff in MS.
That said many things are slightly broken or don't work quite right for me (anybody wonder what is happening with the empty pulldown on the Find toolbar?) I regularly find bug-like things and report them to the bug tracker.
Yesterday I discovered that Draw export to jpeg does not export high quality! Hmmm I wonder why that is. Need to write it up.
Most geeks here never used Visicalc. I find it amusing that it still ran on WinXP - I tried it. I don't know about newer versions of Windows. Visicalc was amazingly simple and clunky. I find it hard to believe that I actually used it on an Apple II and thought that it was great.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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?
He is a troll. Why bother?
He is a senior engineer according to his posts and thinks he knows what is best. I supported users before and consulted with migrations from Office 2k3 to Office2k10 and XP to WIndows 7.
I stand by my claim people need a reason to change and will fight you as the bad guy getting in the way of them doing their job to all so supperior MS Office. It is the same crowd who sees leaving 11 year old XP behind for the sake of change and wasting money is just that. LibreOffice needs to be better as these users love being locked into a standard everyone else uses. If it is a clone that is not quite as right and the few who are now used to ribbons and not menu's see it they will freak out and panic fearing they wont be able to do their job.
My argument with my ex showing me IE 7 with a smile is true too. I made her use Firefox and it took a good week before she stopped clicking the blue E even though FF is supperior. We may hate MS with a passion on this website but we look like abunch of crazy homeless guys ranting on in a strange dellusion to these folks. Make a better product and be different. THis is how Firefox the most successful opensource product won!
http://saveie6.com/
Excel will connect to MS SQL Server, Cognos and lots of other products for data and then let you do some transformations on the data on the client
does OO do that?
Yes it does.
Is it really that hard doing a Google search before spewing nonsense?
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.
(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 still to this day do not know anyone who prefers the Ribbon over the previous interface -- however, there are folks who don't know the old interface (ie, they're new in the workforce) and accept the shitty Ribbon and live with it less unhappily.
My experience is the opposite. A lot of people moan and groan about change, but most people get on with it and once over the hump can't work out how they ever lived without it. I've just come through a recent Office 2010 migration and the overwhelming feedback from most users was positive. We did get the odd moan exactly what your post sounds like, but those came from the people who always moan about everything. The air con is too cold, oh now it's too hot, there's too much noise, the printer is too far form my desk...
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
I agree. It is a gross over-simplification to make this type of technical decisions solely based on ideology.
What do you think "ideology" means? Your statement is like saying "one should not make decisions based on one's values".
How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.
*Solely* based on ideology, remember. The idea is to bring in a little bit of real world experience to your decision making too. You shouldn't just write Microsoft with a dollar sign and decide that anything is going to work better and you equally shouldn't do the opposite of that.
Yeah, the upper limits for Excel are silly numbers (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/excel-specifications-and-limits-HP010342495.aspx?CTT=5&origin=HP005199291) If you're hitting them, power to you. That's very impressive.
Thus speaks someone who has clearly never used Latex.
In Latex, you focus on writing the text, with minimal tags for things like chapter and sections headings. You typically do very no to very little explicit formatting. The latex system does the typesetting for you, producing professional output in whatever styles you have defined.
In fact, this was an aspect of it I actually found occasionally frustrating. It would move diagrams and figures to different pages to produce output it thought would be best. Sometimes I really wanted a diagram on the same page as the text which talked about it - but you often don't get that kind of control in Latex. It does the work for you, and generally produces very good results.
> Organizations are going to either pay MS for a (debatable) better product, or to technicians to bridge the gap of other solutions.
As somene who's dealt with broad scale deployments of Office, especially the email and calendar suites, that "or" is misplaced. The word should be "and". The expertise and support are necessary for either tool suite, the difficulties are in the amount of support. MS Office, for example, has a ludicrous number of constant and disruptive updates for documents that are fragile and difficult to source control, prone to lengthy arguments about which font to use for which paragraph. And the license management itself is very awkward.
