Slashdot Mirror
Apache OpenOffice Reaches 100 Million Downloads. Now What?
We're thankfully long past the days when an emailed Word document was useless without a copy of Microsoft Word, and that's in large part thanks to the success of the OpenOffice family of word processors. "Family," because the OpenOffice name has been attached to several branches of a codebase that's gone through some serious evolution over the years, starting from its roots in closed-source StarOffice, acquired and open-sourced by Sun to become OpenOffice.org. The same software has led (via some hamfisted moves by Oracle after its acquisition of Sun) to the also-excellent LibreOffice. OpenOffice.org's direct descendant is Apache OpenOffice, and an anonymous reader writes with this excellent news from that project: "The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 170 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache OpenOffice has been downloaded 100 million times. Over 100 million downloads, over 750 extensions, over 2,800 templates. But what does the community at Apache need to do to get the next 100 million?" If you want to play along, you can get the latest version of OpenOffice from SourceForge (Slashdot's corporate cousin). I wonder how many government offices -- the U.S. Federal government has long been Microsoft's biggest customer -- couldn't get along just fine with an open source word processor, even considering all the proprietary-format documents they're stuck with for now.
Libre Office is much better, IMO.
I thought LibreOffice was the true descendant of OpenOffice.org?
...would be done to the U.S. economy by having the U.S. Federal Government migrate away from Microsoft to an open-source solution.
(And please, not a Microsoft shill or apologist here - I use OpenOffice at home and enjoy it and wish I could implement it at work. I don't like the economy of the United States hinging on continued government spending, either. But OTOH, you can't tell me that ditching Microsoft wouldn't have some pretty serious economic consequences and we're in the mess we're in.)
I thought everyone had moved to LibreOffice already.
We're thankfully long past the days when an emailed Word document was useless without a copy of Microsoft Word
My first thought upon reading this was, "Right, because Microsoft has all of those various free Office viewers".
I don't respond to AC's.
With so many people experiencing issues with Microsoft Office 2013 activation and random requests to re-activate which result in error codes, or issues where "A problem has occurred" with no log entries or error codes when you try to install the software, it's quite possible Microsoft has strongly encouraged people to seek alternatives.
Since experiencing so many reliability issues with Microsoft Office 2013, issues that did not exist with Microsoft Office 2010, I've become a vocal advocate for making the switch from Microsoft to either OpenOffice or LibreOffice.
I often encourage OpenOffice for older folks that are looking for a more reliable experience while I suggest LibreOffice to those who want a feature rich experience and don't mind the occasional glitch or updating the software as regularly as they release updates. I feel both are great projects.
Microsoft claims 1 billion MS Office users. No doubt some/many are pirated, but that gives a sense for the scale of the potential user base for OpenOffice. And from what I've seen, Apache OpenOffice gets around 1 million downloads per week, a steady rate that can certainly continue for quite a while. So even if Apache did nothing, we would get to another 100 million downloads in another two years.
The question is whether we want to glide or really take off?
To really advance among mainstream end-users, people like your mother, this will only happen as average people, not just the techies, learn about open source and are comfortable with it. This means better documentation, especially geared toward newbies.
To advance among corporate users OpenOffice needs better interop with Microsoft Office. Yes, I hate to say that as much as you probably hate to hear it, but it is the reality we (some of us at least) live with.
Finally, we should find a way to extend the OpenOffice brand to the web and tablet editing experience, since traditional desktop PC use is a diminishing proposition.
none of them matter if the document standard is closed.
programs: irrelevant. standard: relevant.
We're thankfully long past the days when an emailed Word document was useless without a copy of Microsoft Word
Sadly that isn't really true. My company has standardized on LibreOffice and we use it for most things. However I get Word and Excel files all the time that cannot be accurately read by OpenOffice or LibreOffice. Particularly .DOCX and .XLSX files. Many are just fine but the more complicated ones tend to have moderate to severe formatting corruption. Sometimes to the point of unreadability. Google Docs and other doc viewers frequently don't do any better of a job of it. I have to keep a seat of Microsoft office available for those documents that I can't read any other way even to this day.
I've tried over the yrs to download the latest ver of OpenOffice and to give it a try and I always end up moving back to MSFT Word within a few days/weeks.
It's not missing features per se, it's layout/UI awkwardness and smoothness.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
n/t
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Nice but when they redo the UI and do typesetting you can pry LaTeX from my cold dead hands.
get the damn thing to work properly. I seem to have the magic touch to get every obscure and unexpected behavior to happen.
Mostly random stuff.
I actually have been looking into that question and tracking it via surveys. Of those who tried OpenOffice, 78% continued to use it "sometimes" or "regularly":
See: http://www.robweir.com/blog/20...
Unless you are a business user you are unlikely to use any office application daily.
Why is no one able to come up with an Outlook alternative?
Then maybe there really would be a migration...
At the Office 2003/2007 interface, I had better luck with Open Office displaying some documents between Excel 2003 and Excel 2007 than with either Excel. Microsoft internal document standards are a farce.
I use Apple's Pages, Numbers and Keynote.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Then again, that's my reaction to a lot of things, so....
