Why You Should Choose MS Office Over OO.org

sander writes "As noted on linxfr.org, Microsoft has published a competitive guide on OpenOffice.org 1.1 vs Microsoft Office. Some of the weirder things they claim in it is that by choosing MS Office over OpenOffice.org one is protected from the threat of viruses. But the giant seems to be sweating -- and with a good reason."

some stuff

For anybody who doesn't have software to read .pdf files (or for anybody who doesn't want to download the pdf file), here [216.239.41.104] is a link to the HTML version of the above mentioned on the above link [microsoft.com].
also, here is a translation of the link to linuxfr.org [google.com]. Slashdot should have posted another link to the english version- i don't think the majority of /. readers can read french fluently.

OpenOffice does not have a dedicated development or support rteam.Consequently,if bugs go unresolved,users have the option to resolve problems by scouring through numerous community sites and chat rooms.

is it just me, or is microsoft the one who we usually hear about leaving bugs unresolved for months? [eeye.com]

Unresolved bugs.

That is one of the things that stuck out to me... Given the longstanding bugs in Windows, and the lack of support to end-users when bugs do occur, I'd say this is a case of the pot calling the stainless steel pan black.

Re:Unresolved bugs.

...

But stainless steel is silv... Oh.

Re:Unresolved bugs.

I'd really like to use something other than microsoft office, but I am simply chained down because on most college campuses, everything is "powerpoint lecture" or the syllabus is a Word .doc file.

What's wrong with OpenOffice? It reads and saves MS Office docs extremely well. (Make sure you have the latest version!) And if you want to show people up and protest MS Office, you can export your documents to PDFs! My wife uses it to exchange letters in Russian with her father. Despite the fact that he's using Word, she can read and save the files without trouble. Works quite well. Oh, and OpenPresenter is almost exactly like PowerPoint.

Re:Unresolved bugs.

I tried to use OpenOffice for an online Technical Writing class last term (just ended last week). It worked fairly well. I was always able to get the information out of the documents. Only formatting was ever broken.

Unfortunately that's not always good enough. After too many times correcting "mistakes" that weren't actually mistakes (e.g. suggesting that a classmate put bullets in his list, even though there already WERE bullets, OpenOffice just wasn't showing them) I ended up switching back to Word.

OpenOffice is good at reading Word documents, but it's definitely not good enough for everyone's needs.

RTF != fine

RTF (which is, by the way, an older standard than Word), it would have looked fine in either word processor.

Have you ever actually LOOKED at a RTF file? It never, ever looks fine.

Also, from the doxygen manual. [stack.nl]:

"Note that the RTF output probably only looks nice with Microsoft's Word 97. If you have success with other programs, please let me know."

RTF is clearly not completely standard, and in my experience most often looks like hell (our co-op office used to make us submit resumes in it).

Re:Unresolved bugs.

That's not totally openoffice's fault. If your friend would have sent you the file in an open format, then you wouldn't have had a problem.

Uh, I made no mention of faults. Show me the part of my post where I claimed that it was OpenOffice's fault (whatever that means). Believe me, I would've much rather used OpenOffice than installing VMWare, Windows, and Word.

But it doesn't really matter whose fault it was. I was responding to a guy who claimed that you could use OpenOffice in a school environment without any problems [slashdot.org]. My experience tells me that might be true for some classes, but is absolutely not true for classes where exact reproduction of formatting is important.

Re:Unresolved bugs.

There is the question of 'de facto standard' formats, however. I'm not bashing OO here, but the fact is that .doc is an extremely widely used format. Maybe even like gif or jpg, at least a png or bmp. It really should handle .doc's the way they're supposed to be handled, of course. And due to the incredibly wide use of the .doc format, it could be considered a 'fault,' as you say. The burden isn't on Word to provide interoperability with a so-rare-it's-almost-obscure format, but on OO to fit in with the mainstream.

Again, not saying OO is bad...you people scare me...don't hurt me.

Re:Unresolved bugs.

Interestingly it does OO is great in a homogenous environment. I work at a large size corporation (5000+) that has just switched EVERYONE to OO. there have been some glitches moving things over, but most of them had to do with excel file macros etc. Now that it is very uncommon to recieve a .doc,ppt, etc file from anyone inside the company, I just don't think about the MS software anymore. All it takes is for someone higher up to have a little vision and a reason to control expenses, and this could be your company soon.

Re:Unresolved bugs.

Unfortunately, MS doesn't have to use a standard because it has, more or less, a monopoly in this market. Maybe the EU could force Microsoft to use an open standard? And work with competitors to improve filters and interoperability? IMHO, this would be much more damaging to MS's grip on the market than just a fine.

One the other hand, I'm not sure if the politically liable EU has the guts to do this. ;-)

Standard? *WHICH* .doc format is standard?

There is the question of 'de facto standard' [...] .doc is an extremely widely used format

You should say "de facto standards" and "widely used formats".

The dotDOC written by MS Office 97 is different to MS Office 2000 and different in turn to MS Office XP - and of course the corresponding Mac versions of MS Office are all slighly different again. Then you have dotDOCs written by MS Office 2000 purportedly in an earlier dotDOC format (typically 97 or v6) which are different again. Later MS Word versions usually read the earlier dotDOCs OK, including "earler" dotDOCs written out by later MS Words, but will usually not be able to reliably write something that the genuinely earlier MS Word versions can read.

OpenOffice Writer is separately valuable for being able to take an "MS Office 97" dotDOC written by MS Office 2000, read it in without crashing, and write it out as a genuine MS Office 97 (or version 6) dotDOC that MS Office 97 (etc) can then read without crashing.

OO in HTML editor mode is also top class. Very good WYSIWYG and gotta love that "@" button.

Never had a problem with fadin in bullets

I think the effect you're after is demonstrated by this one-page presentation [cyberknights.com.au] (also in MS format [cyberknights.com.au]). All I did was right-click the text objects (on their borders so the object itself is being referred to, not the text in the object), choose effects, and pick an effect for them. You can do this en bloc as well.

I have a Chinese customer...

...who uses and prefers OOo for writing and editing Chinese docs. His enthusiasm is such that others in the local Chamber of Commerce for the Middle Kingdom are taking it up, too. And there are about 100 times as many Chinese in the world as there are Australians.

Re:Unresolved bugs.

I live on a university campus... And ALL of the presentations I've seen were done via OO.o or StarOffice (before OO.o was around), mainly because the professors chose it.

In the labs they have both Word and OO.org.

Y'know... If you want OO.org on the labs computers, maybe you could ask one of the CS assistants around. They usually serve pretty good intermediaries between the students and the Admins. Chances are that if you want it, that the admins would also prefer to have it (especially if there exists any sort of unix-department at your univ.), and unless there is some sort problem the higher ups have with OSS, you're likely to get it.

Just speak up and stop being a pussy.

Re:Unresolved bugs.

Quite a bit of study material comes as a powerpoint or word doc here too.

I've never had any trouble opening them with openoffice, true, there may be some slight formatting errors or other trivial graphics mishaps, but then again most of the time I'm trying to read the information in them, not goggle the prettyness of graphics (besides, they're usually frickin' ugly anyway, even in word or pp).

Now, the accursed html exported from powerpoint, which is used way too much as well is another story... there's just no way to get that sucker to open on anything else than IE.

Re:Unresolved bugs.

I'd really like to use something other than microsoft office, but I am simply chained down because on most college campuses, everything is "powerpoint lecture" or the syllabus is a Word .doc file. If there was an open source alternative to powerpoint that was significantly better and for efficient with an editor that was extremely simplistic (anyone can pick it up) it may have a chance of taking over powerpoint, but it just seems that so many people think of presenting lectures automatically think powerpoint.

On my computer, I have OO for all my word processing and spreadsheet needs (and have gotten through two terms without any longing for Word or Excel), but I had to install PowerPoint to do freelance presentation design work. If I can figure out how to actually submit comments to bugs on the OO site, I will feedback Impress religiously in hopes that it becomes as facile an alternative as the others.

With respect to word processing and spreadsheets, I've shared files back and forth with MS Office, whether using it myself at school or having a partner editing the same files. The only problem I ever really noticed with .xls was that sometimes when a friend opened my spreadsheets in Office XP, she'd have strange split windows she had to turn off. There was some formatting weirdness with sharing a .doc file with a partner for a memo assignment, but in addition to using a different program, she was on Mac (so, whole different font system, etc.) Still, in neither case was it a show-stopper.

But, dude, just because you can't replace PowerPoint yet doesn't mean you have to install ALL of MS Office. Get away with what you can!

Re:Unresolved bugs.

At City College of San Francisco, my instructors also use PowerPoint and Word docs.

Open Office opens them fine in Windows and Linux and AbiWord opens DOC files fine under Linux.

The instructors aren't getting that fancy with their PowerPoints and Word docs that you need Office to handle them, most likely.

Re:Unresolved bugs.

You need to separate "reading other people's docs" from "creating my own docs".

Use whatever office suite you want to create your own documents. Use OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, KOffice, GNOME Office, Wordperfect Office, SmartSuite. Hell, use notepad if you really want.

For viewing other people's documents (including presentations) just grab the viewer apps for those formats. Microsoft provides free viewers for all office formats since 97 in their Word Viewer, Excel Viewer, and PowerPoint Viewer software (free downloads from the Office site). There's also the Inso Corporation viewers and QuickView which supports just about every office / image format under the sun.

Just because someone else decides they need to use Office, doesn't mean you have to.

Chained down

You're never chained down to use non-free software. You just have to figure out what level of effort you're willing to make to break your chains.

