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

[frazzydee]

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]

Re:Note the URL path

[tdvaughan]

Interesting? It's far more likely that it is short for 'Discussion Guides'.

MS Office runs on Linux!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you Must have MS Office, but don't want to use Windows just for that, you can use Microsoft office under linux. Either by wine [wineqhq.org] or crossover office [codeeweavers.com]. It also works for other popular apps such as dreamweaver, quicken, photoshop and the like!

I don't care if you use MS office or not, just don't run it in windoze!

Support Team

[althalus]

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.

Trademark issues

[Fencepost]

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.

Have to Laugh

[GMFTatsujin]

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!

Re:hmmm....

[muckdog]

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...

locked in

[dAzED1]

In the argument against OO being free, they say:"

"1."OpenOffice is free."License cost makes up only a small portion of the total cost of ownership.More significant costs include: ... Data migration and testing (especially if customer uses Access database)

So they're saying that since you're already using their crappy product, switching off it might be expensive.

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

Is that supposed to be a bad thing? Office Macros are part of their "anti-virus API," right? ;) For shame...it doesn't support such a wonderful security flaw that has been the home of maliscious code for eons.

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

Yeah, outlook is "free" with MSOffice. That's why there are liscense costs with Exchange. Wait, you don't want exchange mail? Just regular smtp? Then use one of the billions of free email clients.

I love this world.

Re:OpenOffice.org?

[AJWM]

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.

FYI: little-known issues about MS-Word...

[denis-The-menace]

How can I recover a corrupt document or template - and why did it become corrupt? [mvps.org]

Some Tips and "Gotchas" for those who are new to Word [mvps.org]

Re:some stuff

[nelsonal]

StarOffice includes AdibasD which is, AFAIK, an access like shell wrapped around the SAP DB. However due to licensing issues between SUN and SAP it is not allowed to be distributed with the open version. A sweet project would be a quick and dirty GUI for one of the opensource DBMS as acess is basically a way for people to make queries, forms, tables, and reports with no knowledge of SQL.

Re:Fallacies

[n9uxu8]

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:some stuff

[nempo]

OO.org does have a database client but it's hidden away because of the difficulity of configuring it.

Re:buying e-mail client ???

[Zathrus]

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.

Re:Fallacies

[Perl-Pusher]

I don't have that problem, what version of Open Office do you have and what version of MS Office are you using. Mine are 1.1 & 2000 respectively.

Re:My experience with OO.o

[Brackney]

You didn't like the drawing package? I think that's one of OO's strong points. It's incredibly flexible and full-featured IMHO. Perhaps it has too many widgets?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:My experience with OO.o

[jfengel]

I spent a very long time trying to figure out how to get the 3D cylinder drawing to give me a fairly simple cylinder, to attach to a flow chart. No dice. Eventually, I found an extension (which was not easy to install) that provided some of the flowcharting symbols I need. (No, I'm not doing flow charts. I'm doing architecture diagrams and the flowchart cylinder to represent a database was exactly what I needed.) Office provides such things by default.

I did, however, finally figure out how to get Snap To Object working (it was hidden under a bunch of other menus) and that may tip the balance. That's a really nice feature.

Re:Fallacies

[Thorizdin]

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.

Bugs from 2002

[overshoot]

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:Macro compatibility

[Perl-Pusher]

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.

Re:some stuff

[Frymaster]

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.

XML

[Quila]

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.

Re:Clippy!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but does it have an annoying lightbulb that pops up whenever you don't need it? You can't beat a lightbulb. Therefore, OO.o > MS Office.

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

[Doesn't_Comment_Code]

That is an advantage of OO.org. I use it at work. I am able to supply and receive documents in just about any format. I routinely have clients say,

"I can only send it in format X, and most businesses say they can't use that."

And I say, "No problem, send what you've got, I'll let you know if there's a problem."

And you know what? 99.9% of the time I can open and use the document and respond with the same format.

That's a service MS Office can't supply, or doesn't now anyway.

Re:Unresolved bugs.

[AKAImBatman]

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:Fallacies

[mj01nir]

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:Wow, Sales people get it REALLY wrong sometimes

[DR SoB]

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!

Re:OO.o bears the burden of translation BOTH ways

[Anonymous Coward]

Heck, MS-Word isn't compatible with anything else, not even newer and older versions of MS-Word.