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
I have LibreOffice installed on Fedora, but rarely use it. And when I do need a word processor I tend to use AbiWord.
I remember working on a document in Word 2003 with several large tables. Periodically, Word 2003 (which I had to use by corporate edict) would crash while working on one particularly large table, and would be unable to reload the document. I found out that loading the document in OpenOffice and saving it back immediately fixed whatever problem Word was having and I could work in Word for a while longer. I ended up having to do that every few days until I was done with the document.
I use Libreoffice in large part because it isn't streamlined. Office is OK if you never have to do anything that MS doesn't want you to do, but if you need to do something that's off the beaten path, it can take a lot of looking to find. The interface is just not intuitive at all. I had Word XP and disabled the customized menus because it had a habit of hiding things that I needed and not offering an adequate clue where it is. So, with the next release, they put in that ribbon crap and it's been shit ever since.
MS has a habit of making shit interfaces then refusing to acknowledge it.
I wonder how many government offices -- the U.S. Federal government has long been Microsoft's biggest customer -- couldn't get along just fine with an open source word processor, even considering all the proprietary-format documents they're stuck with for now.
That's because Microsoft Office has long ceased being the proprietary alternative to OpenOffice/LibreOffice. Nowadays, any typical organization use Microsoft Office + Active Directory + SharePoint + Exchange et. al. complete with compliance with bullsh*t like HIPAA and FIPS 140-2, and OpenOffice/LibreOffice cannot simply become a drop-in replacement anymore.
Don't treat your users like idiots or children. If you can't explain why they should switch, you don't know how to explain things or there's no good reason for them to do so.
...
Step 4. Profit !
They make web servers right? Sun Microsystems makes Java and Open Office. Maybe I'm behind the times.
Find me a replacement for Excel then. A real replacement, not some crappy OpenOffice thing that has 80% of the features.
IMHO, Microsoft's motivation for adopting an open document format was possibly more about killing Adobe Acrobat, than maintaining compatibility with a competitive (zero-cost) product.. by adopting an open format, MS was able to throw cold water on one of Adobe Acrobat's major value propositions.... just like HTML5 has done / will do to Flash. Agree or Disagree?
What's next? Getting people to use it after they download it. I suppose I'm counted in that 100 million, but I've never actually had a reason to use the product. Absolutely everyone I know in business and personal life uses MS Office, and I get the whole MS Office suite free through work or included in any new PC purchase.
Popisms.com - Connecting pop culture
"Continued to use"
Translation: Left it installed in case they might use it someday or were too lazy to uninstall it.
By Rob's numbers, 100% of the entire install base would still be using OO. MSO doesn't have those kinds of numbers for people who actually pay for the software let alone those who try something for free.
I wonder how many government offices -- the U.S. Federal government has long been Microsoft's biggest customer -- couldn't get along just fine with an open source word processor, even considering all the proprietary-format documents they're stuck with for now.
Microsoft positions MS Office as part of an integrated solution for clerical work that scales to an enterprise of any size.
Microsoft Office 365 for Health Organizations
Microsoft has entered into a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with Texas, a pact that carries much more weight these days after the HIPAA omnibus rule was released in January.
Implementing Office 365 for such a large network should serve as a sign that the state is comfortable enough with cloud computing that 100,000 employees, including the state Health and Human Services System, will be using the services.
What will Texas Office 365 deal mean for healthcare security? [Feb 2013]
In the 80's and 90's there was linkage between apps and OS .. and the Juju was strong. Monopoly resulted. Now in the new era, platform is irrelevant. Same data and capability needs to be made available on all platforms where practical. The Juju pops back up though in places like HealthVault (championed by an outfit that is losing its monopoly) where a subset of functionality is available to non windows users. (yeah.. I was irritated!) Have we reached a point where we should be free of linkage between applications and platform? Lets hope that the app developers (free and closed) can provide value with software quality, rather than platform linkage.
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
Wow, you serious?
Because, unfortunately in some regards, (almost) everyone uses Excel for EVERYTHING. Most people outside of Slashdot could probably name one Database program (Microsoft Access) that they've heard of, and I'm willing to bet most of them don't know how to use it.
Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. But light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
But how many actually use it on a daily basis?
Hehheh, you're modded down by open source fanboys so that the grimy truth would not come to light.
But exactly. How many of those downloads is just "Hey, free Office! Oh, this is trash, uninstalling..."
...collaborate and listen. LibreOffice has ~10 times the number of developers involved ( https://www.ohloh.net/p/libreo... , https://www.ohloh.net/p/openof... ), and it's a better project in every possible way. The only thing you have going for you is that name you inherited for Oracle. By carrying on with this project you're just continuing a fork that serves no purpose to the community. In fact it harms the community, because new-comers try AOO and think it's the best that the community can do, when LO has shown we can do so much better.
The only upside, is that LO can import your work and benefit from what little improvements your small team are able to produce.
In the context of everything else that is available (R, etc), yes.
For most users that I've known who were willing to try OpenOffice, Calc worked fine for them.