1. Deal with the less-than-perfect conversion of OpenOffice documents into and out of Microsoft Office form. This is, at the moment, pretty darn good -- comparable to if not better than proprietary non-Microsoft office suites.
2. Talk your professors into accepting open-format documents.
3. Talk your professors into giving out open-format documents.
4. Get your department to make a policy allowing open-format documents for any assignment.
5. Get your department to make a policy requiring open-format documents from professors.
6. Get your university to do the same.
7. Transfer to another university.

OK, that last one is pretty extreme, but it's not like you don't have any choices. The first one is relatively easier, and each successive one makes things easier for more and more other students, too.

Re:Unresolved bugs.

I'm torn...

I can't decide which is worse:
groping through Knowledge Base documents and being put on hold for hours calling Microsoft

OR

reading outdated man pages then being cussed out by an experience, yet socially inept user, for asking a question on a discussion board

When it all comes down to it (MS or OO), I just end up entering the error message into Google anyway.

Re:some stuff

Slashdot should have posted another link to the english version- i don't think the majority of /. readers can read french fluently.

From what I've seen round here, the English version would be no more useful than a version in Klingon.

Re:some stuff

Where you will end up if you think Klingon is a real language [cnn.com].

MS employs extremely efficient foot-shooters.

Yes, but I think everyone will get the point that OO makes PDF files, and Word doesn't. PDF files are MUCH less likely to cause problems, because they can contain the fonts they use. I don't think that is available in Word. In most cases, you don't want the person to whom you send the file to be able to change it, and maybe later forget and think it is his.

I would LOVE to see someone make a similar two-page brochure, formatted exactly the same way, that would provide all the arguments for using OO. Here's one: Word is quirky; it often does things that you don't expect, like put footers at the head of the next page.

Re:some stuff

It's funny, considering Point no. 5:

Seamless Information Exchange
There are over 300 million users of Office worldwide who can seamlessly exchange documents without concerns for loss of data or formatting errors. Third-party studies show that competitive office suites retain only 75% accuracy (data and formatting) when receiving documents from Office users. See Summary eTesting Labs: Microsoft Windows XP/Office XP versus Red Hat Linux/StarOffice Migration Study

Hey MS, If you weren't afraid of formatting losses, why did you choose PDF? And how did you get your nice Office suite to create PDFs? Oh did you have to pay someone else for that feature? *snigger*

It's not a tangent! It's important.

It's not a tangent! It's important. Chen and Chan and Lu and Li (not their real Chinese names) have been completely unable to answer an important question about Windows XP. The reason? They're in China, and if they don't know the answer, they have to lie, since they have no way to contact anyone at MS who will listen.

Whenever I ask for MS technical support, I am calling about a difficult question. If it weren't difficult, I would answer it myself. Those are exactly the kind of questions MS technical support can't answer.

The Psychic Friends Network [karmak.org] is sometimes equally as good as Microsoft technical support at understanding bugs in Microsoft software.

Re:some stuff

Man, you know, the funny thing is that the one thing you pick on them for is true. Yes, even GPL'd software can have unresolved bugs sitting for months. Hell, go to the OO.o bug tracker and you can find entries from 2002 if you look for two minutes.

This isn't to pick on OO.o - writing bug-free software is manageable, but not necessarily easy, especially for something that big. But no, Microsoft isn't the only one who leaves bugs unresolved for months. If you're going to debunk this, I'd start somewhere else.

Re:some stuff

Hell, go to the OO.o bug tracker and you can find entries from 2002 if you look for two minutes.

Exactly... you can't go and find what unresolved bugs there are for any Microsoft product, can you? No, that's proprietary information, my friend, and you and I are not worthy to view it -- whether we're MS customers or not. What a beautiful example of OSS in action, and a strong alternate point to their argument.

- Leo

undocumented unresolved bugs

I've told this story many times:

A friend of mine worked for a rather large company and his users were having problems with excel corrupting files in a wierd, almost viral, way.

His Microsoft account rep kept on telling him that the problem must be with something that he was doing, because nobody else seemed to be having that problem.

Then my friend found out that someone at another company was having the same problem, and my friend had the following conversation with his MS account rep:

friend: I was talking to Mr. X at Ycorp the other day and, ...
MS: Oh yeah, Mr. X. I talk to him all the time.. YCorp is one of my accounts, you know...
friend: Ah, then you'll know that, for the last couple of months, he's having the same problem with excel that I've been having!.
MS: <guilty silence>.

One thing that you rarely get in the Open Source world is people lying about the existence of a bug.

Re:some stuff

ou can't go and find what unresolved bugs there are for any Microsoft product, can you? No, that's proprietary information, my friend, and you and I are not worthy to view it -- whether we're MS customers or not. What a beautiful example of OSS in action, and a strong alternate point to their argument.

This has nothing to do with open vs. closed. Plenty of closed-source companies allow the public to view their bug databases. Microsoft just isn't one of them.

Re:some stuff

Of course, if there's a bug that really hurts, and you have a competent IT staff (or even just one good programmer), you can fix it yourself. This advantage of OSS isn't stated often enough.

Re:some stuff

you have a competent IT staff (or even just one good programmer), you can fix it yourself

more than just that! you can:

• submit a bug report to the developer
• find solutions or workarounds in public fora
• contract someone else to fix the bug for money

and when you're done, you can just kick it back to the project and no one will ever have to deal with it again.

all these added features for infinitely less money.

Re:some stuff

> writing bug-free software is manageable

Oh, you just admitted you aren't a programmer.

All software of any reasonable complexity has bugs. Period. Process can help but it will never prevent 100% of bugs.

There are bugs in FOSS. There are bugs in proprietary software.

Now then, what's the difference? Well, with a proprietary vendor you can spend hours/weeks with tech support trying to move up through 1st, 2nd, till you get to 3rd level where you might be able to convince someone there is a bug. And then do you think that engineer is going roll out the red carpet, whip up a build and send it over to my house? No... I'm just another user with just another problem, and he might give me a workaround, but likely I will be waiting for the next release like everyone else. It's my only choice. Now if I'm a megacorp paying real money for lots of licenses I might be able to get that red carpet. But I'm not.

Now with FOSS I have options. I can get onto IRC or I can file a public bug report. For bad bugs, these are likely to be fixed right away. If it is decided its invalid for some reason I will get a response from an actual engineer saying why they closed the bug. If I don't get satisfaction well, I have the source. If I have the ability I can fix it myself. Or else I could contract someone else to do it. And then I'll probably give the patch back to the project if they want it.

There's a huge difference there. It's about power to get done what you need to. FOSS gives that to the user.

Re:some stuff

You should read the Salon article about tech support at one of the big three computer hardware companies.

They hire people with NO COMPUTER KNOWLEDGE, put them through a two-week "training" course which consists of reiterating "We don't support that", then turn them loose on YOU.

They are judged based on whether they can hold a tech support call to under 12 minutes - PERIOD.

Nothing else matters to them, the outsourcing company they work for, or the computer manufacturer that hired the outsourcing company.

The IT industry does not care a whit about its customers or its employees - just like every other industry.

Forget tech support. Occasionally you will find someone who will actually try to solve your problem - but he's on his way out at that company if he does.

And so should you be.

Bugs from 2002

Man, you know, the funny thing is that the one thing you pick on them for is true. Yes, even GPL'd software can have unresolved bugs sitting for months. Hell, go to the OO.o bug tracker and you can find entries from 2002 if you look for two minutes.

Sure you can. One of those is mine, in fact: OO.o doesn't have an overbar (opposite of underline) font attribute for text. Really a problem for doing technical documentation, but to date nobody has wanted to bother with it. Including me, as it happens; if it were important enough to $EMPLOYER we'd have added it already.

Of course, MSOffice doesn't have overbar either. Wonder what it would take for $EMPLOYER to enhance MSWord?

Re:some stuff

Seems like one of their big arguments is that there is no database client. I thought openoffice had a database client, am I wrong?

Re:some stuff

Not really. It has a data front-end that can be plugged into a backend database, but nothing as self-contained as Access. This is about the only valid complaint about a "lacking" office app in the OSS world. For the small office there's nothing like Access.

Don't get me wrong, I haven't used M$ Office since college 5 years ago (it was crap then and still is) but there is nothing like Access in the OSS world. Yet. There are some excellent front ends to e.g. pgsql/mysql/etc. but nothing Ma & Pa Kettle's General Store can fire up w/o being a DB admin. Is there?

BTW, that bit about OO users being more susceptible to viruses is really funny - it made my day.

Re:some stuff

I hear rekall [rekallrevealed.org] is trying to fill that role. Check it out and see if it meets your needs.

Re: unresolved bugs?

Back in 1995, Microsoft Word had a problem with auto-page numbering in the footer of documents that affected the page numbers as well as the font used if changed from the default 12pt Times Roman. 9 years later, this exact same bug remains.

Re: unresolved bugs?

See, now, whereas some may call this a bug, isn't it far more positive to characterize it as a commitment to tradition?
It's you humorless types that give /. such a negative reputation...

Re: unresolved bugs?

That bug was so difficult to deal with most of the time that a lot of my papers wound up being numbered by hand either on the computer or with a pen once I printed it.

Support Team

Actually, besides the already helpful OO.org developers, Novell has recently announced at brainshare that they will be giving full support for OO. From developers, to sales and user support. Not just for the linux part, but full OO support. Not a bad thing to have for those just getting into open source, or companies that need the assurances.

Re:some stuff

They didn't publish it in .doc because the PDF was done in Quark XPress:

Title: competitive OpenOffice.qxd
Author: Gravity
Application: QuarkXPress(tm) 4.11
PDF Producer: Acrobat Distiller 4.05 for Macintosh

How about eating your own dogfood before complaining against other brands Microsoft?

lying liars and the lies they tell

It seems Microsoft is learning from the administration of GW Bush in this regard. When dealing with an opponent, claim that the opponent has your flaws, whether or not this is true. This strategy is tailored to a news media unaccustomed and unprepared to investigate or otherwise do any more than quote sources. It becomes Microsoft's word (excuse the pun) against the diffuse band of evil virus-writing hackers who also happen to write open source software.

