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OpenOffice.org 3.0 Wants to Compete with Outlook
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Sun Oct 14, 2007 09:17 AM
from the don't-we-all dept.
from the don't-we-all dept.
jason writes "At the OpenOffice.org 2007 conference about a month ago there was a presentation on what to expect in the next major milestone for their Microsoft Office competitor. "The presentation mentions bundling Thunderbird with their Office Suite, and refers to it as an 'Outlook replacement.' This is all assuming that Thunderbird recently losing two of its main developers doesn't affect the decision, because I'm sure OpenOffice wants to ensure that Thunderbird will continue to progress before including it." This probably won't sway large corporations away from using Microsoft Office, but it could make it more intriguing for the smaller businesses that are looking to cut some costs."
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OpenOffice.org 3.0 Wants to Compete with Outlook
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Compete? (Score:5, Funny)
You gotta be kidding. (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Tuesday December 19 2006, @05:12PM)
The great thing about Office is all the damn pieces work together. Excel is friendly with Access, Access is friendly with Word, Everything is friendly with Outlook. To beat Office, you have to have an Office suite that works like that. Not just all the pieces in one package.
There is not one single thing in OO that doesn't have an OSS equivalent stand-alone application that is at least as good. Bundling a mail client with the rest of your apps doesn't suddenly make you competitive, especially when your whole user base could have already installed that mail client if they wanted it.
There are OSS projects that are actually making a push toward doing the things that Outlook does (like Kontact [kde.org]). But Thunderbird is still lagging behind Evolution imho, and neither of them play all that great with any of the groupware servers out there, open or closed.
I used to try and push OO on people, but I've completely lost faith in it. I keep thinking, maybe they'll get their crap together, but then they do stuff like this.
Re:You gotta be kidding. (Score:5, Insightful)
I know exactly how you feel. I used to use Office 2000 since about 1999. Since then I have been waiting for Open Office to serve as an Microsoft Office replacement. What happened? I upgraded to Office 2007 a month ago. I as well have given up on OO. Maybe one day, but then I will be ready for retirement and won't care.
Re:You gotta be kidding. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:You gotta be kidding. (Score:5, Insightful)
WRT to manuscripts I can't keep comments, styles, formating etc straight.
WRT to investing the OO spreadsheet is way to limited, and to extend the spreadsheet with custom functionality is absolutely painful! OOBasic bites, and their component architecture is anything but simple. OO extensions are a joke when compared to Microsoft Office.
So in the end OO is not usable except for extremely simple things. I am complaining because after eight years of using Microsoft Office 2000 OO is not close to the capabilities of 2000. Yet I have and use Office 2007, and that is the sad part.
Re:You gotta be kidding. (Score:4, Informative)
Right.... GNU Cash is for investing... Right.... Ok, so I ask how am I supposed to calculate the price of an option based on its implied volatility with GNU Cash? Oops, you mean its not an investment tool? Or how about calculating the cost of a hedge where I buy X calls, and Y puts? Ooops...
OO.o writer is not usable for manuscripts because comments and edits get buggered up. If you want to write without edits, and comments, sure Writer is fine...
Re:You gotta be kidding. (Score:5, Informative)
These examples are further trivial in Gnumeric, OO.o Calc, and nearly any other spreadsheet if you don't want to use pre-existing third-party tools. I fail to see any ingrained advantages of Excel for these scenarios, other than your personal familiarity for the tool. That's not an insignificant factor, but it underminds the universality that you try to imbue your personal gripes with.I use comments and change tracking (which is what I assume you mean by "edits") in OO.o Writer. They never get "buggered up" (whatever you mean by that). As before: the only downside with commenting in Writer is that you must either hover over the comments or see ALL comments in a separate pane, which is not as good as MS's interface that has the documents and comments side-by-side (and visually linked to the section they comment on). But OO.o Writer will be getting even this "real soon now."
Re:You gotta be kidding. (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.ferrus.net/)
What you're basically saying is this: You can't possibly use any tool but Word because you're attached to the exact implementation of two specific Word features. That doesn't mean that other tools are bad - it just means that you're inflexible.
Re:You gotta be kidding. (Score:5, Insightful)
And what you're basically saying is this: "Your preferences are wrong, and it's because you're stupid." It's the classic Slashdot rebuttal, and it is often modded as insightful, but it's not.
I don't purport to know what someone else needs to do his/her job. When a guy says OO.o doesn't cut it, despite trying, I tend to believe him. What makes you think you know what he needs?
Personally, I used OO.o for a year (Writer, to be precise) in grad school because I wanted to get rid of pirated MS Office, and I didn't have the $125 for the student version, and besides, I wanted more than the student version had... Why, I don't know, since I only would have used Word at the time. Anyway, I got quite good at Writer, and there are some great features in there (predictive input!), but ultimately, I had to call it quits and buy the $100 volume license of MS Office from the school.