Re:MS Office, OpenOffice and Macs

[bmsleight]

Need to look at NeoOffice [neooffice.org]

t the X11 port of OOo is ugly, has poor font handling and doesn't conform to any of the Mac's environment. Even cut and paste still uses control and not command.

From NeoOffice

Welcome to the online home of "Neolithic Office", or NeoOffice(R) for short. NeoOffice is a prototyping project exploring different methods for porting OpenOffice.org to run natively on MacOS X. It is a free software port of OpenOffice.org to the MacOS X platform, currently in its prototyping stages.

Don't belive the modest site, its very good full OO on the Mac

Re: unresolved bugs?

[phasm42]

You don't happen to be using the same version of Word from 1995 do you? I just tried this (currently using Office 2000) and had no problems. I think you're talking out of your ass and hoping no one calls you on it.

Huh?

[k98sven]

Apparently the "Open office" trademark is owned by the "E-mail incorporated corporation of California", and has been classed as 'dead' since 1993.

Interestingly enough, the Openoffice.org trademark [uspto.gov] is also dead since last year, being considered "Abandoned: Applicant failed to respond to an Office action.".
Sun owns this trademark.. what are they up to?

Re:buying e-mail client ???

[Daytona955i]

Have you tried Ximian Evolution? It's got e-mail, a calendar, task list and address book. It also has the ability to grab rss feeds and display them for you. I think it's a lot better than outlook.

Ximian evolution with Open Office and PostgreSQL or mySQL and you are set... Who needs Office/Outlook?

Re:Unresolved bugs.

[dietz]

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.

Sun does offer paid support for OpenOffice.org

[soullessbastard]

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

Re:some stuff

[angst7]

It has a data front-end that can be plugged into a backend database

That is precisely what a database client is.

Or are we working under an alternate definition of *client*?

In fact I have used the database client in OO.o to connect to MySQL and found it really quite nice. (Though not terribly intuitive) Claiming there is no database client is a lie. There is no bundled DB-like application, but thats a different issue.

Re:Unresolved bugs.

[juhaz]

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.

Document created 11 september

[Anonymous Coward]

According to pdfinfo, the document was created on that day of all days in the year:

$ pdfinfo OpenOffice.pdf
Title: competitive OpenOffice.qxd
Author: Gravity
Creator: QuarkXPress(tm) 4.11
Producer: Acrobat Distiller 4.05 for Macintosh
CreationDate: Thu Sep 11 16:05:53 2003
ModDate: Thu Sep 11 16:06:03 2003
Tagged: no
Pages: 2
Encrypted: no
Page size: 792 x 612 pts (letter)
File size: 55259 bytes
Optimized: yes
PDF version: 1.2

Re:some stuff

[hetta]

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?

Try Rekall or Knoda. Both are quite nice database frontends, if you can get them to run on your system.

OOo's ODBC support (which I last tried around OOo 1.0) works but is rudimentary: no forms, no reports, therefore no linked tables, and no relational database.

Rekall, Knoda, look'em up, try them out, they're cool.

Re:Even more bizarrely...

[nathanh]

...one of their other big points is that OO doesn't have it's own email/PIM client. Of course it doesn't... between mozilla/evolution/insert your favorite email client here/ they don't -need- to include one.

More to the point, StarOffice used to have a mail client, but Sun wisely removed it. YAMC (Yet Another Mail Client) was definitely bloat.

Re:some stuff

[Master of Transhuman]

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.

Re:some stuff

[Evil Grinn]

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

[tjw]

Not really. It has a data front-end that can be plugged into a backend database, but nothing as self-contained as Access.

OO 1.1 does have dBase (database in a file) support built in. With it, you can create a database, design tables, use sql queries, and even create 'Forms' for editing records one at a time. I'm not saying it can do everything Access can do, but a lot of the functionality is there.

RTF != fine

[IncohereD]

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.

[dietz]

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.

[Anonymous Coward]

rtf is format invented by microsoft, in 90s ? but definitely newer than word .doc invented in 80s.

Re:MS employs extremely efficient foot-shooters.

[eggz128]

As far as I can tell, there's no way to make a PDF file from OO except the old fashioned print-to-Distiller method.

OpenOffice.org 1.1. Click the button on the tool bar to the immediate left of the printer icon. It looks like a PDF icon, and I'll let you guess what it does. No distiller required.

Problem: Macros

[spacefight]

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...

Re:Unresolved bugs.