Fallacies

Fascinating use of "facts" and "logic" going on here. Let me start with this one: "...Basic feature functionality that enables content authoring is only one small aspect of what a small business needs. Businesses need to:..."

Well, that's a great argument. No, it isn't. The opening line was, "Open Office is good enough. I only need basic functionality." And Microsoft's response is, "No, you don't! You need more than that!" Well, thanks. I'm glad you know what we need more than we do.

Another argument they make is "User support such as training (OpenOffice UI, although similar in many ways to Office, is not the same and users may require 'retraining')."

Well, that's also swell! I'm glad Microsoft has assumed that we'd need retraining, because obviously everyone was originally trained using MS Office. I'm glad they assume that. That makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. So what about everyone who hasn't had training in either?

I'll leave the rest of the fallacies to more experienced users than myself.

Re:Fallacies

I would have expected them to say MSOffice has lower TCO or higher ROI than OOo, at least trumpet "Office is better". But no, all we get is "Don't you DARE switch from MSOffice or ALL THIS will happen to you!".

Ah, Microsoft is feeling the heat the free software community is lighting under their asses.

Got any of that "Ronson Fast Lite" left?

Forgot to include...

WHY open office can't format Office Documents correctly.

Re:Fallacies

After a couple years using WordPerfect, it took me about an hour (during which I still managed to get things done) to get used to MS Works. It was maybe 15 minutes (during which I managed to get work done, again) to get used to MS Office. OO took me a couple hours (and again, I still typed up a term paper in that time).

Yes, people require retraining to use a word processor they aren't familiar with, but it's not like you have to send them off to boot camp for nine weeks.

Re:Fallacies

"I'm glad Microsoft has assumed that we'd need retraining, because obviously everyone was originally trained using MS Office."

Well, that the truth isn't it? For every slashdot headline about some school, college or course teaching some 'other' Office suite, there's hundreds teaching MS Office. Even if they had no training at all, Microsoft Office is what most people have had prior expeirence of, so some readjustment will be required.

I agree that for computer literate users the move would go unnoticed, and so MS' argument is a bit weak, but so much of Office (Word in particular) is learnt parrot fashion. For the person who thinks Word is the computer, retraining would be required.... but not too much! :)

Re:Fallacies

Or how about this one: "OpenOffice provides no database client support". Really? Then how did I setup a fairly slick front-end to a MySQL database using OOo and ODBC? It's called OpenOffice Forms and even many die-hard OOo fans don't know about it because it's so buried. But it's there.

Oh, and if you don't want a separate back-end database, you can create a dbase database straight from OOo. Check out Tools/Data Sources in your friendly neighborhood OpenOffice install.

Re:Fallacies

ARGUMENT: License cost is only a small part of the total cost of ownership.

FACT: License cost is a significant part of the cost at $369-479 per PC (per CDW.com) for MS-Office 2003 Standard/Professional.

ARGUMENT: Installation and deployment costs

FACT: Many of the same methods used to deploy MS-Office work equally well, or better with Open Office. There are no software keys or other serial numbers to deal with in Open Office. You do not need to invest time and money into administering software licenses, audit trails and license compliance reports with Open Office. You do not need to worry about entering 25-digit CDKey codes on each PC or performing Microsoft Product Activation. You do not need a Microsoft Passport or the risk of associated unintentional information disclosure to use Open Office.

ARGUMENT: Existing MS-Office users will need retraining to use Open Office.

FACT: Like the retraining necessary when MS-Office 95 users were forced to move to MS-Office 97? And again to MS-Office 2000? And again to XP/2002? And, though to a lesser extent, again to 2003?

What happens when students, either due to school policy or an individual effort to save money, grow up using Open Office instead of Microsoft office? Won't this argument then get turned on its head?

ARGUMENT: Open Office does not have an email client, so customers may incur cost to get one.

FACT: Netscape? Mozilla? Pheonix? Eudora? Pegasus Mail? Outlook Express? Need I go on?

ARGUMENT: Businesses need to exchange documents with other businesses.

FACT: HTML and PDF are the two most widely used formats for sharing documents with other businesses, and both are natively written and read in Open Office, without the need to spend $200 more on Acrobat Writer. Microsoft's argument exposes their belief that they should and do monopolize the office productivity marketplace, or else how could they argue that MS-Office format files are more portable than PDF or HTML?

ARGUMENT: Ensure their mission-critical data is protected from virus attack.

FACT: Like those pesky office macro viruses? Or the dozens of exploits for Outlook? Or the fact that VBScript does not properly implement sandbox security? And since when is Microsoft so concerned about viruses? Hell, they used to include antivirus software at no additional charge with Windows 3.x. We now pay 4x more for Windows and Microsoft REMOVED the antivirus features from the OS!

ARGUMENT: Microsoft ... providing [support] resources where, when and how you need them. OpenOffice users have to search the web for answers.

FACT: I see no difference between searching Microsoft's website and newsgroups for answers than searching OpenOffice.org's, except that in Microsoft's case I get anectdotal answers (this worked for me) or (I learned this trick at work), whereas with OpenOffice, there's a chance I can talk to someone who KNOWS THE SOURCE CODE.

Of course, I can pay Microsoft for support if I really need it. After spending $125 I usually have to wait on hold for over an hour to speak with someone with an accent so bad that I have to get everything spelled to understand the answer.

ARGUMENT: MS-Office documents may not open properly in Open Office and visa-versa.

FACT: Isn't this Microsoft's fault? After all, they are the ones that keep changing their applications to make interoperability more and more difficult with each release.

Re:Fallacies

But when the first column of every table comes out in reverse-video when displayed in Word, and Word can't fix it, then there's something very wrong with what OO.o is doing.

Well, since the table isn't being displayed properly in Word, it sounds like there's something very wrong with what MSO is doing. Something like:

editor=check_editor()
case editor in
OO) display_tables_wrong();;
MSO) work_properly();;
esac

Not that Microsoft has ever been shown to use such underhanded tactics, I know.

Re:Fallacies

Sorry to break it to you, buddy, but MS Office compatibility is not a "basic funcionality". It is a requirement born of Microsoft's monopoly. If MS were to release the Word document specs then other people could write compatible files. As it is, there are plenty of other options (i.e. pdf and rtf) and as soon as MS loses an appreciable amount of market share to any other text editor, it will be a moot point. As consumers we really need to demand an open standard. If we could ever get to that point, life would be much easier for all of us.

Re:Fallacies

I must be missing something. I just created a doc with a table in OO.o and saved it three times (XP doc/win95 doc/rtf). I then opened it up in word 2000 and it was correctly formatted in all three cases. Of course, I haven't bought a copy of office since office 2k premium, so this may relate to office xp and later revs... DAve

Re:Fallacies

OK, now instead of creating a poxy one table "test document", open MS Word, create a document with actual content, apply liberal and inconsistent formatting, and then use spaces to line things up (you know, just like you are a regular office secretary who doesn't know you can use tab stops or other 'tricky' things like that). Insert a table if you like. Be sure to use bullet points, and add headers and footers.

Once done, save into Word 97 format. Now get OpenOffice to open that and make it look like it did in Word. It's just about impossible.

When a document is created in a sane way (by a person who has experience with Word), OpenOffice works like a charm. Unfortunately, most people aren't experienced with Word (and most "training" doesn't tell them what they need to know, like why it keeps changing the font if you move to the last line), and they create crappy documents. As soon as the document looks different in OO, they *hate* the new software, and it often never gets a second chance.

Re:Fallacies

OO.o doesn't provide basic functionality.

It fails to write Word-compatible .doc format documents.

You are correct -- in a heterogenous environment, MS Office is better then Open Office.

However, how many environments are running the same word processor, nevermind the same version?

This is more anecdotal then hard evidence, but have you tried to read a complex document written in an older version of word into a newer version? OO.o seems to get it more correct then the latest release of MS Office.

Have you ever tried to import a non-word format into word?

Now, consider this rebuttle:

By using Open Office.org, you have several benefits to promote a heterogenous environment. Due to the fact that its free, everyone can run the latest version. Since it runs on a variety of platforms, you are not locked into a single vendor of OS or hardware. Your employees can run the same version at home without additional cost, and transfer those files to the office without any compatibility issues.

Also, being a large commercial open source project backed by several large businesses, you recieve the quick bug and security fixes of OS, yet have the security of a fortune-500 company.

Re:Fallacies

Do you mean "homogeneous" [reference.com], i.e. "all the same"? Not "heterogeneous" [reference.com], "all different".

Not trying to be a grammar Nazi, but the words mean totally opposite things.

I disagree that a homogeneous environment is better, because it's not practical. Do you never exchange documents with other organizations? Unless you can force the whole world (or at least the bits you communicate with) to use the exact same versions, you need to be able to support diversity. If you want everyone in your organization to use the same version, you can't upgrade anyone until you can upgrade everyone. Upgrades will be few and far between; painful, feared and hated.

Re:Fallacies

You may need to check your work here. I created (yesterday) and 7 page Word doc that included mutiple tables created in in Calc that behaved flawlessly. There are some problems in document conversion, but I have been using OO for more than 2 years and I have had only 2 issues that I had to find work arounds for, one of them being the font translation issue that messes up some bullet points. Btw I produce an average of 6 docs per week, since a large part of my work is technical writing. Also, its worthy of note that most of the people I send these to have never heard of an Office alternative, that idea hasn't even entered their universe, but I have not had one report of a problem.

my reason

I chose MS Office because I like throwing away my money. I am also a moron. That is why I have a chandelier hanging in my car.

good logic

Some of the weirder things they claim in it is that by choosing MS Office over OpenOffice.org one is protected from the threat of viruses

yes because i get all sort of virus alerts about new security threats for open office.