Er, not for me. Libre and Open Office (latest as of 2/74) spreadsheets did NOT work. A tax template (from 1040excel.com) had me owing ~$200 more tax then when opened in MS Excel, and some of my wife's environmental-compliance baroque* EXcel spreadsheets simply would not open (crashed). Some Word files also had problems.
* Should have been done in a database, but the client dictated Excel.
It's NOT because I wasn't willing to try - indeed I'm desperate to leave MS after using Win 8.1...
Just bought a new laptop with Office 2013 Home / Student edition included. Went through the Office licence activation fine then got an obscure error message that Office installation cannot be completed because it is already partly installed. It gave a link to the MS website which gave no help at all; essentially it was an unknown problem. Tried rebooting and going through the install/activation process again a few times but always the same useless error message. In the end I thought "f*ck it" and completely unistalled Office. I'm now considering whether to install LIbreOffice or Apache OpenOffice; Microsoft had their chance and blew it.
Because, unfortunately in some regards, (almost) everyone uses Excel for EVERYTHING. Most people outside of Slashdot could probably name one Database program (Microsoft Access) that they've heard of, and I'm willing to bet most of them don't know how to use it.
I don't see a smiley so I guess this is meant to be serious. You must be stuck in one shit hole corporate job somewhere if you think that about Excel. You are wrong on databases too. I'd say most people couldn't name any, and why should they? 2 of 2, nice.
Macros are the main problem keeping back a switch to LibreOffice or OO.o. Also, paid commercial support (so that Joe Smith can call up an "engineer" at 3 AM on a holiday Sunday with an urgent issue and get a hotfix issued by 7 AM).
The macro problem is bigger than most people (i.e., those outside Corporate or Public Sector America) realize. On many large enterprise systems, the computer is so locked down that to develop almost any kind of automation, or work productivity software, is nigh impossible. So, assuming you know some basic stuff about software development and you're tired of clicking and dragging on the same cells in Excel 500 billion times, you have two choices: either suck it up and click until you get a repetitive stress injury, or break out the VBA.
Most enterprises (at least, those I've worked at) don't restrict the use of VBA macros, so they've become a sort of "programming environment of last resort" for worker bees in companies that are either too cheap, or too stupid to deploy actual development software like Visual Studio or Eclipse. And even those employees who decide to go off-roading and fly in the face of corporate policy to install "un-approved" software (heretics; how dare they!) will run into major roadblocks related to not having administrative privileges on their system.
VBA code does not port seamlessly without major changes to the LibreOffice/OpenOffice environment; it basically has to be rewritten, depending on the complexity. Long story short, there are entire enterprise systems implemented in VBA (typically based on MS Access or MS Excel), often with copious use of Win32 API functions, which include networking, databases, custom file formats, custom GUIs (UserForms), and so on and so forth. These systems can save hundreds of hours of manual labor and improve the quality of life for people who work for a living and are just trying to get shit done, despite cloistered "departments" impinging from all sides, trying to impede their progress to the fullest extent possible due to NIH and general paranoia about software that they themselves didn't select (but when one of the IT guys who pulls the strings decides they really like some cool new program that helps THEM in THEIR job, of course it gets immediately installed on everyone's systems without so much as a security sniff-test).
Hiring an intern to work on one of these for a summer or two, or hoping and praying that you recruit someone who's willing to work for near-minimum-wage with a background in programming, is often the only thing separating corporate drones from RSI-inducing repetitive work. And don't go to the IT department and ask them to develop or buy a system, oh no; they never have the budget, and even if they did, they wouldn't be able to sit down with your boss's boss's boss for a Project Scope Agreement meeting until July 2017.
VBA, from a pragmatic perspective, is a loophole that skunkworks people have been gleefully exploiting for close to 20 years now. If you propose to do away with it by removing Office from peoples' computers and putting OO.o or LO in its place, you'll incite a riot. If you do it anyway, your business will grind to a halt as productivity and efficiency drop by a factor of 100.
If you're an IT director with a hand in a decision like this, I urge you to survey ALL your employees -- not just the managers who have no clue what their employees do -- to see what impact a transition from MS Office to LO/OO.o would have. I'm not saying a move is impossible, but you need to do it in cooperation and coordination with your employees. Yes, even the inconvenient ones who like to download zipballs with those "Open Sauce" EXEs that you don't trust. They're the good guys; they're helping your company; and they're just trying to get their work done as efficiently as possible.
You must be stuck in one shit hole corporate job somewhere if you think that about Excel.
What corporate job ISN'T a shit hold corporate job? Have you ever had a real job that wasn't working with IT people. Excel is for EVERYTHING. Every day I see people with 100+ megabyte XLS files with two hundred columns and 1,000 rows tracking every miniscule, meaningless thing they can think of. I know of executives at television stations that use Excel to track their budget. If you believe otherwise, you live a very sheltered life.
Somewhat valid point.
I am a scientist. At some point, I decided to move over to linux completely. Real number crunching can be done in R or Matlab, but for some things, excel is quite useful. In the end, I found gnumeric quite nice to work with, and I have not found anything that I missed compared to excel. (actually, it has some extra functionality that I find quite convenient).