What were my problems?
OO.o tables do not save correctly to .doc. If I needed to work on the document elsewhere, or was collaborating with someone, they had to be reformatted every time.
Making tables is an arduous process in OO.o. And being that I use a lot of statistics in my writing, tables are abundant. Word table formatting is quick and easy, and you can get them to look exactly as you'd like in a number of different ways (this has always been the best part of MS software--any way you can think of doing something probably has a way to do it).
Indent sliders don't snap to sane intervals. This is in violation of the UI metaphor: Those sliders snapped on electric typewriters. Last time I complained about this on Slashdot some pompous ass told me I was too stupid to use styles so I'd better just stick with Word. Except, I did use styles, and I use them in Word, too, and those sliders are the easiest way to set the indent in Word--why the hell should I type everything in when there's a damn GUI slider there? Why doesn't the OO.o slider work right? You can't get the same indent twice. It's maddening.
I have to work with other people, and they don't know or want to learn OO.o. This obviously isn't a problem with the software, but it is a big problem with using it.
I finally decided that getting things done was more important than being different. And this is what it comes down to, really, with a lot of FOSS. There are a few things that are improved by the removal of the profit motive (video software that plays anything, PDF writers --utilities like that whose proprietary counterparts are too worried about making money to be any good), but major applications don't seem to benefit. FOSS requires people to learn something new that doesn't do as much and isn't as compatible with the rest of the world's software. And that's why uptake is slow. Not because people are stupid, but because they are smart enough to know it's not worth it for them to switch. Until OO.o is better and more compatible than MS Office, this will be the case, and people will stick to MS Office in droves.
I value supporting FOSS projects in theory, but at the end of the day, I have work to do, and OO.o doesn't cut it. And I say that as the world's leading expert on how to do my job and live my life. That ought to be a satisfying enough reason for anyone.
Re:You gotta be kidding. (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.ferrus.net/)
People who spend a significant chunk of their time working in a given piece of software tend to get attached to the details of how it does things, regardless of the technical merit of those design decisions.
Your complaints about OO.o are a perfect example of this effect. "Indent sliders don't snap to sane intervals"? Clearly this isn't annoying the crap out of the OpenOffice developers (who have to use the program to write any number of internal documents), so it's not a major problem with using the program - so it must be an artifact of your learned workflow.
Now, having trouble unlearning that sort of workflow artifact is a real issue. OpenOffice really will suck for you until you've gotten used to the native workflow for every single task that you do. Let me clarify: Until a Microsoft Office user adapts to OpenOffice almost completely, Microsoft Office really will be marginally better for them.
None of this means anything but the simple fact that OpenOffice, being different from what you have the most experience with, is harder for you personally. You can't get any sort of objective data about other people using the program from a biased sample of one.
No, sometimes OOo really can be that painful. (Score:5, Interesting)
For me, the most painful thing that I've run into recently is partially due to the abysmal documentation that comes bundled with OOo and partially a clumsy implementation. The manuals that are located on the Website really used as the native help system. They are FAR better than the extremely limited and misleading information included in the help files. For example, compare and contrast the two sources for how to handle images.
Recently I was using OOo 2.2, then 2.3 to work on a short 30 page whitepaper (including the appendixes) for work. I needed to insert just two image files to illustrate a point I needed to make. This is a task I've done plenty of times and it's never as easy as it should be. This last time, for whatever reason, was more than usually painful.
It took me the better part of a couple of hours to place and size not only the images, but the frames that surrounded them. Time and again I'd click on the image and get just the image and not the frame that bounded it. I wouldn't notice, re-size or move the image, then wonder why I still wasn't getting the text to flow properly around it.
After much mucking around, I FINALLY got them both where I wanted them, then saved the file as a
No, this wasn't a PEBKAC problem. I double and triple checked saving the document in Office XP format. I even saved it as
To say I was pissed would be an understatement. Oh, sure, I could have exported the file as a
Besides, this is the first time that I can remember that OOo has failed me in such a fundamental way. Lord only knows why, because I sure don't. It does mean that there's no way that I can recommend OOo for even a pilot project here. This kind of basic functionality simply MUST work. First time, every time.
Will I open a trouble ticket with the OOo team? Maybe, if I can figure out a way to duplicate the problem in a file that's not full of company confidential information. This is a HUGE issue. I can't believe somebody didn't stumble across it during the beta cycles.
Re:No, sometimes OOo really can be that painful. (Score:5, Interesting)
I invite you to try it yourself. Just insert a picture from an image file using just the default settings. Go ahead, I'll wait.
....
Back yet? Good. Then you'll know that the default setting, and so far as I can tell the ONLY setting, for inserting an image from a file REQUIRES that it be wrapped in a floating frame with its own anchor. Please tell me, how the H E double hockey sticks am I supposed to explain the nuances of dealing with that to a company of 50,000 people?