Note the URL path

The path is:
/partner/salesmarketing/opensource/discguides

Disc stands for "disinformation campaign"

Hmm, very little is said about features...

One of the things I find most interesting about this guide is how much it focuses not on how MS-Office is better but on the many inconveniences you will suffer by switching away from it. They focus on the pains of data migration, macros, and training. And to the question "What if OpenOffice has all the features I need" they don't attempt to refute the claim, they point to all the pain you will feel when MS-Office users start sending their "full-featured" documents to people who only have OpenOffice. MS-Office was feature-complete as of Office 95, everything else is not simply window dressing, it's down-right irritating

They're admitting to anti-competitive behavior

Wow, what better argument can you give than that OO.org can't open "full featured" word documents of the most recent word versions?

Now, why can't OO.org open those documents? It's not because OO.org doesn't want to, or isn't up to date; the reason is because Microsoft keeps the method of opening those documents secret! They drive out the competition by not letting them know how to open the files. This justifies the EU's recent actions even more.

Re:They're admitting to anti-competitive behavior

It's not because OO.org doesn't want to, or isn't up to date; the reason is because Microsoft keeps the method of opening those documents secret!

First, they didn't say that. They just said that you can't read the documents. This is a well-known fact, so I don't see how stating it is "admitting to anti-competitive behavior".

But anyway, the main point is that if I were running a business, I would not want to use a product that can't read documentst that others send to me. I wouldn't be interested in why I can't read them, so this still sounds like a compelling reason to use MS Office. Whether the software has the features they need (which might include reading Word .doc's) seems like a better basis for a business decision then the reasons why it has or doesn't have those features.

Re:Hmm, very little is said about features...

"They focus on the pains of data migration, macros, and training"

Ah, the trials of a monopoly. Once you've attained complete market saturatation, your only option to is to keep locking in your current users more and more tightly. It's a bitch moving an Access database to another version of Access, let alone another suite entirely.

The Dalai LLama
A watched comment never gets modded...

Re:Hmm, very little is said about features...

"MS-Office was feature-complete as of Office 95"

They did add that wonderful feature that refuses to believe that you actually do want bullet points numbered 1,2,3,7, and 9.

-B

Re:Hmm, very little is said about features...

Ahh yes, the paperclip. Otherwise known as the productivity police. "Productivity detected! BINK! BINK! Now interrupting with inane and irrelevant suggestion"

Re:Hmm, very little is said about features...

It's amazing.
The only office features I've ever used that oo doesn't have, are some of the useful security holes... eh, I mean collaboration features.

Re:Hmm, very little is said about features...

Features are almost completely ignored. The fact is, my OpenOffice does more of what I need to do than MS Office. I can author documents and when I'm done publish them as PDF (File - Export As PDF...).

Can MS Office do that? Sure, I can install a "PDF Printer" and some third party utilities, but out of the box OO can create a PDF suitable for sharing with anyone on any platform.

The argument that you're suddenly incompatible with everyone else is specious. To be perfectly honest, one of the most incompatible applications out there is MS Word. If you're going to share Word docs with anyone, you better make sure they are running the same version of Word; otherwise, YMMV.

Organizations currently standardized on Word are perfectly capable of re-standardizing on something else (like OpenOffice). OO is another option for any sized company out there, if a migration is a barrier for entry then the same statement can easily be made for the next version of Microsoft Office.

If MS wants to win, they'll need to do a better job here. This is pure marketing glitz, and to be perfectly honest most of the major tech companies (HP, Sun, and Microsoft) have been especially guilty of doing this as-of-late. I think we're on the verge of another tech bubble.

Its a beautiful thing!

Inch by lonely inch, the Open Source Movement/Linux/whateveryouwannacallit matures and grows more powerful.

And M$ says they won't release a new version for (what was it?) three years? Five?

Meanwhile the opensource coders and fans continue whittling away in the trenches, refining their dreams and ever more gradually making MS look pretty damned bad and ugly.

I think of where Linux distros are today compared to 5 years ago -- and I think about where they will be 5 years ahead!!

It's a beautiful thing!

PDF

"Microsoft Office vs OpenOffice" document, published by Microsoft in ... PDF format.

Amusing...

Re:PDF

I wonder if they produced the document in OpenOffice 1.1 so they could just click the "Export Directly as PDF" button?

Re:PDF

Even better, it was created on a Mac...

No, really, it was created on a Mac

From the Document Properties for OpenOffice.pdf:

Description

Title: competitive OpenOffice.qxd
Author: Gravity
Subject:
Keywords:
Created: 9/11/2003 10:05:53 AM
Modified: 9/11/2003 5:06:03 PM
Application: QuarkExpress(tm) 4.11

PDF Information

PDF Producer: Acrobat Distiller 4.05 for Macintosh

PDF Version: 1.2 (Acrobat 3.x)
Path:
File Size: 53.96 KB (55,259 Bytes)
Page Size: 11 x 8.5 in
Tagged PDF: No
Number of Pages: 2
Fast Web View: Yes

Time to check out Open Office

Hmmm. If Microsoft considers OpenOffice a sufficiently mature product that it warrants a comparison, then I guess it is time for me to compare.

Re:Time to check out Open Office

I was just thinking the same thing. Last time I tried OO, I concluded it was "not ready yet" and went back to Word & Excel. The fact that MS thinks it's worth attacking makes me think the newest version must be worth another look.

Good

Many of the same people who could possibly be swayed by this probably haven't heard of OpenOffice.org anyway. This is free publicity.

I can't imagine anyone seriously basing their purchasing decisions off of such a document, although I'm sure someone here has an acquaintance who can disappoint my small amount of faith in humanity.

hmmm....

And yet the comparison document is in a format that can't be read by MS Office, but CAN by OpenOffice.org...not a great idea :)

Chris

Re:hmmm....

actually no... Openoffice exports to PDF but is not a PDF reader itself. Still one would then have to wonder if the pdf was originally written in openoffice...

Naturally they EYODF

Of course Microsoft would create this document using their own products, naturally, they are the big proponent of the "Eat Your Own Dog Food" methodology.

So why then when I click on Document Properties on this PDF do I see?

Creator: QuarkXpress 4.11
Producer: Acrobat Distiller 4.05 for Macintosh

Bill: while you're transferring this over to Microsoft Publisher perhaps you'd like to fix the typo on page 1: "rteam".

John.

Clippy!

"B-but, Open Office doesn't have Clippy, the helpful paper clip. Or a wizard. Or a little Microsoft logo that tells you when you're writing a letter (because obviously, you don't know). We even have a helpful little puppy! You like puppies, don't you? Everybody likes puppies! Fine, go ahead and use Open Office, puppy killer!"

Re:Clippy!

Every time you use MS Office god kills a kitten. Think of the kittens.

Step 3

first, they ignore you
then, they laugh at you
then, they fight you <-- you are here
then you win

Will step 4 happen? Stay tuned.

Rule one of marketing..

1. Never mention the name of your competitor.

Once a company names their competitors in marketing literature, you know the company is losing ground. Or so the marketers say. I'm not sure if I believe it though

Re:Rule one of marketing..

Your are 100% right (MOD PAY ATTENTION TO PARENT!!)

I work for a software company, when a customer questions a competitor product or asks "Which is really better" kind of question, we always tell them:

"Install both and you can make a better decision".

I bet Microsoft would _never_ use that line!

Wow, Sales people get it REALLY wrong sometimes

After reading this, it looks like they are marketing OO!! I mean, sure it doesn't have Clippy and all (more features) and it doesn't have an email client (umm, do we really need another anyways?), but personally, I _hate_ Clippy.

Why didn't they put the "System Requirements" of Office? I mean, if it's a comparison shouldn't you put some sort of "comparison" information somewhere? That alone would show that OO is multi-platform, a HUGE benefit for most business..

The open-source community should be using this paper to hype OO, IMHO it does a great job!

Re:Wow, Sales people get it REALLY wrong sometimes

Okay, in that case, let's compare:

http://www.microsoft.com/office/previous/xp/sysr eq s.asp

Windows XP Professional, or Windows XP Home Edition
128 MB of RAM plus an additional 8 MB of RAM for each Office program (such as Word) running simultaneously

Office XP Standard
210 MB of available hard disk space
Office XP Professional and Professional Special Edition
245 MB of available hard disk space

Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows Millennium Edition (Windows Me), Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 6 (SP6) or later, Windows 2000, or Windows XP or later.

Computer with Pentium 133 megahertz (MHz) or higher processor; Pentium III recommended

Okay, so break it down:

A computer (d'uh), 210-245 Megs of RAM PLUS 8 megs for each product run (so Word, Excel, Access, Outlook = 32 Megs) so 242-277 megs. OS: Windows.

Now from the article:

System Requirements
Windows (98, NT, 2000, XP) - Pentium-compatible PC,
64 MB RAM, 130 MB HD; or
Linux (x86, PowerPC) - 64 MB RAM and 170 MB HD
Solaris (x66, SPARC) - 64 MB RAM and 240 MB HD; or
MacOSX (beta); or
FreeBSD

Hmmm, so OO uses less RAM, less system resources, any runs on a variety of platforms.

Now here's the clincher:

basic feature functionality that
enables content authoring is only one small aspect of what a
small business needs.

So they are promoting bloating. Neat!

Open Office is "good enough"

This quote made me stop:
I only need basic features. OpenOffice is good enough."
In today's networked, highly collaborative world, businesses do not operate in a vacuum; basic feature functionality that enables content authoring is only one small aspect of what a small business needs.

It reminded me of an incident that happened several years ago. I was working at a company with close ties to Microsoft when the "I Love You" virus struck. Both Microsoft and our company were hit hard by it. A couple days after the messy cleanup, I sent a Word doc to a Microsoft employee. It was a form we used often and it had a macro that allowed the recipient to fill in some check boxes.