People who do "serious" work with Office have real problems migrating.
I'm one of those people who does "serious" spreadsheet work. By and large switching between the Excel and OOo/LO works pretty well. Occasional formatting issues and the odd formula incompatibility but mostly it works fine. I try to use macros as little as possible so I can't speak to compatibility there but I would expect it to be something of a creeping horror.
Write and Word do have incompatibilities.
Sadly yes. Quite a few of them in fact.
I never tried to open a MS Access database in OpenOffice Base,
I have and it generally works but probably not exactly the way you expect. Base isn't really the same thing as Access. It's more of a connector application than a standalone database product. I use it primarily to do ODBC connections between spreadsheets and a database. Unfortunately they tend to break their ODBC code between versions so I've been stuck on a pretty old version of OO for quite a while.
Switching from MS Office to OpenOffice / LibreOffice is not easy at all for power users. To put into geek terms: imagine switching from Apache to Lighttpd. For most things, it will be great. But, if you have some serious .htaccess magic going on or are relying on mods which exist only for Apache - well, you are out of luck and you are probably not going anywhere.
Bingo. If you have a heavily macro'd set of Excel spreadsheets or the like you probably aren't going to want to switch. Just way too painful. But most people could probably switch with only modest problems here and there.
Only 1 million actual users who use it on a daily basis (I am just guessing here to prove a point). Downloads mean absolutely nothing, unless they have stats on if people actually use it and or keep it installed.
Excel is actually pretty nice for quick, one-off, interactive data browsing and visualization. I see that pivot tables are present in OpenOffice and LibreOffice now, so I don't see any reason to use Excel over one of the free options, because they're all absolutely terrible at anything beyond the aforementioned use case. Anything more involved and anything you'll have to repeat on further data sets should absolutely not be done in a spreadsheet (I personally prefer Python with the MATLAB-like libraries).
My wife has a lot of technically unsophisticated clients. More than half came back with "I can't open this." Not worth the time to educate them, so we went back to Office.
It is unwise to ascribe motive
(posting as AC because I modded the thread)
The reason why the government isn't using a free alternative like Open Office or Libre Office, and it's called lobbying and buying legislators to make sure that MS gets some government change. It wouldn't take much to convert. Other governments have done it, but the powerbrokers that control the government would never support anything that is "free".
I would love to see an alternative to Adobe for Photoshop, Acrobat and Illustrator. I have used Photoshop and Illustrator (licensed owner) since versions 1.0 and now have CS4. I don't want Adobe's Cloud version. I don't want to deal with the cloud or subscription based software. CS6 won't save files in CS4 format so I don't want it for that reason too. Just as we have OpenOffice it would be nice to have OpenCS.
Excel is fantastic for exploring small sets of data... "quick and dirty" stuff. When you want rigorous statistics or a more formal analysis of data, R and friends are far superior. And anything even remotely repetitive should be done in something with a better scripting language. But I'd hate to lose Excel just as much as I'd hate to be forced to use MATLAB or Python to plot results from some small screening experiment.
And of course, we are completely deviating from Excel's forte as a financial tool, where it is much stronger.
Sometimes I'll even use it to clean up data for insertion into a database or some other such task. It has some nice built-in "Filter" functions.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Give Gnumeric a try.
I'd *love* to ditch MS Office for any version of Open Office, but none of them give me MS Word's Outline Mode, an integral part of Word since Word for Windows back in the '90s.
For you real old-timers, it's not KAMAS (a CP/M based outliner that I maintain has never been surpassed), but it's the only thing current that comes within shouting distance
This page accidentally left blank
Ah, that would be the incremental saving of changes - good times! Another workaround was to use the Save as... function to save a fresh document with no incremental stuff in it. It even used to be posted on the Microsoft support site. AFAIK, they never got this feature right, and gave up on it when implementing the .docx format (I could be wrong!)
Wow, this must have been the first time I said something "positive" about OOXML.
Calc does _everything_ I use Excel for. What specific features are the issue for you?
When the government spends a million dollars on MS Office, let's guess that something like 1/3rd of those resources go to marketing, 1/3rd go to development, and 1/3rd to administration. So for $1,000,000 in spending, $300,000 of utility (goodness) is produced, the economy has $300,000 more utility in it that gets divided up between people.
If instead, the government spent the same million on OpenOffice, 80% would go to development, 20% to administration, and 0% to marketing. Therefore, $800,000 of development work would be done, adding $800,000 of utility which gets spread around. We see that spending the same money on OpenOffice results in over twice as much utility being added to the economy, meaning twice as much good stuff is available to be spread around.
Int he more likely case, the government would spend only 1/10th as much on OpenOffice. That leaves $900,000 either in the hands of taxpayers to spend on good stuff they want, or for the government to spend on things like literacy and job training programs. Which provides more value to the economy - handing money to Microsoft, or using it to increase literacy and job skills?
100 million downloads on a good day would mean 30 million people installing it.
Of those, how many kept using it?
My experience with OpenOffice, in all of its forms, has always been and continues to be negative.