[Rallion]

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:MS Office, OpenOffice and Macs

[bmsleight]

Hmm, try

NeoOffice [neooffice.org] -> Download [neooffice.org]-> one of the NeoOffice/J mirror sites [planamesa.com] -> NeoOfficeJ-0.8.2.dmg [planamesa.org]

The site states that it doesn't have any binaries though - anywhere you can get builds of this? Or will I have to set up CVS?

[RANT]Come on three maybe four clicks, ok so your a mac user and you can't right click to save the url, but please.. [/RANT]

Double-rubbish

[Tony]

How exactly is OOo's XML format lock-in any different to MS's?

Uhm... it's well-documented [oasis-open.org], and tracks an emerging standard (the first of its kind). That is, it's agreed-upon by many other companies, not just Microsoft.

Also, Microsoft does not publish its XML schema.

MS-Office 2003 is a nightmare to use in an heterogenous environment. Its export to third-party schemas is hardly more than a check-box on a PR sheet somewhere; it doesn't work quite right, so the published document isn't a very good XSLT translation of the original document.

Microsoft, by obfuscating their XML schema and making it no more readable than their original binary format, is the one paying lip-service. But as long as people are willing to accept intentionally-broken garbage, they will continue to sell intentionally-broken garbage.

Re:some stuff

[k_head]

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

Re:Of course, nobody I even know uses OOo.

[nathanh]

The company I work for evaluated OOo. I have managed to get them to use several other free software packages (notably perl rather than asp) but there's no way I could sell them on OOo. It's ugly, it's counterintuitive, and it inherits all the interface mistakes Office has -- and you can't get professional support for it. And so my office shelled out to get everyone copies of Office 2k3.

So you didn't even consider paying $50/seat to Sun for StarOffice, which is effectively OpenOffice with professional support.

Re:buying e-mail client ???

[IO ERROR]

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.

True, but we [citadel.org]'re working on it.

Re:How old are they

[dpu]

Actually, MS Office has been around a LOT longer than that. Office 95 was version 7.0 I think. Before that, you could get Word 6.0, Word for DOS was still around, Word for Mac was still around, Access 1.0 (and then 2.0) were in the stores.... All told, the first bundled version of MS Office was probably back in about 91 or 92, but Word and Excel have been around since Windows 3.0 came out. I can still remember the competition between WordPerfect 4 and 5 and Word 5 (at least, I think it was v5). So Office has been around for close to 15 years, with Word, at least, being closer to 20.

All years in this post should be taken with a grain of salt. I smoked a whole lotta drugs in high school...

Re:Unresolved bugs.

[krunk7]

I'm currently attending college. I use Linux and opensoftware almost exclusively as does my girlfriend. The problem you had has to do with fonts which is easily remedied. Rather than being a hinderance my use of open source software like LyX (LaTeX frontend) [lyx.org] and pdf formats have been a big plus when it comes to professional looking lab reports and papers. I'm often complimented by professors and TA's.....little do many know how incredibly effortless they are to make while my friends are toiling away in Word formatting nitpickiness. :)

The fact that a *.doc was opened and the bullets didn't show seems about as insignificant as whether or not my work car is black or grey. The content was displayed fine and that's what counts. On those very, very rare occasions when you cannot view the content it only takes 30 seconds to export to pdf. I haven't run into a single professor/student who was unwilling to do so...and if I did, I would make sure they got nothing by LaTeX and sxw files from than on out. hehe

The Virus Thing Checks

[shylock0]

Okay, so I use StarOffice as my primary word processor and spreadsheet. But I also use MS Outlook. Why? Because I have to use Windows for a variety of reasons (primarily because its the only platform for which AutoCAD is available), and because Outlook is simply the best PIM available (not just e-mail, but everything). Now, assuming you use a third-party AntiVirus (we use Norton), then Outlook really *is* the safest e-mail program to have.

I do consulting. And I do virus calls for my clients. More often than not, some stupid user has clicked a file or opened an attachment they shouldn't have. With Norton + Eudora or Mozilla, a stupid user can execute viral code. But Norton integrates so well with Outlook (not least, I'm told, because of Microsoft's APIs) that its virtually impossible (once Norton is installeD) to become infected.

That's my $0.02.

Re:some stuff

[JonathanThurn]

The above mentioned article on Salon is even titled "We Don't Support That" [salon.com] and was mentioned in a previous Slashdot headline [slashdot.org]. Unfortunately, Salon wants your money or your eyes for the privilage of reading more than the first paragraph.