I got a nasty reply from the microsoft employee about how it was irresponsible to send word docs with macros in this time of virus vulnerability. Since then, I have used as few of the gimmicky features that MS Office supplies. They don't add much to your documents, and they set you up for virus and incompatibility problems. Only using basic features isn't something you should settle for, it is a good rule to follow to avoid lots of nasty problems.

Migration cost is the biggest

M$ is right about one thing- migration is the most painful and expensive part. Unlike using M$ products, though, the pain stops afterwards.

Having an option is bad?

I was amused by the claim that OO was inferior because "if bugs [in OO] go unresolved, users have the option to resolve problems by...".

This apparently contrasts with MS Office, where if bugs go unresolved, users do not have any options.

Ok. I knew that, but I'm surprised that MS raised it as a point. :-)

Same old FUD as before

We've already discussed most of what's in this document. For example:

3. "OpenOffice 1.1 is an open source alternative." OpenOffice does not have a dedicated development or support team. Consequently, if bugs go unresolved, users have the option to resolve problems by scouring through numerous community sites and chat rooms.

MS has been saying things like this about OSS for years. Of course they don't mention what your options are if a bug in MS Office goes unresolved.

The number one reason NOT to use MS Office...

Too expensive, no useful additions in years.

I'm still using Office 97 on my Windows computer. It cost me about $70 when I got it, and it's functionally identical to the Office 2000 and Office XP that my university and workplace use. The additions in the last several iterations of Office have been of only niche usefullness, and you can usually get something to do that with 97 anyway.

At least with OO, I'm not asked to pay another $150 every year or two just to get a new font, or a new text overlay effect that I could do with the old one anyway.

Spellcheck

The spell checker must not work on that doc (or they didn't use it or they have some strange settings)

"support rteam."

Maybe others, but that one was glaring @ me (it is right beneath the 3. OpenOffice 1.1 is an Open Source alternative)

Also what is this OpenOffice they refer to? I know of an OpenOffice.Org and they mention that "OpenOffice" is a trademark owned by someone else.

Support?

OpenOffice does not have a dedicated development or support team. Consequently, if bugs go unresolved, users have the option to resolve problems by scouring through numerous community sites and chat rooms.

I guess they've never tried to resolve an MS issue as a lowly home user, slogging through the MS "knowledge base". I usually end up Googling for answers to my MS Office questions.

The best part...

The best part has to be "with an R&D budget of over $4.8 billion, Office is a core Microsoft business."

$4.8 billion, and it's not up to par, IMO, with OpenOffice

My experience with OO.o

I just bought a new computer and chose to skip getting MS Office on it, so I have been experimenting with OO.

My results so far: in general, I prefer MS Office. Perhaps it's just because I'm more familiar with its eccentricities, but I find many things about OO annoying.

I can't map functions to ALT keys, and the relatively simply "switch to style X" involves setting up a macro before I can bind it to a key.

It took me a long time to get section numbering right. Eventually it did work, but the vast array of options confused me and tweaking them introduced subtle problems of their own.

OO doesn't have book-style figure layout. (Neither does MSO.) Drawing is not easy, and not well integrated.

This is not an evaluation; this is just the list of things I wanted to do on day one that pissed me off. MS Office has its own problems, and many of those persist for version after version. But the devil I know is better than the devil I don't when all I want to do is get some work done.

I assume OO.o will get better, and I'm going to keep using OO.o to see what happens as I get more familiar with it. I sure can't beat the price.

Re:My experience with OO.o

If you want real layout you have to use something like Pagemaker or Framemaker or Quark XPress, which are designed for it. Word tries, and OOo does pretty much what Word does.

But I don't think Word tries hard enough. The layout has been pretty much the same for as long as I can remember, which is a pretty damn long time. Meanwhile they're busily adding blinking text (for the blinking toner in my laser printer). For all OOo's faults, at least it hasn't had those faults for years running.

Re:My experience with OO.o

Hmm, I made my wife compare the two office suites and then asked her which ones is better. And she said flat out that MS Office is better and more convenient to her as well since she used to use it at work.

Then I told her that she can either pay $500 and I will install MS Office for her or she can have OpenOffice for free. Guess what? She opted for OpenOffice and bunch of shoes and dresses :)

I'd say, the OpenOffice is definitely ready for market.

buying e-mail client ???

customer may incur a

licensing cost associated with buyng an e-mail application

Hmm, is Mozilla still free ?

Re:buying e-mail client ???

Hmm, is Mozilla still free ?

Yup.

Now, let me know when Mozilla will do calendar, appointment book, task list, and email integration.

And before you flame me as a troll - I use Firefox at home and work and Thunderbird at home. Work requires I use Outlook, and it's because of those features that it has value. I don't find its email capabilities particularly wonderful by themselves, not to mention the slew of virus vulnerabilities (but that's ok, because we paid for, at a considerable expense, a mail server virus scanner). Despite the drawbacks there is very little that is actually competitive with Outlook/Exchange. And most of the alternatives (Notes, for example) suck even more. Yes, there are some OSS solutions out there as well, but they're not up to the same level in functionality as Outlook/Exchange. And that's a pretty sad statement.

Microsoft Sweating over Office?

Definetly.

From a developer's perspective, over the last year they have pushing Office 2003 down our (mainly MS based shop) throats. I can't rememeber how many free courses I have both declined and been to - all evangelising using a component of Office as part of the front end. (Not mention to all the free cd's of Office for us.)

Not a bad strategy - get the developers to build their apps requiring a cool little widget in Office 2003 so the customer HAS to upgrade to the latest version to use the app.

Thanks, but no thanks our customers are not keen when Office 97, Star or Open Office is fine for their needs.

There's only one really good reason to use Office-

The golden rule...he who has the gold rules.

If someone is giving you money (employer or client) and they demand that you give them Office files (.doc, .xls, .mdb), you have to be able to provide them. They don't want to hear "well .rtf blah blah conversion blah". They use Office and they're giving you money, so they call the shots. An internal debate between open-source principals and cash is a short one.

-B

Re:There's only one really good reason to use Offi

In OO do a simple "save as" and save it in word format, similar steps for excel and powerpoint.

By the way I haven't seen anyone mention Sun Microsystems here, we owe a lot of our Open Office success to their team. Cheers.

Re:There's only one really good reason to use Offi

Although you shouldn't lower yourself to doing business with such people in the first place, here's a trick:

• Save as .RTF from your favorite libre word processor
• Rename the file from .RTF to .DOC

Microsoft Word will see that the .doc is actually an .rtf, and handle it properly, while your clueless MS Word user will never know what you really did.

Little anecdote...

I work in a US spinoff of a Japanese chemical company. As such, there are times when users here have to deal with documents from Japan, complete with Japanese fonts.

A rather nice lady reported a problem with an Excel document that contained Japanese fonts. The characters in the spreadsheet were appearing as squares rather than the proper Japanese characters. Naturally, this appeared to be a fonts problem, so my first attempt at a fix was to install the Japanese language set. Unfortunately, this didn't work, as the document STILL had nothing but squares where the Japanese characters should have been.

It looked as though it was a versioning issue. It looked like a document created with Japanese character with Excel 95 (the document seemed to have been created with that) could NOT display the characters properly in Excel 2000. I couldn't find any method of getting the document to show up properly in Excel 2000, and the solution seemed to be to install Excel 95, because that was the only application that would show the characters properly.

Then I remembered OpenOffice.

I didn't know if it would work, but I downloaded and installed OO 1.1. I opened the Japanese document, and to my surprise, I was greeted with the spreadsheet just as it should have appeared, complete with the Japanese characters. Not content to leave it at just that, I re-saved the document from within OpenOffice, then I opened it with Excel 2000. Lo and behold, the document appeared correctly! The only way that I could get a document created in Excel 95 to show up properly in Excel 2000 was with Open Office.

Needless to say, I related the solution to the network admin who had assigned me the task, recommending that OpenOffice be considered as an alternative or replacement to MS Office.

Re:Little anecdote...

I ran into a similar problem a few months ago. I had a user that had Windows crash while he was in a document. After that he couldn't open the document. We tried copying it to another Windows computer and opening it in that computer's copy of Word. No luck. Finally, on a lark I took it home and tried opening it on my Linux box. OO opened it with no problems. I resaved the doc and he was able to open it again on his computer in Word.

Microsoft Office has no threat of viral infection

Microsoft Office has no threat of viral infection. That's because viral infection is very real. Hell, they ought to remove all doubt and just ship Microsoft Office pre-infected.

Halloween XVCXXIXXCVIX

From an email that went through the marketing offices of Microsoft headquarters:

Ten reasons

you should choose Microsoft Office Deluxe Professional Edition over OpenOffice.org:

1. It makes us more money.

Ok, so we're still about nine reasons short... Someone needs to conjure them up. -Bill.

Make of it what you will...

OO rollout goes well

I have a customer with about two hundred Windows desktops. Most are win2k which are relatively trouble free, but they're so thrilled with XP (Wintendo) that they've blocked any more entering the enterprise after the first five. We're working on a Knoppix installation and the Mocha TN5250 client might be the final piece of that puzzle ... we shall see.

Some users intially whined about receiving a non M$ office package, but they whined much less when the IS department started a charge back scheme. A few of the finance folks are heavily invested in Office and they will rightly stay there, the rest are very likely to get moved to OO the next time the M$ tax appears, and they'll have no choice if we get Knoppix to do everything that is needed :-)

They got one thing right...

...although only by inference. The one thing that keeps us from moving to OO tomorrow is the lack of a user-friendly, quick-learning-curve, brain-dead-reporting database application. And tools to get all the *&^$%% mission-critical .mdb's running around this office converted.