Heh. Haha. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA! (wipes tears from eyes) Thanks, I needed a belly laugh. Oh, wait. You were serious? Well, let me explain in really small words, then:
It. Won't. Work. Satisfied?
No? Well, I guess I'll have to use somewhat bigger words and more complex concepts. I hope you can follow along.
First, what I tried to do was NOT some "weird combination of native layout elements", it was straight up insertion of a graphic image into a document. This is Word Processing 101, folks. Well, OK. Maybe Word Processing 201. It certainly isn't graduate level, pie in the sky sort of stuff. It's just day in, day out normal work.
Second, I work for a company with more than 50,000 employees. We don't look at pilot projects for desktop deployments of such a basic component unless we fully expect to deploy it across at least half the footprint. However, any such pilot MUST still be able to effectively trade files and data with the rest of the company, or the pilot will be deemed a failure by the people who can sign checks. We don't have the luxury of isolating small workgroups. Everything that we do is too interconnected.
Third, you may have noticed that I said I was working for a COMPANY, not a governmental agency. As such, we don't get to dictate what our customers and vendors use. Whatever they wish to use as a medium of communication, we have to adapt to. Now, granted, we spend metric boatloads of cash (that's a technical term, btw) on specialized communication applications and interfaces to do that for the more obscure stuff that our vendors want to use, and metric fleets of boatloads of cash (another technical term) for the more obscure stuff that our customers want to use. (Why the difference? Because the customers give us cash while the vendors expect us to give /them/ cash.)
However, if our theoretical and increasingly mythical pilot project is to stand any chance of success, the participating users absolutely /must/ be able to use their existing communications channels without modification. Asking vendors to make changes to /their/ ways of doing business just to accommodate us can make them cranky. Asking CUSTOMERs to make changes to /their/ ways of doing business just to accommodate us might make them look for someone else to give their money to. Therefore, if we can't produce documents that are at least somewhat close to what outside organizations expect, the pilot will be deemed a failure.
On a final note, you want to know what REALLY annoys me about this particular incident? I've done this sort of image insertion using OOo, then saving it as a .doc format for literally years and I've never seen this behavior before
Re:Excel for investment? _you_ must be kidding (Score:5, Insightful)
Why am I interesting in this debate? Because I had to buy Office 2007! I was holding out for the longest time, hoping that OO would finally allow me to do what I want. The days of Office pro being less than an hourly rate is long gone, just like the dotcom bubble.
>You should not be using Excel at all. You should be using a proper financial modelling system connected to a relational database, e.g. Business Objects with various add ons. Again, for the level of investing that this necessitates, the cost is unimportant to you.
I advise that you actually look at the tools that investment banks use. They in fact use Excel! Sure there is back end stuff, but traders and quants like Excel because it lets them very quickly come up with ideas and strategies.
>Alternatively of course you are just someone playing at investing. In which case your opinion is not particularly valuable. Given how expensive professionals have been getting it so wrong lately, anyone who trusts the financial models of an amateur without access to proper business modelling tools and data...deserves to buy a share in this wonderful toll bridge I just bought that links England and Wales.
I find it amazing that instead of actually doing a constructive argument you mock me. I could just as easily mock you since you did not even know that professional traders use Excel. Are you a quant? Do you follow the market?
Re:You gotta be kidding. (Score:5, Informative)
To use an example from a previous OpenOffice discussion, let's say I want to use OpenOffice to translate a text from Japanese into English. I bill 'per-character' in Japanese, so to determine how much to charge the client, I do a word count in OpenOffice. And the results given for english are correct, but the Japanese results are entirely wrong.
Copy and paste the same text into Word, and the word count works fine the first try.
Now, you're right, that technically I didn't *need* word count to complete this task. I could have manually counted through all the words. You also don't technically need a good outline view, since you can manually select and drag huge blocks of text around the document. You also don't technically need video support in Impress, because you can just tell the viewers to close their eyes and imagine what it might look like. So I guess in that sense you're technically correct.
How About A Complete Office System (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/journal.pl?op=list&uid=911325 | Last Journal: Monday October 29, @02:52PM)
How about a complete system?
Open Office System would include:
And, all of this would be compatible with MS Office, down to a UI switch that would allow the user to choose the MS style interface.
All of this would have MONO programmability for "macros". (Not the half-hearted programmability that MS offers, and sorry OO only pays lip service to.)
You do all of that, my org MIGHT think of switching.
Re:You gotta be kidding. (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday May 26 2004, @08:01AM)
First, let me say that your experience with OO will depend on what you use it for. As I use it mostly for writing papers for publication in scientific journals, quick spreadsheet applications (usually for classroom illustrations), and for "powerpoint" presentations at conferences, it works just dandy for me.