LibreOffice (the successful fork of OpenOffice) is more portable, actually uses and follows document standards for permanent access to older documents. And the multi-platform compatibility with older hardware and other operating systems are huge reductions in "total cost of ownership", coupled with the time saved handling license registration and tracking for MS Office toolkits. The difficulty is in missing features: There is no direct freeware or open source competitor to Outlook, for example, with its tight integration with MS Exchange. (The freeware tools and most "Connector" tools that tie to MS Exchange are basically Outlook Web Access clients, with all the limitations that contains.)
If a company can use LibreOffice with hired or trained support, and a good mail and calendar integration tool such as corporate GMail, than at the IT level, there is no contest on "total cost of ownership". There remains a hidden cost: training. The staff need to relearn MS Office skills they learned during their education as paperwork handlers, and this is a very real cost.
> Oh come on. Do you really think Microsoft is going to blackmail world governments, or leave them without any recourse? Not to mention the fact that there are entire cottage industries that have grown up around the concept of third party interaction with these data formats.
Yes, of course they do. Forced updates and maintenance costs, with no guarantee of successful acces to the old documents, is the ongoing "danegeld" paid for MS Office format access. The cottage industries you mention are profoundly hampered by the deliberately hidden or deliberately mishandled API's used by Microsoft since the creation of their office suites. (Do look into the history of the so called "Open Office XML" standard, it's been fascinating.)
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.
...are completely nanners.
Could you put that in layman's terms?
In what way does that statement demonstrate a bone-headed mindset? It really doesn't work that way in business.
I work in a very competitive field. We have an enormous amount of support infrastructure designed so that we can work effectively, efficiently and quickly and ultimately bill less to the client. We do that because if our quote is more than our competitors then we don't get the work.
I like OpenOffice - as I've posted above I used it at home for many years and it's a very impressive project. I don't think it's any disrespect to the team, though, to say that Microsoft Office is better. And better very quickly translates into getting work done faster. There's not a lot of point taking an idealogical position and using OpenOffice if by doing so you sink your business.
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
"the yoke of MS oppression"
I present People's Exhibit A showing why everyone thinks open-source zealots are completely nanners.
This here is a case of an organization which wants to use open-source but finds it can't. There are a number of reasons for this, their own ineptitude and internal opposition for starters, failures in interoperability with other organizations too, but still they found they can't get rid of MS Office. It's perhaps far fledged to actually blame MS for this, it shows that it's also far fledged to accuse open-source adepts of zealotry or calling them crazy.
The only time I've ever felt oppressed by things MS does is when they do their idiotic "version-specific upgrade" thing, and when they do that, I can always just wait for the next iteration of Windows that doesn't suck. Office in particular is probably MS's best product, and definitely the best of its kind. Anytime I've ever tried to use something that is not Word or Excel, which is frequently because I am poor, I have felt nearly imprisoned by the poor interface, missing functionality, and lack of anyone else to ask when I can't figure something out.
The "version-specific upgrade" thing helps to establish vendor lock-in. And personally, I don't believe in the "the next version of Windows will be the best" mantra anymore, I've heard it too often. For many consumers and commercial users there's hardly a reason to upgrade their office suite for functionality improvements alone (and more often reason not to upgrade). In this case they even use MS Office 2000. The workforce here has apparently been trained to work with OO.o.
It's good that FOSS exists, because competition is important,
But here, it seems, it doesn't exist or isn't good (they do use a number of other 'open source' software packages). This is a case of non-competition.
libre projects lower the barrier-to-entry for aspiring devs, and computers are important enough that gratis options should be available. However, demanding that others use an objectively inferior product on the ideological basis of opposing the industry standard's producer for the cardinal sin of being and acting like a business is much more like what I'd call "oppression." People don't use OpenOffice because it sucks. Leave them alone.
The case doesn't show OO.o is "an objectively inferior product", it doesn't even show whether it's "good enough" or not. It shows the city of Freiburg needs to clear up their IT mess and feels, partly by outside pressure, compelled to standardize on MS Office. It shows that the tool is more important than the product, even when that product isn't 'proprietary'. Their decision will lead to Freiburg becoming another actor to force other organizations to use MS Office, meaning even less competition. Freiburg apparently didn't consider spending some of the license savings to improve the 'open-source' office product. The inhabitants of Freiburg don't have to "leave them alone" in this decision though and I hope they don't (without resorting to zealotry).