Have to Laugh

From the PDF:

Question the "free" argument... License cost makes up only a small portion of the total cost of ownership. More significant costs include: Installation and deployment,

Data migration and testing (especially if customer uses Access databases)

My emphasis, there. And I couldn't agree more. Handling issues of inaccessable Access databases is incredibly important, and is notorious for chewing up helpdesk hours.

Especially when Office 2000 broke Access compatibility with 98 databases, and forced everyone to upgrade (or to not touch the database with Access2000 so that those who had not yet upgraded could still get to their data).

OfficeXP did the same thing to 2000 databases - all it took was one XP user to touch the database, and all the 2000 users would suddenly be out of the loop. I fully expect Access2k3 to be the same way.

So yes, consider those Access databases as a major component of the cost of data migration. When one version of Access touches the database, be ready to install and deploy that same version to all your other clients, because with Access, you migrate your data whether you're ready to or not. And you pay every year for the privilige! Hooray!

Oh?

Some of the weirder things they claim in it is that by choosing MS Office over OpenOffice.org one is protected from the threat of viruses

Bill, give Darl his crack pipe back...

Re:This document should not even exist...

If a group of people got together on the internet and designed a car that could be built from parts available from Home Depot, would Ford or GM have to explain to us why their cars are better?

No, but when Japanese manufacturers started producing more reliable vehicles Ford, GM, and Chrysler all had to resort to intensive marketing strategies until they could develop something that was more competitive. It worked pretty good too.

They thought they were in control of the automobile world and were proved wrong; the same *might* be happening to Microsoft. For quite a while they had little to no competition; now they are seeing some real threats on the horizon, and they're only doing what anyone else would do in the same position. They simply became too comfortable with having a large piece of the pie, and now are having to fight to keep as much of it as they can.

So sick of the TCO argument

Is anyone else here tired of MS whipping out the ol' TCO everytime an open source product kicks their product's ass?

From the article:
License cost makes up only a small portion of the total cost of ownership

We all remember Microsoft's skewed Windows .NET Server/Linux comparison and how they creatively invented numbers to show how expensive Linux was in TCO. Funny that they never factored in the billions of dollars companies lose due to security flaws that enable breakins and data theft, macro viruses and exploits of other features they think you can't live without, and lost time/effort/work from programs/OSes that crash. That will raise your TCO, won't it?

So Microsoft, QUIT IT with the TCO argument. None of us are buying it, and subsequently, none of us are buying your stuff.

case study (well, sort of)

My daughter, who grew up on vi, abiword, gnumeric and SO/OO, spent over a year interning at a non-profit organization with at leats a thousand users, and hundreds of computers. They had older versions of Office. They didn't have the money or inclination to upgrade. They'd considered switching to Linux, but didn't want to retrain users all the time (they have several hundred new interns a year, plus shorter term help more frequently).

She introduced them to AbiWord, Gnumeric and OpenOffice. WIthin two weeks, they had completely switched to OO. The IT department loved her after that, and I thought a couple of them were going to kiss me when I met them. They have far less problems with OpenOffice than they had with MSOffice. User training hasn't been an issue!

They interchange documents with people all over the world. Occasionally they have to ask someone to regenerate something with an older format, but overall they are as happy as the proverbial clams.

My favorite bits in the MSO/OO "comparison" document were:

1. In the OO features they listed database user tools, but later stated that OO included no database client support. Say what?
   
2. A user may incur additional costs by having to buy a mail client. Even if one can't get by using Mozilla or one of the other free mail clients, there are several good, solid solutions for a lot less than the cost of MS Office!
   

MS Words fails with large documents

The german computer magazine c't [heise.de] reviewed word processors in it's last issue. They especially looked into large documents by inserting hundrets of images and footnotes into a document. MS Word's layout falled apart after 52 images (rendering the document in an unreparable state) while OpenOffice.org didn't show any problems at all.

This isn't a new problem BTW. I remeber having lost a document in Office 97 a few years ago...

XML

I love it. They touted Office's lip service to XML as an advantage, forgetting that OO's internal file format is pure XML with an open published DTD. A decent programmer can make software to read and repurpose an OO document with 100% accuracy.

Anyone with knowledge of both can blow away most of these arguments. However, some do have merit in certain circumstances.

Microsoft does it again

I thought Microsoft would have learned by now.
FUD is not effective. Didn't they even mention this in their own documents.

Today there are a lot of CEOs that not yet have heard of OpenOffice.org or StarOffice. After reading this they will start asking themselves can I reduce my costs using OpenOffice.org intead of accepting the Microsoft Office suit as the only way to provide office functionality.

Microsoft may, or may not. be right that MS-Office is better. But what managers will ask is: Is OOo good enough?

Just like managers found IE good enough when compared to the costly but better Netscape.

So I suppose we have to thank Microsoft for their unintended free marketing of free software.

Office can't save files as PDFs.

I've found the "Save as PDF" feature in OO.org to be invaluable.

If you work in an environment that does not require press-quality PDFs, but does use PDFs for office document exchanges, OO.org saves you the $300+ cost of buying Adobe Acrobat.

Advocacy within the office.

It's taken a bit of time, but I've managed to get our office to take open source tools seriously.

Open Office is finding it's way on to more desktops, as are other applications.

Tools like Audacity [sourceforge.net] are great when you have a level designer who wants to tweak a short audio clip, but you can't justify spending the money you did on Sourceforge for the audio guy.

The next step is getting companies interested in donating to the projects that they find useful, be it in code time or a few bucks for project hosting costs.

PDF Created On A Mac

Microsoft believes in their own products so much that they didn't use any of their own products to create this document. They may as well have created it in OO.

From the Document Properties for OpenOffice.pdf:

Description

Title: competitive OpenOffice.qxd
Author: Gravity
Subject:
Keywords:
Created: 9/11/2003 10:05:53 AM
Modified: 9/11/2003 5:06:03 PM
Application: QuarkXPress(tm) 4.11

PDF Information

PDF Producer: Acrobat Distiller 4.05 for Macintosh

PDF Version: 1.2 (Acrobat 3.x)
Path:
File Size: 53.96 KB (55,259 Bytes)
Page Size: 11 x 8.5 in
Tagged PDF: No
Number of Pages: 2
Fast Web View: Yes

Viruses + office suites

I would just like to mention that one of the worst headaches I've ever seen with viruses in the workplace was the outbreak of MS-Word macro viruses shortly after Office '95 came out.

Sure, it was a while ago, but I spent a lot of hours cleaning that crap off of people's machines in the couple of weeks before we had a real fix.

What a great ad for OO

If the first page of this PDF read like a good advertisement for OpenOffice and reason enough to leave MS Word behind, then you're among friends...

I almost feel like writting a letter to MS saying "Thanks" for advertising Open Office and getting the name out, mentioning that based on this PDF I've just switched from MS Word to Open Office.

Microsoft? No.

Hold on. One of the reasons is to "protect" people from getting viruses? Um, that's sorta a given fact if they use ANY Microsoft product. Rare, but there. With Open-Office though, you will be a hell of a lot safe. Besides, which is more popular? MS Office of course and that's another reason why it's more of a target.

And of course Microsoft will be saying that their product is better. They DO try to say that Windows is better than Linux after all...

The only feature I miss from Microsoft office

I used to love to check the document statistics including readability, number of words, characters, sentances, and indicated grade level of the piece. When you wrote for technical people the higher the grade level was, the better off you were. When you wrote for most end users then you aimed for much lower. In addition let us not forget the grammer checker for those who were writing for the grammer nazi types :)

There is no need for Office!

Years ago I learned word processing on Wordperfect 5.1 for Dos and spreadsheets were Lotus 123 version 2.3 for Dos. I switched to Win 3.0(big mistake), then to 3.1(improvement, on to 3.11(not bad). Along the way (2years) I got Lotus Smartsuite R4 and had everything I needed at 1/3 the price and disk space of office. I have used Lotus R9 and now OO 1.1. Last fall I put together a business plan on OO 1.0 and had no trouble at all, that was in RH9. I still use Win xp for games but serious work is Linux and OO.
Who needs a bloated virus trap with lots of fluff, but no useful, different features?

Some real reasons not to use OpenOffice...

(From the misses)

No comparable clipart library. (Different colored toruses??)

No comparable powerpoint type themes.

No document wizards, for Drawing app like in Publisher.

Sometimes difficulty figuring out the options menu. It's not layed out very well.

Seriously these are why she won't use it. She can go into publisher, click new X document, choose a picture, etc and print out the page. She couldn't care less about open source, she just wants to get something printed in 5 minutes or so while the kids are busy.

MS Office *is* better - right now.

Putting cost aside, and loyalty to the OSS model aside, MS rules the desktop because of Office. Now, I run OO. I never encounter any problems. When I build a new machine, more often than not, I install OO on it. But good god if you could hear my wife cuss! At work, they use MS Office for everything but email. OO is basolutely NOT able to deal with most of the documents that she gets from work. No matter the version of office, there is *always* some problem. Whether it's a weird formatting thing, or a completely unreadable document, there is always something that isn't right.

But if she makes something in OO, it rarely has a problem going the other way. She opens it at work with no issues.

But I would like to throw some points out there:

1. There *is* a learning curve. OO does thing just differently enough to confuse a long term Office user.
2. There *are* bugs - and we aren't talking about the obscure ones that MS Office tends to have. An example is superscripting and subscripting. My wife was swearing like a sailer over a math document she was preparing because of these issues - admittedly, I have no idea if 1.1 fixed the issue, snce she hasn't had to do a math document for awhile.
3. While with OO, you can search Google or the bugtracker for some answers... The MS Support sight is very good for Office. Office is MS's bread and butter. It isn't perfect - no complex software is, but its pretty damn good.
4. Groan if you want, but what email client do you have with OO? None. All versions of Office come with not just an email software, but one that happens to be a damn good one with an integrated PIM system, and direct server support on the backend. Outlook, altho the largest target for attack, is really nice and full featured. With proper setup, viruses can be very difficult to get - even in Outlook, and with proper user training, it can be almost impossible.