I do have to respond to your comment that "There is not one single thing in OO that doesn't have an OSS equivalent stand-alone application that is at least as good." I like the concepts of KOffice, and Gnome Office, but KOffice really isn't as functional as OO in any way, shape or form. It used to open faster than OO, but recently, OO has taken just three seconds from click to start on my computer, so I can't complain about that. Gnome Office is not integrated. Abiword is great for very small documents of limited functionality, but is no where near the abilities of swriter. Gnumeric is arguably equal with scalc, but then it doesn't have the same sort of interapplication communication with documents as scalc shares with swriter. As a long time simpress user, I have yet to find either a problem with it interoperating with powerpoint, or another opensource program that holds a candle to it.
So to finish, you are probably right in that OpenOffice has a long way to go in matching every type of functionality as MS Office, but I still can't say it has any real competitors in the OSS world at the current time. [Note to KOffice users: I have seen quite an improvement in functionality over the last couple of years, but you all need another couple of Google Summers of Code to catch up. - No flames intended, it's just my humble opinion.]
Re:You gotta be kidding. (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://fsfe.org/join | Last Journal: Saturday March 31 2007, @05:28PM)
Re:You gotta be kidding. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well der. The point, to spell it out more clearly, is that the people who are developing OpenOffice aren't coming up with features that big companies want, and big companies are the ones holding the majority of Office licenses.
I was rather under the impression that the integration of office components with each other and tightly with windows, while nice in theory, actually made it a horrible security threat. Applications that co-operated but existed wholly apart from the OS, other than running on it would be a good thing.
Not enough of a security threat to bother any of the hundreds of thousands of companies that have purchased it. But more seriously, macros are completely reined-in, Outlook restricts everything, IE7 has as many security features as Firefox and runs in a sandbox in Vista to boot. (It's not part of Office, but I figured someone would bring it up.) And, frankly, it's been years since anybody has seen a macro virus, or another virus that uses Office to spread, and so even if there is still some security threat to these products more-so than to OpenOffice (which frankly I doubt), there's a sense of calm in that area right now.
Speaking of security, Office does have a nice feature where you can encrypt sensitive files before sending them out of the office to prevent your data being read by nefarious third-parties. Does OpenOffice have anything of the sort? (I haven't used it in a few years, and their website is so horrible it doesn't even have a basic page describing the features of the product, nor does it have screenshots, or basically anything you'd want to see before downloading it.)
Openoffice is very nice MS Office has the edge on maturity, but I don't like the locked in nature of the document formats.
I can guarantee if you go to a professional writer and ask:
Which would you rather have?
A) An outline view where you can instantly re-order your work, including notes and references?
B) A slightly more open document format?
There isn't a single one who's going to answer B.
Re:You gotta be kidding. (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.beryllium.ca/)
BAM! Hah! Disproved your entire post with one name. Extra points for me.
Re:You gotta be kidding. (Score:5, Informative)
WRT #1, version upgrades are a nightmare, and I've seen colleagues lose days of work because of file incompatabilities. I know that if you're *very* careful this won't happen, but you shouldn't have to worry about this. And I want reliable access to things I wrote 10 years ago.
#2: The last time I used Word (2003) for a serious project I used styles for different-level headers and so forth. Everything was auto-numbered and auto-formatted and I was pleased and thought to myself that maybe Word was finally usable. Then I inserted a table of contents and doing this stripped the numbering out of all the headings and eliminated all of my bulleted and numbered lists! I simply couldn't believe it. The truth is that the only people I know *personally* who are happy with Word are people who do not use it's features very deeply. There appear to be plenty of people who use Word in a serious way and who are are happy, but I have yet to meet one personally. (And yes, I am at a big university and I am know lots of people
So what do I use? LaTeX and Emacs. I adopted them both specifically when writing my book because I didn't trust Word. It took a long time to become comfortable with both, but it was one of the best decisions I've ever made. My book is published using TeX and I can use the compositor's files to revise the book. I find this works incredibly well.
I always tell PhD students: you are going to a professional writer so use professional writer's tools: LaTeX and BibTeX. (I *never* recommend Emacs, though I personally love it.)
Small businesses are already using OOo and Tbird (Score:2, Insightful)
Changing the names of the various apps in OOo would have a bigger effect. The number of times I've had someone think that Calc was windows calculator replacement, rather than a spreadsheet is far too high.
Exchange (Score:5, Insightful)
How will it improve Thunderbird or OOo? (Score:5, Interesting)
One could say the same about any office product, but at the very least they share the "Recent Documents" and can launch each other's applications (which is quite a nifty side-benefit). I'm not seeing even that advantage to the Thunderbird bundling. Although I'm sure it will be useful for those not knowledgeable enough to be able to install both separately.
Thunderbird would be a great idea (Score:2)
Visio would be better (Score:5, Insightful)