In terms of hours lost, Microsoft Office is a bargain compared to this buggy code-what-pleases-you piece of shit.
Futurist Traditionalism
According to real life experience, you've cherry-picked your audience as usual.
Futurist Traditionalism
But I'd hate to lose Excel just as much as I'd hate to be forced to use MATLAB or Python to plot results from some small screening experiment.
Get to know iPython+matplotlib -- IMO it's actually easier to do quick and dirties once you've written a few convenience functions.
1. The check is in the mail.
2. I promise I won't come inside you.
3. I hate Word.
Care to elaborate about the extras you find convenient?
You evade, which does you no credit. Offering a survey that you know will be answered by fanboys inevitably produces bad results. The rest of the audience isn't bothering to answer this.
You'd also need to ask them at a longer duration from the download to see if they kept using it. There are many ways to cherry-pick data, and the first is to be careful about who you ask.
Futurist Traditionalism
I'd be very happy with an open source equivalent to Publisher 98 to be honest. I know there are alternatives but they don't have the useability and functionality of good old Publisher.
If you don't think Excel is widely used for all sorts of meaningless crap across a wide array of corporate and non-corporate jobs you're being willfully ignorant.
Is there any reasoning behind this vitriol? There is simply not a replacement that offers the sheer breadth of features available in MS Office. As soon is there is, maybe another suite will be a viable alternative, but until that day, I will stick with MS Office.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -Carl Sagan
Find me a replacement for Excel then. A real replacement, not some crappy OpenOffice thing that has 80% of the features.
Honestly, Excel still only supports 65,536 rows; while OpenOffice (and LibreOffice) support 1 million (counting in base 2) rows.
I didn't know that until I was doing some number crunching where I was simply loading up a CSV file into OpenOffice and then graphing a couple columns in a NET graph; didn't have an issue with it taking a minute or two as it was a "quick'n diry" analysis, and then later discovered that I was graphing 300k-400k rows in the graph.
And in all honesty, Excel and OpenOffice Calc have about a 99% overlap in functionality. The big issue is if you want all your Visual Basic for Application scripts that are in your Excel documents to run when you open it in OpenOffice Calc. However, OpenOffice Calc allows you to use a number of programming languages for its scripting.
So yes, for legacy scripted documents, Excel is a must. For anything else, OpenOffice is more than sufficient.
Pivot tables have been present in the product since at least StarOffice version 5. They were called Data Pilots until recently, when the developers realized that nobody knew a Data Pilot was the same as a Pivot Table. OpenOffice Calc has perhaps 98% of the features of Excel. Most of the confusion results from slightly different function names and other inconsistencies found with Excel (at which point I should mention that no version of Excel is 100% feature-equivalent to another, and every Excel upgrade requires retraining.)
Yes, good suggestion, especially if you already know MATLAB... they syntax and overall workflow is similar for plotting. I personally like the "Pyzo" distribution for Python.
I still find Excel plots to be faster, easier to modify, and easier to share for trivial data sets.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Not just Excel, PowerPoint as well. Get the LO and CalligraSuite spreadsheets and presentation packages on par w/ Excel & PowerPoint, and you'll see a lot more adapters of those. Office doesn't consist of just Word.
"...But what does the community at Apache need to do to get the next 100 million?"
Um... just keep the servers running?
Mod parent up. That's my favorite Word feature and my biggest disappointment with Libre/OpenOffice.
If you don't think Excel is widely used for all sorts of meaningless crap across a wide array of corporate and non-corporate jobs you're being willfully ignorant.
Corporate world sure, everywhere else is a maybe sometimes, which is a long way from "almost everyone", which is just ridiculous. That comes from people who live in a corporate world and thinks everyone else does too. Not. There are tons of people in the non-corporate world who don't even need a spreadsheet for anything. And some who do, that don't use Excel.
Honestly, you don't keep up with current events. I don't care for Excel but it has supported a million rows since at least 2007 but hey, let's pretend make statements from outdated data. 40 Mb of hard drive space is huge!
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/excel-specifications-and-limits-HP010073849.aspx
I don't have time to make a sig
The sad part is, MS Access barely qualifies as a database, but most of the "techies" I spoke to at a ghost-hunting conference last weekend** heaped praise on building a "database" with MS Access - they intended to put it on their website for collaboration between ghost-hunting groups, much to the cheers of those various groups who were present.
I stood up and quietly began asking questions of the guy who announced it. 30 minutes later, after realizing to his horror just how insecure and craptastic Access is for Internet use (I had to explain the risks and hazards in layman's terms, which made things slow-going), I gently introduced them to MySQL (which should be more than sufficient for their needs). I offered to help construct a basic setup for them to use once they sorted out how they would introduce privilege separation and suchlike. Next up (if they haven't abandoned the idea completely), I'll introduce them to the concept of a CMS. The guy leading the effort nodded blankly when I walked up to the podium afterwards, gave him my business card, and told him to call me when he was ready.
