Why You Should Choose MS Office Over OO.org 1393
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."
good logic (Score:5, Interesting)
yes because i get all sort of virus alerts about new security threats for open office.
MS consitency... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Fallacies (Score:5, Interesting)
Ah, Microsoft is feeling the heat the free software community is lighting under their asses.
Got any of that "Ronson Fast Lite" left?
Open Office is "good enough" (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Time to check out Open Office (Score:5, Interesting)
My experience with OO.o (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
The other way round? (Score:2, Interesting)
However, my real question is, does OO.org already have a similar Competitive Guide Why people should use OO.org?
Open Source users 'in the know' probably can understand the benefits in the sleep, but how many average MS-only users? Bashing MS isn't always as effective as praising the alternative.
They left out sharepoint services (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:some stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: unresolved bugs? (Score:5, Interesting)
The bottom line... (Score:2, Interesting)
Little anecdote... (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Fallacies (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Step 3 (Score:2, Interesting)
Have you ever been to school? Well I'm there now. Where I am, pretty much every paragraph in an essay has to have a quote, or we lose marks. Personal opinion is acceptable in moderation, but generally discouraged.
/me kicks the education system
apps - database and draw (Score:1, Interesting)
If MS Office has Access, you're looking at the professional version -- $700 (CDN) retail price for v2003. Also, if you need to include MS Visio to compete with OO Draw, add in another $300 (for Visio Standard, or $750 for Visio professional -- Standard is the more relevant comparison, OO Draw is very basic).
Total:
* MS solution: > $1,000
vs
* OO solution: bandwidth
Hmm. That $1,000 difference could buy a hell of a lot of "retraining"
Stability issue (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:some stuff (Score:4, Interesting)
This document should not even exist... (Score:2, Interesting)
max 32000 limit (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: unresolved bugs? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:some stuff (Score:2, Interesting)
Seems ironic that MS would publish the thing as PDF, eventhough you can't make those with just MS Office.
Re:Open Office is "good enough" (Score:2, Interesting)
I remember the tone was snide and he said that there were better ways to do what the form was trying to accomplish without using macros, if I really knew how to use Word.
I clearly remember thinking two things. First, that it's messed up that an MS employee was telling me that it was bad to use his company's product as designed, and second, I'm never using stupid Word gimmicks again.
Re:some stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't get me wrong, I haven't used M$ 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:Fallacies (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Hmm, very little is said about features... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Fallacies (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
case study (well, sort of) (Score:3, Interesting)
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:
MS Words fails with large documents (Score:4, Interesting)
This isn't a new problem BTW. I remeber having lost a document in Office 97 a few years ago...
Office 2003 sucks... a brief story (Score:2, Interesting)
I started the program and noticed, hey, there are some very ugly blue toolbars on by default. I wanted to turn these off, so I went to the Help and discovered that (as far as I can tell) you no longer have help on the hard drive, you have it on some website somewhere. The 'help' search box searches a website. This is much slower and doesn't get me that nice index I'm used to. It's very unhappy. So about 2 minutes into the MS help I gave up and went to Google.
I spent 5 minutes Googling and I can't figure out how to change their theme back to the normal Windows theme that is present in every other app. So I decided to ignore it and go on.
Okay, so I'm working on an outline document. I had created my original outline in Notepad (with two spaces, four spaces, etc, before each line to do the hierarchy) -- I wanted to use Word for the font sizes so I could actually read it during my presentation. So I pasted the Notepad in and got each line as a heading 1 in the outline. While I didn't relish the thought of setting the level of each one separately, I didn't really expect that it would 'just work'.
The bug I quickly discovered was that, for whatever reason, you had to actually press enter on a new line before the thing would indent properly. That is, clicking on a line and hitting the "demote" button didn't DO anything. I had to delete the newline at the beginning of the line, for each line, and replace it manually. THEN you could indent it properly.
So I guessed the hotkeys for Promote and Demote (shift-tab and tab). But I couldn't guess it for Demote to Body Text, which I also needed a lot. Mousing over the icon got me the name. Right-clicking got me the 'customize your toolbars' menu(a list of toolbars with checkboxes, and a Customize item at the bottom). Okay, Customize (although this is not really what I wanted to do). I flipped the tabs and didn't find it, so I left the menu. Tried the help again, searched for 'hotkeys' and didn't get anything. I looked in Customize again, dug a little deeper. Indeed, there IS a Keyboard button; it's not on the tabs, but it doesn't deserve a tab by itself (or something). I have no clue.