Re:Unresolved bugs.

[Trejkaz]

Of course now that Word 2003 is circulating, some .docs are actually WordML, which was "invented" last year.

OO is great on a helpdesk

[The_DoubleU]

I'm working on an internal helpdesk of a big IT firm and they are using all MS office. The best moments are when you have a user who is unable to open their own Word/exel/whatever files in MS office.
I ask them to send the file to me, open them in OO and save them as doc, xl. Problem solved.
Ofcourse I don't forget to mention how I did it and provide a link to the OO website.

Now that is advertisment!!

Re:some stuff

[zurab]

Please, throw anything you want in whatever direction, but unfortunately, you must not understand the difference between a database server - like a production RDBMS (which you call "database") - and a database tool. Just because Paradox can be used a relational data store does not mean you run your high availability secure banking production servers on it.

What it is - is a great tool for quick and convenient way to manipulate data and tables across other RDBMSes, including itself. It has an easily learned scripting support so you can script and automate some of the repetitive tasks. Also has an extremely useful querying interface. Beyond standard SQL queries, with its unique interface, you can access data that would not be easily reachable with the SQL. Many, if not all, Borland tools, like Delphi and others used to come with a stripped down version of Paradox, called Database Desktop - kind of like you would use MS Query but you could accomplish a hell of a lot more using Database Desktop since it provided an actual database functionality. I don't know about now, since I don't do any of that stuff anymore. If you haven't worked on a database application, you are unlikely to understand the usefulness of such a tool.

This is relevant to the Office suite discussion because MS argues it has Access, SUN has its own with StarOffice, OO.org has nothing. I am not sure this is necessarily an "office" functionality, but to have at least a standalone tool like that would be of a great value to many.

Open Office Falls Short

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been a Unix user for over fifteen years.
I've used both MS Office and Open Office. Say,
what you will, call me what you like, but OO
just absolutely stinks compared to MS Office.
OO is plauged by numerous incompatibilities
and it just is not a polished piece of work.
Want an example? When I start OO it asks me if
I would like to register, so I select the "never"
option. Guess what, the next time I start OO it
ask me if I would like to register. Sigh...

Never had a problem with fadin in bullets

[leonbrooks]

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 don't know why people are still bying

[gunpowder]

Microsoft Word/Office or any other Microsoft products after Bill Gates gave this interview in 1995 [cantrip.org].

And no, it's not a fake.

Their "XML" isn't, OO HTML editor

[leonbrooks]

Microsoft's Office XML sucks. It comes in two flavours, one with everything useful stripped out and one up to the eyeballs in bizarre XML attributes and binary crap.

What I do with the HTML editor on my own site [cyberknights.com.au] is edit the doc up in OOWriter, then shove it through a filter which "tops and tails" it, leaving the essence of it to be framed by a brace of PHP scripts. The scripts add headers, footers, banners, some geek stuff (translate, linked-to, validate) and common styles. I agree that it's not DreamWeaver, not a website designer, but for actually editing up pages it's night-vs-day better than Word or any other WP I've seen.

Re:MS employs extremely efficient foot-shooters.

[Ashish Kulkarni]

Not that I've got anything against OOo, but check out pdf4free [gicomsrl.it], which is a free tool which can install itself as a printer (plus it is VERY simple to get up and running). We use it exclusively, it's quick and the PDF output is nice AND very compact.

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

[nikster]

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.

.Docs are not good for sending out,

[JLeslie]

Why would I ever want to send a document to a client in .doc format? My tables will appear outlined, abbreviations and names will have scwiggly red lines under them, bullet points scwiggly green. If I want to send a professional looking document I might make it in Word, but I'll definitely convert it to pdf before sending. And wouldn't you know it, open office has that feature built in!

And another thing, in my experience I've had way more problems moving between different versions of word than open office. Even the SAME versions of word on different machines.

Finally: A Non-Microsoft-Funded Study

[econ5000]

On the heels of several Microsoft-sponsored studies evaluating the total cost of ownership (TCO) of Windows vs. Linux, The Yankee Group has performed its own independent research on the same topic. And the findings are somewhat similar: Linux provides smaller companies with customized vertical applications or who have no legacy networks with better TCO than Windows But for the vast majority of customers -- and especially those that are already Windows shops -- Windows still offers better TCO value, according to the Yankee/Sunbelt Software study, which is due to be published this week http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,155 3624,00.asp