By the time I got done talking, I was surrounded by a bunch of people (various new-age and definitely non-IT types) who just stared at me slack-jawed and soaked it all in. The one and only other human being in the room who knew what I was talking about was doing his level best not to giggle (he's on my wife's local team, and his day job is web development). I should mention that most of these folks can be wizards at basic EE concepts (with lots of gaps), and can make a sound file do anything just shy of your laundry... but IT is a great big blank to most, and the deepest most of them go is to, say, use wordpress.
As a side-note, I now know fully how Bruce Campbell felt when he shouted at the villagers about his "boom stick!"
So yeah - Access would probably be about it for most folks.
** Why was I there? My wife is really big into this sort of thing, and as any married man knows, you either go along with her or you're a dead man.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
OpenOffice/LibreOffice may have only 80 percent of the features of MS office, but since neither I nor anyone that I have worked with over the last decade use more than perhaps 15 percent of those features that's not really much of an issue to me. To be truthful, MS Office 4.3 was overkill for probably 90 percent of end users. I can't foresee ever creating a spreadsheet doing anything more complex than pull numbers out of a SQL database and make a pivot table with them, and the free versions do that just fine. Sure, there will be edge-case users who do stupidly complex things with it (which generally would be much more appropriately done with some other tool), and for them buy a full MS Office license. For the rest of your enterprise, why bother?
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
dealing with bug/enhancement issues that have been pending for more than twelve years. Issue #3959 (notice the position in the queue?) has been either ignored or brushed off as unimportant since April of 2002, despite seniority and votes in the issues list.
Classic case of writers telling programmers "this is a must-have function" and programmers responding with "I don't use it so neither do you."
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
You either did not read the survey results or did not understand them. Survey participants were asked about "the software application called OpenOffice". They were asked whether:
1) They had heard of it
2) They had tried it
3) They use it occasionally
4) They use it regularly.
The "continued to use" percentage is the sum of "they use it occasionally" and "they use it regularly". It excludes those who just tried it.
Sure, people are reasonable when it comes to brand identification.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg (I want an iphone)
I would vote Excel in that contest. To me, comparing Excel to Python/matplotlib harkens a lot of the comparison of something like Python to a compiled language. The former gives you a REPL that lets you interact with your language easily, you can make changes and see them reflected without recompiling, etc. Well, Excel takes that one step further: with it, you don't have to do anything: as you change the input data, the calculated data changes immediately. With Python and matplotlib (at least as much as I've seen it), you don't have to recompile but you do have to re-run your script or take some other action besides just changing the data to get it to regraph (or else start writing your own wrapper).
Or not everything is graphing either. For instance, suppose you're picking between different mortgages and want to compare a few different scenarios. You can have cells for the interest rate, nominal loan time, points, extra prepayments, etc. and then have cells to calculate the total interest paid, actual loan time, etc. Want to see what an additional 1% does to your rate? Change 3.5% to 4.5% and... you see the effect.
Finally, I think spreadsheets often make data entry easier as well as just looking at tables easier. You can just grab and resize columns if something doesn't fit, as opposed to go and manually respace things. Entering data going down in a spreadsheet column is about as easy as it gets because you have an enter button on your 10-key: it's easier to type "17 25 4 12" than "17 25 4 12" even ignoring row vs column-ness.
At least personally, when I use a spreadsheet instead of going to Python/matplotlib or something else, those are usually the reasons why.
Let's try that again not making up new HTML tags: ...it's easier to type "17 [enter] 25 [enter] 4 [enter] 12" than "17 [comma] 25 [comma] 4 [comma] 12" even ignoring row vs column-ness.
I once heard that the most used database in the world is Microsoft Excel.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Have you tried XMind? I was recently searching for an outlining tool and found it to be pretty good for my purposes. The basic version is free.
Access has a user friendly GUI for non-programmers or light programmers to do work in. It is the GUI not the engine that makes Access worthwhile. Which is why Base for OO/LO was important. The backend can easily be SQLServer.
It's really surprising 100 million managed to download openoffice. I mean i clicked a few links on the apache site stating "open office available now" got to a few pages, wiki pages, whats new notes, and a list of a hundred or so language packs and links to rpm debian etc. files.
Sure must be hard to guess the browser language and operating system to get to a download now buttons similar to firefox, chrome etc.
Our family has used Open/Libre for years. What I really WANT is an iPad version....
And MS Access will upsize decently enough to SQL Server when you Access database outgrows the limits of Access (and I don't really mean the file size limits).
While I don't condone it, people in the Finance/Accounting departments have made complete applications in Excel. Then, they throw it over the wall to I/T and say "turn this into a web app for us -- it should take, what, two or three days?"
But again, I've seen plenty of complex spreadsheets that use way more functionality than I as a developer would ever use.
I'm pretty sure I account for about 1% of those downloads from trying every fucking build multiple times to find one that fucking works (or breaks in different but more-tolerable ways) when opening various MS Office documents.
While I don't condone it, people in the Finance/Accounting departments have made complete applications in Excel. Then, they throw it over the wall to I/T and say "turn this into a web app for us -- it should take, what, two or three days?"
But again, I've seen plenty of complex spreadsheets that use way more functionality than I as a developer would ever use.