But on the flip, OO has a huge point on its side - it's free. The second biggest thng OO has going for it is that it is constantly evolving and getting better. OO gets exponentially better at every point release. Unlike MSOffice which has gotten more bloated than anything over the years.

Sun does offer paid support for OpenOffice.org

Counter to what the competitive points claim, Sun provides fee based support [sun.com] for the top-tier platforms (Linux-x86, Solaris, Win32) for OpenOffice.org, not just for StarOffice. It's right in the "Commercial Support and Training" portion of the OOo support homepage [openoffice.org] next to the Sun logo. There are also some other firms and independent consultants listed. Gee, not only can you get paid support from Sun, but price around your support needs as well! You'd think that if MS is trying to sell Office with support as a major bullet point they could at least have given the webpage a look!

While I can't speak for other places, on trinity [neooffice.org] where I host and answer OOo OS X support forums there's usually a Mac OOo expert answering questions within one day of asking. There are non-programmers who volunteer their time to help new people with installation, deployment, how-tos, etc. It seems unfair to belittle one-on-one expert help just because it's done for free :)

ed

Gems...

There are over 300 million users of Office worldwide who can seamlessly exchange documents without concerns for loss of data or formatting errors.

As anyone who has tried to open an Office 2000 document in Office 97, this is blatantly untrue.

License cost makes up only a small portion of the total cost of ownership.

Indeed. For MS products, the cost of constant forced upgrades, security problems, antivirus tools, e-mail scanners, etc. represent a serious additional cost.

OpenOffice UI, although similar in many ways to Office, is not the same and users may require "retraining"

Indeed, this is true. But at least they had the decency to put "retraining" in quotes. The vast majority of commonly used functions will be at a user's fingertips within minutes of loading OpenOffice. The rest are no more different than from one version of Office to the next. My wife is not at all technical, was trained on MS Office, and hardly noticed the difference when switching to Open Office.

OpenOffice does not have a dedicated development or support rteam. Consequently, if bugs go unresolved, users have the option to resolve problems by scouring through numerous community sites and chat rooms.

Note the "if" in that sentence. Note also the number of defects open in MS Office. Note also the excellent reputation of MS support.

businesses do not operate in a vacuum; basic feature functionality that enables content authoring is only one small aspect of what a small business needs.

Businesses indeed do not operate in a vacuum. I presume that this is why the document is in PDF format - so everyone can read it. Compare and contrast the ease of creating PDF documents in MS Word and in Open Office.

I could go on, but my righteous indignation circuits are all burned out. EUR500M? Should have been the full EUR5G.

Point by Point, Microsoft...

1. The costs of converting from Microsoft Office to other platforms is not an advantage for Microsoft Office over the long term. If you use Microsoft Office you will be faced with that conversion cost over and over again, every time you have need to use an alternative. If you use a tool based on open standards your data will remain accessible from other applications as time goes on. It's like the guy at the garage says when you put off repairs, "Pay now or pay later"...

Of course Microsoft's response would be that you will never have to migrate from Microsoft Office. Permit me to express a little skepticism: every few years we go through another forced upgrade and conversion as a new version of Microsoft Office comes on the scene. Not only is this a cost of Office, it's a regularly recurring one.

1 1/2. Open office doesn't have a mail client. This is an advantage: the mail client Microsoft provides is inherently insecure. By merging Internet Explorer with Windows Explorer they imposed on every application in the system the responsibility of parsing and evaluating the names associated with objects to try and guess whether they're trusted (and can be allowed to do things like read and write files) or not. Any application that uses the MSHTML control and related APIs, anyway. Like outlook...

2. There's actually a cost to features: the more features in your software, the more complex it is, and the more dependent the data you produce with that software is on the particular version. See point 1.

2 1/2. If you're not running Outlook, you've done more to prevent yourself from getting infected with a virus than anything you can do with Microsoft's help. Then you can go on and turn off the RPC service, the personal web publishing services, and with each step leave viruses further behind...

3. When we were installing our first Windows NT domain, I was unsure some of the setup. I called Microsoft three times before I got someone who was willing to provide an answer to one question, and it turned out to be the wrong one. Our network was basically down, and when i called Microsoft for help they told me I had used up our free support calls and could I provide a credit card number so I could pat them to fix the problem they'd caused. I went ballistic, my boss went ballistic, and a week later we got an apologetic call from someone at microsoft and some kind of free support contract... but in the meantime "numerous community sites and chat rooms" had fixed things for me.

4. Microsoft offers limited compatibility with Open Office is what I think they meant to say. As for macros and dynamic links and the like, well, see point 1 and point 2 1/2, remember when macro viruses were the worst problem out there? They haven't gone away, they've just been overshadowed by the flood of "cross zone exploits".

CLO (Chief Licensing Officer) sinks TCO

OOo is good. Good enough that I use it myself and install it on executives' PCs instead of MS Office w/ PowerPoint. It isn't as polished as MS Office; this is true. But it isn't "finished" yet, either.

Anyway, the real killer feature of OOo is lack of concerns over license compliance (for users, I mean, not developers; but that's an interesting distinction to need to make considering that license compliance with MS Office unambiguously refers to end-users). In a reasonably sizeable corporate office software license compliance is enough of a concern to have created a burgeoning market for compliance tracking and auditing tools.

In fact, I believe you'll soon have a new executive level CxO designation: CLO -- Chief Licensing Officer. This person's job is to oversee the department in charge not of installation, acquisition, maintenance, training, selection of software but merely of adhering to license terms. The impetus will be to avoid draconian (or has it progressed to Machevellian yet?) BSA audits carried out by warrant-holding sherrifs. Think I'm kidding?

With Open Source there are many benefits. One that cannot be denied is the total elimination of license management and compliance. This is true on both sides of the software equation -- producers and users. Imagine how much better MS Office would be if MSFT didn't have its brightest minds inventing ways to stop the software from working (XP Activation being only the latest incarnation; now you know the great advantage OOo has over MS Office -- it doesn't have to delay waiting for the Activation team to finish its work.) Anyone who's had to track licenses for a large installation knows the headache on the user side.

Remember, one violation per the BSA's standard (i.e., not just the "license" but the original invoice is also required to establish that you are not a THIEVING PIRATE!) can cost you not only a year's worth of milk money (up to $150,000 or more) but also your freedom (up to 5 years in the federal pokey with Bubba, the federal poker) [constructionweblinks.com]. That's a big price to pay for making an "extra" copy of MS Office for Mr. Jones' take-home laptop, isn't it? With proprietary software it doesn't take much to ruin your day.

Don't forget to add the potential for fines and/or prison as well as the overhead needed to maintain license compliance records to avoid them into the TCO equation.

Problem: Macros

The biggest (if not only) problem with OOo I heard from a guy which works in a bigger midsize company is the fact, that you can't reuse all the macros they wrote in MS Office. That's a big minus as lot's of company data (reports, worksheets etc) are using the macro options from MS Office. Otherwise, he said his company could adopt it...

it's funny...

from pdf:

Office provides innovative security on three levels to protect your business environment, data and intellectual property:

and one of these levels is

Data Loss: Auto recovery and application recovery tool

it's funny that OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 on my machine actually can open corrupted Word documents but M$ Office still can't.

and

...Microsoft has continued to innovate and invest in productivity applications since the '80s, evolving Office from a content authoring tool to a collaborative productivity enhancement platform. With an R&D budget of over $4.8 billion....

hmmm... what they are researching with all that money for all these years? PowerPoint?

OO 1.1 good, but has a ways to go

I've been using OO periodically for quite a while now (the pre 1.0 days I'd say, but can't really remember) and its made some fabulous progress, but as much as I'd like to, I cannot recommend it for my business or my employees just yet. The main feature that I use OO for these days is its PDF export function -- you don't get that with office unless you've got a full copy of Acrobat. However, I feel that the OO interface has something to be desired. Its just not as simple to navigate as Office 2003... I'm not one to give MS undue credit, but MSO2K3 is pretty nice. I don't expect OO to be of the same caliber as MSO2K3, and hopefully the next few releases to OO will make some inroads. At least it starts up a little faster now ;-)

I'm Convinced

I'm ready to switch. OpenOffice doesn't have all the wonderful nifty features that MS Office has, and I'm tired of explaining my use of this obscure piece of software to my friends and family...

So. Tell me - where do I buy MS Office for FreeBSD?

No?

Linux?

Solaris?

Oh.

Wait a second...

Wait one second...
"R&D budget of 4.8 billion"
*blinks*
Did I see that right? Is that how much they spend annually on developing Microsoft Office or is that a cumulative figure?

Microsoft should really investigate their TCD (total cost of development) to output ratio.

Unbelievable,
--Stephen

Advantages and Disadvantages

On the whole, when I first read the pdf on the microsoft site, I was actually rather impressed. For the most part, it was civil. Not what we'd all like, but relatively civil.

It was *almost* truthful for the most part... not entirely, but *almost*... ... and it is probably the best advertising OO.o has had. With this established, there are a few key points I think I would make about this arguement.

In the #OpenOffice.org channel on IRC, I was asked what I thought about the article, and the impact it has on OpenOffice.org as a whole. All in all, I thought its great for OOo. As long as we don't get into a petty pissing fight with MS Office, that is. Then someone was throwing around the idea that we should have a pointer article tossed back as a response to Microsofts little publication. I only replied "Why bother?" No matter what route we took with a reply, I think it would do more harm than good. The only thing I could think of as a reply would be a nice polite response to some of the false comments in the article.