"I'm not much interested in interoperability. I want substitutability. I want to be able to throw your software out."
This is the problem with proprietary formats:
It's an unlevel playing field and it holds people hostage with vendor lock-in. Shoving competitors out in the cold by locking your own formats down so that nobody else can read them.
Vendor lock-in means reduced competition.
Reduced competition means lower quality.
it is in the consumer's long term interest that things are open and free, even if they avoid hassle in the short term by following the path of least resistance.
In other news, mice still like cheese even if it's used as mousetrap bait.
Not true. LibreOffice has some serious bugs when working with doc, docx, & odt that are extremely problematic and have not been fixed for months on end. Exhibit A is the "read-error" bug when files have images.
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52226
This renders a word processor basically unusable. The solutions are either disabling autosave or not using images. I've been using OpenOffice for over a decade & I am this close to going back to MS Office. It used to be good. Post-fork, it's a piece of junk, & the community refuses to acknowledge this. Sticking our heads in the sand will not help.
Like Office 2010?
I use office 2007, and even switch to 2003 from time to time.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Latex is just not there if you deviate from writing a paper, period.
The learning curve explodes if you actually want to tweak the format in any meaningful way. I've had a CS Phd who's been using latex for years try to change the headings in a document to a blue color and after more than half an hour the solution she found is to manually edit every heading to set the color. There goes the famous "separation of content and presentation". And come on, HALF AN HOUR, for a trivial task, by an expert user, for a trivial task! The only reason you use such a tool is to avoid a similar punishment trying to look your formulas look good on any alternative, and even then you avoid changing any presentation whatsoever as much as possible.
Now, most people, myself included, actually want to have better usability for moving images around, setting my styles, get WYSIWYG immediate feedback instead of compiling my documents, inline grammar and spelling help, etc, etc, etc. (latex alternatives are severely lacking). MS Office is, to me, just a great piece of software.
Incidentally, there is an easy way to use Word much like Latex, by creating a template with all the desired styles and then locking the styles to restrict any formatting changes (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/restrict-or-permit-formatting-changes-HA010090865.aspx). Most formatting problems have to do with people inserting extra newlines to move things down, inconsistently painting a style manually in many parts of a document, numbering lists and headers manually, etc, etc. If you open the styles side panel of the typical document you will find dozens upon dozens of redundant and inconsistent styles. I even found that in the "Word template" for submissions to a known conference, along with their latex template. I usually keep a few templates and use them in every new document, concentrating only in content. If I ever need to format something, I switch temporarily to presentation by unlocking, editing, locking, cleanly separating both aspects. Changes are applied instantly over all document consistently and I can even update the template with the changes I made.
In sum, almost any advantage of latex over word can be matched by word if used in the right way. The opposite is just far, far from true. I would really encourage people to look into this workflow, as many others that I have shown it love it instantly. I just wish that MS would make styles more prominent as a replacement for the typical buttons for bold, etc...
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 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.
You've missed the point I'm making. The point is that TeX is just a domain specific markup language. It's not a panacea for creating documents, and using it doesn't mean you won't fuck around with formatting for hours and hours if you don't like the defaults or keep going back to change things. Indeed, since TeX is a format markup language, using it gives (me at least) hammer and nail problems: it makes everything look like a format problem that I should be fixing with TeX.
I have used LaTeX before (specifically, combined with LyX 1.0 or 1.3, so yeah, like 8-10 years ago). I found that it did not help me reduce the amount of time formatting a document. Rather, it typically just caused me to spend more time thinking about how to get the system to format the document within the constraints of what my professor wanted (regardless of how unreasonable or stupid they were) rather than what the TeX defaults were. If I were knowledgeable enough to be able to sit down and completely define all the formats I wanted to use from now until the end of time once... it would be very fast and easy to use I think. Since I couldn't do that, it just felt like a tremendous amount of work to write a 5-10 page paper with the system when Word did nearly everything I wanted already. Additionally, the LyX installation I used didn't have working spell check or a thesaurus, or a way to easily create bibliography entries, while the Word installations I had access to had all of those (we had EndNote I believe, or something similar) and those are what I consider the program actually helping me to produce the content. That may be due to the LyX installations being broken or incomplete on the workstations I used or that I didn't know how to use them, but it nevertheless has completely tainted my exposure to the system. Looking at LyX 2.0.5 I see that those do exist now.
