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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.
"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.
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.
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!
What is it in a decent wordprocessor like Word that users of wordprocessors find useful, and that OOo doesn't handle?
The #1 missing feature that Open/Libre office lacks compared to word is being word.
Different is not acceptable. It must be identical including all misfeatures and bugs.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Because they're stupid. They're using OpenOffice from 2007! Five years ago! Ditch your fancy Ubuntu 12.04 and run Debian Etch for a few weeks to understand the kind of frustration those dumb, dumb IT managers put their employees through.
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
Short answer: No.
Longer answer: OpenOffice (and LibreOffice) chokes on documents created in newer versions of Office (2010, possibly 2012). It can leave out parts of the document entirely. The elements are usually the geometry objects (line arrows, word balloons, etc). This little problem actually got a customer pretty pissed off at me because I referred to the document missing some key components that were actually there when viewed in MS Word.
For personal use, advanced users, or environments where you can strictly control document formats, OpenOffice can work. However, if you need to be able to read documents coming from uncontrolled sources, it still has a very long way to go to become viable replacement for Microsoft Office.
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.
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.
I'm using a 5 year old version of Office and not having problems.
Like Office 2010?
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.
They are running a local government. They do not need to listen to any private company. Make a policy which requires communication in ODF. block DOCX at the Firewall. Automatic security lockdown if the malware suite detects anyone attempting to lunch one. 90% of bullshit solved.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
I use both M$ Office and Libreoffice. For personal reasons and bias, whenever possible I use LO instead of M$O, for the following reasons:
1. To see whether LO is ready for daily use;
2. To determine what differences exist between both;
3. To test which features would recommend one suite over the other;
4. To test if documents can be created and use in a mixed environment and
5. To better understand the actions of a monopolist in trying to avoid competition.
Now for my opinions and conclusions:
1. LO is ready for day-to-day use wrt the things I do (text documents, spreadsheets, presentations _and_ drawings.
Most of my documents are read and created using LO.
2. Differences between LO and M$O do exist. In about 1% of documents I receive, I may need Excel for some weird feature; in most cases, the suites are equivalent. But compatibility is greater in text, ok in spreadsheets, usually good enough in presentations and LO is better than M$O wrt drawing (has anyone heard about the ancient M$ Draw?)
3.Now, the best "feature" of LO is being easier to use than M$O (because of all the problems the "ribbon" creates). Also, LO is more object-orientated: click on something to change its properties, which is easier than some hidden menus in M$O to reach some desired setting. M$O imports better html, though, both in Word and in Excel, but I suspect Firefox could help here. LO is a lot more versatile with free standard formats, so usually I use it first to open any file, including M$' proprietary ones.
4. After editing, as a last operation odf documents are saved as the equivalent M$ format. No one complained till now, but I have the extra care of opening them in M$ apps before sending. I assume in an LO-only workplace things will be simpler; this "M$O is the standard for external communication" reveals extreme lack of IT knowledge, since documents can be sent as pdf files to external parties. Nothing can be easier.
5. Regarding M$ actions, not much in that regard -- or the LO guys are really good with countermeasures. Actually, most of our problems arise from incompatibilities among versions of M$ software, thus I believe Freiburg won't have a happy life after some 3 to 5 years in the future when M$ decides their new Office won't be compatible with the previous one.
Specifically regarding your question, there's nothing special about Word. Other apps, F/oss or proprietary, do more or less the same with little variations -- one of the reasons being that word processing is widely understood after all these years and there's not much to add anymore. In fact, it annoys me to no end that some fellow coworkers still move the cursor one character a time (with the keyboard arrows), so I suspect even basic Android apps would be more than enough to replace Word.
People who want to buy M$O, I suppose, are doing the blame game (it's not my fault, it's M$'!) or believe in old golden days when life was better and maybe spending money could bring those days back again... well, for me it's the opposite: I remember when there was a lot of word processors and Word was not one of them -- and people worked quite well, thank you very much.
But then, I'm biased and pro-F/OSS...
Word has an understandable formatting model. That is, all the formatting for a paragraph is stored in the paragraph mark. You can select a paragraph mark, copy it, paste it somewhere else in the document, and you have a paragraph formatted identically to the original. In OO, your text may take on different formatting depending on whether you backspace away a paragraph mark vs deleting it. No kidding. Also, there's no way to reliably copy a paragraph from one place in a document to another and retain the formatting without adding sacrificial paragraphs before and sometimes after the text you are trying to copy. Seriously. OO's formatting model is just broken.
Until this basic problem is addressed, people will -- rightly -- prefer using word. I've been fighting oo's formatting for years, and frankly, I'm sick of it.
Every time there's a story that mentions OpenOffice, I check to see whether this bug has been fixed yet. It hasn't. The comments are probably TL;DR, but the idea is that if you attempt to join two paragraphs into one paragraph that would be longer than 65535 characters, it discards all text beyond that point. No warning, no way to undo, and worst of all, absolutely no interest from the developers in fixing it. The standard response? "You shouldn't make paragraphs that long". It's a word processor - it should handle text. Microsoft Office has no such issue.
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.
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.
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
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?
Enterprise solution - solvent used for dissolving excessive piles of cash in corporate vaults.
p>But then, I'm biased and pro-F/OSS...
And here I thought that your 's' key had broken and you were forced to use the dollar sign instead...
Oh yeah? Well I'm using WordStar and VisiCalc! So there!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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?