I'd say that you worked for the same company I did.
But at my company they waited until they'd exceeded Excel's row capacity and THEN they threw it over the wall. At which point they were having to break it up into multiple workbooks just to run the business while we scrambled to bail them out. Plus - yay! - critical corporate data existed on a laptop that they'd keep passing around (and occasionally taking out of town) and our IT department didn't backup files on desktops or laptops.
On the whole, I'm inclined to say that when you've gotten to the point that only 100% original Excel can do the job, you've probably reached the point where you shouldn't be doing the job in Excel anyway.
I never figured out Excel. Lotus 123 was easy to use and learn, but Excel is obtuse.
And you received 100M survey responses? Otherwise, what exactly does this survey prove? The comparison to Libre Office is also suspect, given the difference in install base which isn't being tracked. The blog looks like 'feel good reporting' more than something that relates to reality.
Ah, yes. Issue number 3959. Originally filed April 10, 2002. More than twelve years ago. In that time it has remained in the top-voted issue list year-in and year-out. Others come and go, but 3959 keeps on pissing off users. At last look, there are about ten duplicates requests on file.
Every few years some developer wanders by and tells the people following it that nobody needs outline view, or that there are tools available to do it, or whatever. Often, they close the issue. In effect, "I don't use outline mode so obviously it's not important." The mailing list heats up for a while, the developer either mumbles something about maybe the team should look into it and vanishes or else just vanishes, but the issue is either reopened or left open. I've seen at least four of those cycles so far. We're probably due for another one.
At this point, I suspect that 3959 will outlive (Open|Libre|Star)Office for the classic open-source software reason: if it doesn't scratch a developer's itch, it ain't happening. And apparently, developers don't outline, edit, or otherwise structure their writing or much care about the people who do.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Does it let you restructure an existing document?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I wanted compatibility. Microsoft office is availble for OSX also, but it isn't really compatible between the two. Before people jump on that, build a complex Powerpoint document, and open it in The Mac version - just as one example.
So I installed OO on all of the machines. It made them compatible. Microsoft Office is becoming the outlier now.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Sure. You can collapse sections and then move them (and all of the contained text and subsections) to anywhere in the document. In addition, you can easily promote and demote sections and the indentation and numbering get adjusted automatically. Paragraph styles are used (e.g., heading 1, heading 2) and those are updated to reflect the changes.
Very true.
Yeah, Excel is obtuse compared to it's former competitors. My favorite was Quattro Pro. It took years for Excel to catch up on some features. Sadly, the macro language was primitive even by VBA standards. Later on it adopted VBA, but it was too late - I had long abandoned it.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Sorry -- I wrote that for the following comment (WRT XMind) and then posted it here.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I tried gnumeric about 3 years ago
just making a scattergram was a chore; the gui for adjusting axes and markers was awful (and, compared to say Kaleidagraph or Igor, excel sucks)
Can't imagine gnumeric has gotten any better
** Why was I there? My wife is really big into this sort of thing, and as any married man knows, you either go along with her or you're a dead man.
And apparently at that point, she'd still be coming after you.
Why would anyone use Excel for anything?
Because it's quick and easy for basic stuff, and useful for making graphs from simple data. That's why I use LibreOffice Calc, anyway. Using a spreadsheet for real data is like using Word / Writer for desktop publishing - it's quick and easy but totally bodgy.
One of the extras I find useful in gnumeric is the ability to do boxplots.
I never liked Publisher much, and back in the 90s I used to use a pirate copy of PageMaker - which I liked a lot. In later years I used Scribus a bit, which was ok, but not as good as PageMaker. If Scribus has continued on the course of development it was on a few years back, it should be pretty good by now.
That's an easy statement to make. But completely meaningless unless you can give some examples of things you can do in MSOffice that you can't do in OpenOffice?
"When you want rigorous statistics or a more formal analysis of data"
aka I do nothing meaningful for a living
yep
"In Excel 2007, the maximum worksheet size is 1048576 rows by 16384 columns."
http://office.microsoft.com/en...
It's called GIMP and it works beautifully.
Replace Outlook and AOO wins Until then Open Office doesn't have a chance.
Next time, introduce them to a proper database like postgresql. Geez, you're no better than those "techs".
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Repeated survey isn't the same as a followup.
Are you going to post any more deceptive evasions?
Futurist Traditionalism
You're right, this guy is a liar.
I notice he tried to dodge the question of the validity of the survey with "Well we repeated it three times!" ...blatant dishonesty, or mental retardation, I can't tell.
Futurist Traditionalism
Yes, XMind allows you to grab any node and drag it (with the hierarchy under it intact) into any other part of the hierarchy. That was one of my requirements, which a few other mind mapping tools I tested didn't seem to support (or, at least, I couldn't find a way to do it with other tools with just a few minutes of poking around). You can also collapse/expand any node.
Three things made me change from MSFT office.