It's very likely that this attempt to use LaTeX is what caused me to simply correct my deficient workflows, and that that is what made me more effective at writing. I'll admit that. But honestly 9 times out of 10 if someone says "I'm having trouble using Word. I know, I'll use LaTeX!" then they're just in for a world of hurt. Word (or Writer) is not a bad program, and I'm willing to bet that often the problem is with the way the person is using Word and not with Word itself. Changing to a different program or different system won't fix that.
In the end, having to use Word has been much more useful as I've never had to use LaTeX at a job while I've never had a job where Word wasn't used. LaTeX is great for producing professional quality documents, but it's kind of crap for producing collaborative documents or ongoing system documentation that needs to be maintained and updated repeatedly. Stuff that's never printed even as a PDF because that would uselessly lock the content.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Well, it was well documented that MS offered Munich special conditions to not go with Open Office. And anyone who's been involved with corporate sales knows that "favors" are wide-spread. The council comes up with totally contrived reasons and says, basically, we have old versions of OO and MSO so it's obvious that we have to consolidate on a recent version of MSO. Huh? Why not consolidate on a recent version of OO? Or Libre Office?
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.
I have felt nearly imprisoned by the poor interface, missing functionality, and lack of anyone else to ask when I can't figure something out.
Wow this sounds like a shill thing to say. I don't know of anyone who feels "imprisoned" by an interface, and who can't figure out how to use Google or RTFM.
If you're going for drama, great, you win. If you're trying to be persuasive using facts, you failed miserably.
Anyone who has been using office software as long as I have probably finds the ribbon to be disastrous and wasteful. The OpenOffice interface is exactly what I used for many many years and I have no problems locating menu items or using it.
I have Office 2007 because I occasionally need to tell someone exactly what menu item to use, or provide a screenshot or documentation. I really do not use it the rest of the time. I use OpenOffice / LibreOffice and it works very well for my use cases.
You should probably read people's post history before calling others "Trolls". You will see that I have no issues with dialogue, yet you on the other hand lack that capacity. You repeat the same statements over and over, as if you can prove your point by redundancy. Try reading the materials posted in response to your statements. You have no counter to anything I stated except for complaining about my intentionally misspelled word.
I agree with your point that Firefox made a better product, hence is winning the browser wars without the dirty tricks MS still resorts to in order to gain share. I still disagree with you that IE7 was usable with Tabs. Even fully patched, you will run out of memory simply by holding a browser page and a tab open. That memory leak was not fully addressed until IE 9, but in 8 it is considerably better. I work with some very exceptionally talented Microsoft people, and they would never use tabs until IE8, and even then preferred Firefox for tabs until IE 9..
As a senior architect/engineer it is important to understand the full scope of making a change to an environment. It's over easily 250.00 per user to switch to Ribbon based office from other versions just in training. Add in productivity loss and in the first year you are looking at a minimum of 1,000.00 per user to switch. That is just the cost to users, not the cost to MS for licensing, recoding macros and custom features, updating PCs and Servers, inventory tools, etc...
To you, maybe it's not a big deal. To a Mom and Pop shop with 10 people that cost is not "that" high, and the environment is generally less likely to see the productivity losses. When you are looking at 10,000-150,000 employees, that price tag is rather staggering.
Now, compare that to what benefit there is to changing? "Font preview" is nice for a technical writer maybe, but to a secretary on a slow PC it's a pain in the ass. Outside of reorganizing the interface, there is little benefit to an upgrade. Take that same secretary and put her on a Linux box with LO or a PC with Office 2000 and they can't tell the difference. "Word" and "Writer" are nearly identical. "Excel" and "Calc" are nearly identical. I have done hundreds of experiments with exactly that, going back to Proof of Concepts for Sunray technology.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
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.