There are a few ways where this advertising could hurt OpenOffice.org, but that would realistically only effect the crowds that would never switch even if their existances depended on it. I know a few people like that that live and breath the harddrive space Microsoft uses.

In cases like that, OpenOffice.org just might not be the better alternative, as they would be very stuck in their ways. I would like to think we would rather have 10 very satisifed users than 20... 10 of which would do nothing but complain about this problem or that problem, and do little if anything to help resolve the issue.

But, OO.o still has quite a ways to go. While I love it and use it for all of my writing, there are still a few things that need fixed and improved upon. But, I've decided to join the project and help make it happen when I have a little more time.. which should be in about a month when my current projects settle down. But, that is what I find so beautiful about the OO.o project. If I don't like something, I can dig on in and help fix it.

If MS Office offered that flexibility, I would have been enticed in joining the team. But, as it did not and never will, I'll be stuck in my ways and keep supporting OO.o ;)

Protected VBA code readable in Openoffice

I've a dislike for VBA, because of it's VB syntax. But if your into VBA and have protected VBA-Code that won't open in Word/Excel then try Openoffice. The 'protected' code itself is not encrypted and just flagged as protected. Openoffice does not care about the protection flag. It just opens the VBA code (user forms are not accessible) in it's script editor.
No surprise that Microsoft dislikes this software that is just another example that security by obscurity is borken by design.

Medical dictionary?

We would like to use OpenOffice.org as a cheaper replacement for MS Word 2002 but so far we've been hampered by the lack of a suitable medical dictionary. With MS Word we can use Stedman's medical spellchecker [stedmans.com] which includes all the words we need. Unfortunately when I talked to them they weren't interested in producing an OpenOffice.org version.

The only possible alternative I've found is the Medical Words [sourceforge.net] open source project. But's it isn't anywhere near complete enought and isn't being actively updated much. It would cost us far more to have our own employees update the list with thousands of additional words than just to continue paying MS Word license fees.

So, can anyone suggest an alternative medical spelling checker that is known to work with OpenOffice.org?

Quote

First, they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win.
-Gandhi

Is this the fight stage?

Free publicity for OOo

Recently we got new development machines at work, but we didn't have enough MS Office licenses to go around. So I downloaded OpenOffice.org and showed my boss how it worked--since most of the developers at my company only need Office to update our Excel timesheets and read bug report screenshots emailed from users who can't figure out how to send pictures except in Word documents, OOo suits our needs just fine.

And my boss had no idea that there was an open source office suite for Windows! He was impressed enough with it that we switched most of the department to OOo.

I'm sure there are many other PHB's out there who had no idea there was an alternative. Thanks, Microsoft, for cluing them in.

Just a few points...

Excerpt from article:
User support such as training (OpenOffice UI, although similar in many ways to Office, is not the same and users may require "retraining")
In reference to total cost of ownership of Open Office. I agree to an extent. Retraining does incur costs, but I don't know - I think retraining is really an overemphasized cost, and it's careless to suggest retraining may be necessary without a deeper explanation of what the difference is between the UIs, and how those differences affect the user experience. Gourmet Settings flatware, while similar in many ways to Oneida flatware is not the same, and yet I've found it unnecessary to be retrained.

Additionally, OpenOffice does not have an e-mail client, so customers may incur a licensing cost associated with buying an e-mail application. http://www.openoffice.org
There is an implication being made here that an OpenOffice user will inevitably need to buy a separate e-mail application. I see language like this all the time in "persuasive arguments" such as position papers. The brochure could have mentioned that users could acquire equally free email applications, but it doesn't because the goal is steer consumers away from the product.

"I only need basic features. OpenOffice is good enough." In today's networked, highly collaborative world, businesses do not operate in a vacuum; basic feature functionality that enables content authoring is only one small aspect of what a small business needs. Businesses need to: - Exchange business transaction information externally with customers and vendors.
How is this an advanced feature of MS Office? This is a secondary business activity that can be accomplished by using any set of compatible communication methodologies including EDI.

- Ensure that their mission-critical information is adequately protected from virus attack.
MS-Office protects businesses from virus attacks? Verdict: clever use of juxtaposition to imply a relationship between two independent things.

- Effectively manage customer relationships so as to maximize sales.
At least this point is more relevent; however, CRM implies much more than storing client emails in an addressbook or designing Word templates that tailor letters to specific clients.

- Quickly access key information from accounting and other business applications.
Finally something I can support. Excel is very flexible and there are a lot of business applications out there that make use of the interactivity between Excel and Microsoft SQL database servers

- Create sales and marketing material that portrays the business in a professional manner.
Photoshop. Illustrator. Dreamweaver... and yes, PowerPoint too... but Powerpoint is empowered by one's skills in the aforementioned applications. When you're giving a presentation, what matters is that the presentation is good, not whether it was done in PowerPoint. The new database features in Flash will help make Flash a very edgy presentation development app overtime. Especially if we start getting presentation templates for Flash.

- Do all this in a cost-effective manner because a small business does not have the resources of a large company for IT integration and support.
Perhaps the strongest argument for using OpenOffice instead of MS-Office. The bulk of document sharing is still paper-based. Therefore, if you won't be sharing your documents for editing purposes electronically, then you will be either printing the document or creating read-only versions of the documents using Acrobat.

I do like the idead of a document being perpetually current - always updated. The database features of Excel, PowerPoint, and Word bring us one-step closer; however, as I said, document sharing in business is still paper-based and will remain so. People will print out their documents to study them, archive them, and share them with others. Also, I have an inherent mistrust of

results from a test in germany's computer mag c't

Reputable german geek magazine c't [heise.de] has an great comparison of 7 word processing programs this month.

Surprising result: The biggest commercial text processors cannot produce a diploma thesis with 120 imgages and 240 footnotes. They all died at different stages of image insertion.

Word 2003 managed to add about just over 40 images before dying a horrible death. WordPerfect didn't fare much better.

OpenOffice.org stood out in that it imported all graphics and footnotes without problems.

Analysis and Rebuttal

Here are Microsoft's arguments against Open Office usage:

1. "OpenOffice is free"
Licence cost makes up only a small portion of the total cost of ownership. More significant costs include:

* Installation and deployment

Yes. Guess what? With OO, you don't need to worry about activation keys, whether you have enough licenses, going through a requisition process for a computer, or anything. You can just download the thing and install it.

* Data migration and testing (especially if customer uses Access database)

It's already been established that Access is a POS. If a customer is stuck using Access, they should be migrating to a DB that isn't liable to eat their data the next time Access feels like corrupting it.

Document conversion and rewriting macros (OpenOffice does not support Office macros)

And macros are one of the primary causes of document breakage and security problems out there already. Many people block or remove attached macros to avoid macro virus problems.

User support such as training (OpenOffice UI, although similar in many ways to Office, is not the same and users may require "retraining")

I don't get why "retraining" is quoted, but okay. There is likely some transition cost, though for the overwhelming masses of Office users, the used featureset is identical on both platforms. The same is true, though, of switching Word versions. This paper gives education users as an example -- I know one elementary school that uses an *ancient* version of Word on Windows 3.11. They have no reason to upgrade -- it works fine. Moving to a newer version is going to entail retraining costs no matter what.

Additionally, OpenOffice does not have an email client, so customers may incur a licensing cost associated with buying an e-mail application

Err...why? There are numerous excellent email clients out there that don't cost a penny. Outlook is a notoriously *bad* email client, famous for security problems.

2. "I only need basic features. OpenOffice is good enough."

In today's networked, highly collaborative world, businesses do not operate in a vacuum; basic feature functionality that enables content authoring is only one small aspect of what a small business needs.

There are no concrete problems included in this section with something that Office can handle and something that OpenOffice cannot. As others have pointed out, the "virus" issues is particularly ridiculous -- when OpenOffice *has* a reputation for being used as a virus vector as Office does, *then* it might be a concern. "Create sales and marketing material that portrays the business in a professional manner"? What? How can OpenOffice not do this?

OpenOffice 1.1 is an open source alternative.

OpenOffice does not have a dedicated development or support team. Consequently, if bugs go unresolved, users have the option to resolve problems by scouring through numerous community sites and chat rooms.

As opposed to the current Microsoft approach? This is aimed at "value" customers. Microsoft is not going to care in the least if they complain about a bug. There just isn't enough money involved for Microsoft to care about actually doing support. If it were Dell, say, they might take an interest. Open Source systems are generally *much* easier to get bugs fixed in and get issues to the developers. Let's take a look at MSIE -- it's been *how* many years of complaints from the Internet at large, and PNG support is still broken?

4. "OpenOffice is compatible with Microsoft Office."

OpenOffice offers limited compatibility with Microsoft Office. Formatting, document integration, dynamic links to data, macros, and customer applications will be lost.

Versions of Microsoft Office itself frequently break said compatibility with previous versions. I've seen instances where OpenOffice correctly imported a document from an old ver

Re:Viruses!!

Oo is vulnerable? lol

Maybe if they find a way to import Office macros..

Re:Macro compatibility

Actually the Open Office people inherited it from the original Star Office produced by a german company Star Division. Neither Sun nor the Open Office developers have really dug that deep into it. The first version of Open/Star Office was not that much different than the original Star Office 5.2. That version could be made to look like Star Office 6 just by changing some configuration files inside. They originally removed more than they put in. It used to have a really decent email client and a not so decent web browser.

Trademark issues

It's a little buried in the FAQs, but

7. Why should we say "OpenOffice.org" instead of simply "OpenOffice"?
The trademark for "OpenOffice" belongs to someone else. Therefore we must use "OpenOffice.org" when referring to this open source project and its software.

Re:OpenOffice.org?

I seem to recall that there was a namespace collision (read, "trademark problem") with some other pre-existing Open Office. Hence the tacked on ".org".

Yeah, I think it looks silly myself, and I don't know that anyone bothers pronouncing it.