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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.
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.
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?
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?
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!
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?
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
No. No. A thousand times, no. Basing your actions on what you *wish* other people would do is a losing strategy. You have to base your actions on what you reasonably project that other people in fact *will* do.
Other people will use Microsoft Office, and most will continue doing so for the foreseeable future. Since they trade documents with each other all the time, they'll expect to do so successfully with you. Without the degradation that comes from import/export cycles. They expect to walk in with a power point on a CD, place the disc in your PC and display it on your projector. If you can't adequately support these things, you're the screwball who can't achieve a business norm.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
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.
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!
>if only Microsoft adhered to standards
What you fail to understand is, like it or not, altruistic or not, Microsoft *is* the standard.
Like Office 2010?
Because all the Devs moved to libreoffice.
Oracle poisoned the name. As we should have all expected.
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.
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.
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.
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();
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.
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!”
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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 is huge. The OpenOffice document format is fully documented, so it will always be possible to access those documents.
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.
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!
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
In powerpoint? Those should be dismissed without anyone looking.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Oh yeah? Well I'm using WordStar and VisiCalc! So there!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
Three German municipalities (Munich, Jena, Freiburg) and some Swiss authorities just put together €140,000 to fund improved OOXML support in openoffice/libreoffice.
Improved OOXML support for LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Wouldn't it make sense to wait for the results before dropping openoffice?
Telling me they were going to audit me under their Software Asset Management scheme.
I use the bare minimum amount of MS software where I work because it has built in redundancy. If you buy Microsoft Office 2010 chances are it won't open files created with the next version. Libre and Open Office don't seem to share that failing in Microsoft's product. That's why I use them - and I pretty much use them interchangeably because my peeps aren't particularly sophisticated users (nor am I).
So, having MS send me a letter basically accusing me of stealing because I don't use Outlook, Exchange, Office or whatever else they peddle, is pretty annoying. Why would I want to let myself get tangled up in that system?
Ironically, we're coming to end of life with our current accounting software (Sage Line 100) and are due an across the board refresh of the entire system. I was THIS close to buying into Outlook and Exchange and a limited deployment of MS Office because it integrates better (at all) with Sage Line 200 but that letter was a kick in the nuts. I am adamantly opposed to giving them money if that's how they treat customers - and I AM a customer. I've spent some proportion of my tech budget on their OS software, including the bare minimum server OS software to host our Sage installation. I must stress if I could go Linux I would but our accounting software, and in fact no accounting software that I can get local support for runs on anything but Microsoft OS's as clients and more importantly on the server side. There ARE web-based alternatives but they're clunky as hell, expensive and obviously vulnerable to downtime if t'internet goes down,
I'm not a tech guy, I'm an interested in tech guy. IT isn't my job, it's just one of the things I do here. Again, I don't have sophisticated users. Incredibly in a company with thirty people under the roof I am, at nearly fifty, the only geek. What can I say. We get our hands dirty, but Microsoft Office? Not THAT dirty.