1. The first 64-bit version, 2007, was extremely buggy. 64-bit 2010 was also buggy and crashed regulary. Unusable junk.
2. Ribbon. This piece of junk UI makes the all apps in the suit a pain to use.
3. Excel graphing tool got worse, while LO and Gnumeric stayed the same. Simple things like formatting a date axis. Such function should be the most basic and usable feature of a spreadsheet app.
Thus, I didn't want to switch from MSFT, but I got forced to be able to do my regular work.
so its less buggy than an over decade old product?
What a moron!
Read the post. My use of the past tense should have been a clue that it happened in the past and mentioning it was used by corporate edict should have been a clue that MS Word was in its support period, i.e. current. For completeness, that happened in the fall of 2004, but you probably don't care. You are probably now going to object that MS Word being so "young", how could I expect it to not be buggy? I probably should have waited a few more years before they had the bugs worked out?
Now, regardless of when that happened I would expect a piece of software that cost several 100 dollars to be better able to handle it's own f***g proprietary file format than a freebee that had to reverse engineer it, regardless how long it has been since you bought it.
Oh Interesting. http://www.apple.com/icloud/se... . Seems that iCloud no longer supports account creation directly without at least one OSX or iOS device. That's a change.
Perhaps for programmers the need is not evident, but for anyone who writes long documents, it's indispensable. It's indispensable enough that I am still using Microsoft Word for anything that has any sort of header/subheader structure. OO and LO are OK for short letters and memos, but if it has more than 2 headings it gets clunky because of the lack of outline mode.
The core difference between writing text and writing code, which apparently the programmers working on OO and LO fail to grasp, is that writers are producing text which will be read by humans, not executed by machines.You can't just comment out the cruft and do a GOTO jump over that module you decided you don't want, then tell them to go back 17 pages to pick up the information in paragraph 3. Writing needs structure and flow to lead the reader through the material in a way that make the content comprehensible. It needs primary and subordinate ideas. Order and levels of importance are important. In Microsoft Word, collapsing the document into Outline mode and seeing the heading and subheading structure makes the flow of the document visible, and more important, the means to change that flow is on the same screen. There is no interruption in the work flow.
http://www.gigamonkeys.com/code-reading/ seems to understand it, going the other direction: most real code isn't actually in a form that can be simply read .... in order to grok it I have to essentially rewrite it. I'll start by renaming a few things so they make more sense to me and then I'll move things around to suit my ideas about how to organize code. Pretty soon I'll have gotten deep into the abstractions (or lack thereof) of the code and will start making bigger changes to the structure of the code. Once I've completely rewritten the thing I usually understand it pretty well and can even go back to the original and understand it too.
Which leads me to "Issue 3959", wherein writers asked for this on 2002-04-10 20:39:19 UTC ... it's ranked as "Trivial" now. It has nothing to prevent implementation except the inability of the code maintainers to accept that writers really do know what they need in their tools.
Here's the overview of Bug 3959 ... https://issues.apache.org/ooo/...
As the wisdom of XKCD proves - http://www.xkcd.com/619/
I have downloaded various versions of OpenOffice and LibreOffice over the past years, probably accounting for 20+ downloads on various devices. None has been really used as the package falls short of my expectations each time. Same for many "free" downloads of other software, such as UML modelling, server, dB and CRM software. I have ended up buying the professional package nearly every time. Money on the table says I've made a commitment (ok, yes, or that I should be committed to the funny farm for even considering purchasing software) - downloading a stream of bits for free means very little. Can they track activations? Active use? I suspect the figures for active, committed, use are far, far, lower. How many documents do you see floating around, created in OpenOffice (rather than exported to .odf which, btw, MS Office does very cleanly).
And there is the question of the ODF standard: which of the multiple OpenOffice and LibreOffice builds actually generates ISO-compliant ODF? They all seem to generate slight forks or use as-yet-not-ISO-compliant versions that don't play well together.
Really? I finished a novel in vim, and if I need structure I just use LaTeX. Real geeks don't need Microsoft Word.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Newsflash! Anonymous Cowards have crappy imaginations!
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Heck, I've done a bit of ghost-hunting. Still have no ectoplasmic trophies over the fireplace, but I had fun.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I have no idea what that incoherent blob of text is even attempting to say, maybe people would understand you better if you stuck to one thought per paragraph and not ASSume
Truly sad Apache promote terrible software, LibreOffice -so- much better why they not ashamed of promote Apache OpenOffice when it buggier slower and no features ? This horrible news - Tech. press need to get message over.
Switching from MS Office to OpenOffice / LibreOffice is not easy at all for power users. To put into geek terms: imagine switching from Apache to Lighttpd. For most things, it will be great. But, if you have some serious .htaccess magic going on or are relying on mods which exist only for Apache - well, you are out of luck and you are probably not going anywhere.
If you rely on that much complicated Excel Spreadsheet, you'll have to wonder if you're using the correct tool for the job.
I'm not dismissing that fact that LibreOffice would need better import/export capabilities with more compatibile exchange with Microsoft Excel. (that needs to be done anyway).
But if you push Excel to its edge, maybe instead you should consider switching your workflow to a package/software suite which is more geared to your data analysis and plotting needs. (things like statistical software, for example)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]