I assumed the list of menus here corresponded with the toolbars I could select (this is not actually true, but I didn't know this). I looked around and didn't see an Outline one. So I clicked on 'All Commands' and scrolled down to the DemoteToBodyText item. Clicked on it. No hotkey is listed. Okay, I'll assign one... how about shift-tab? Click in the assign shortcut area, hit shift-tab, and the focus leaves and goes to the previous text field on the form. I remember that shift-tab is already assigned anyway, so I try ctrl-shift-tab. The focus does not move but it does not capture my shortcut!
I click on the item above DemoteToBodyText, which is DemoteList. Its description is 'demotes the selection one level,' so I assume it is the demote command I used with Tab. BUT NO SHORTCUT IS LISTED!
I give up and finish working on my document. The last thing I notice is that you can't demote something to body text at a certain level -- at any point, the body text has to be below the level of the last header item. You can't do this:It instead comes out as this:There is no way to coerce it to put the second body text one level up.
This experience with Office Word 2003 led me to great sadness, much like the military. I haven't used OOO's outline features, but I'm just going to assume they do it better, because that was AWFUL.
Re:Little anecdote... (Score:2, Interesting)
Last year, while working in a very high-flying, sometimes out of this world Government agency, I was involved in a conference call in which the participants were reviewing a PowerPoint presentation we had all accessed from a common server (we were all using the officially sanctioned MS O Suite). At one point, about half of us complained that all the figures on one particular slide were rotated 90 degrees away from normal. The author plaintatively squawked, "But I used Office X!" I had installed OO on my machine, and on the off chance that it would work, I tried it out. Lo and behold, the twisted slide appeared correctly on OO! Yea verily, OO is more compatible with MS Office than MS Office is! Experiment #2.... OO wins again!
Re:some stuff (Score:3, Interesting)
Hm. That's Flamebait, isn't it? OK, here's some facts [rockymountainnews.com]. All better now?
At the same time, companies such as General Electric and Microsoft are expanding their operations in India on everything from basic customer service to high-end research and development. (emphasis mine)
Doesn't GE make our ICBM guidance systems? Sweet.
Sorry, tangent. I'm in a bad mood.
Compatibility (Score:2, Interesting)
> 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.
Might that be because M$ doesn't make their format public? Doesn't the current antitrust suit exactly concern this matter?
And don't even get me started about their 'rights management' crap... Which is in fact a marketing strategy to lock in users. Kill Bill
Advocacy within the office. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:There's only one really good reason to use Offi (Score:5, Interesting)
- Save as
.RTF from your favorite libre word processor - Rename the file from
.RTF to .DOC
Microsoft Word will see that theSupport When Needed?? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Step 3 (Score:1, Interesting)
The only thing that could keep #4 from not happening is making open source software, development, and distribution illegal. And actively advocating the persecution and litigation of open source programmers.
No, Im not kidding. Think about it.
By its very nature, open source is destined to win.
No, really, it was created on a Mac (Score:5, Interesting)
Viruses + office suites (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Unresolved bugs. (Score:2, Interesting)
What a great ad for OO (Score:3, Interesting)
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. (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
YES***YES*** I LOVE IT Thanks Microsoft (Score:2, Interesting)
Every single one of these items is quickly checked from a few seconds of getting into OOo. They planted the seed in Managers minds with this doc.
Is OOo right for EVERYBODY? no. Is it right for most? _DEFINATELY yes_. All it takes is using OOo for a little bit to realize it just works.
I have used OOo exclusively at work with the IT guys blessing. Do I need to "Fall Back" to MS Office. No. OOo works for every single document my company has ever got or created. Nobody has ever realized that I don't use MS Office.
Imagine that.
This is great. Thanks again Microsoft.
The only feature I miss from Microsoft office (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:some stuff (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Unresolved bugs. (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Its a beautiful thing! (Score:2, Interesting)
OK, with Works you get the full blown version of Word, but I wonder how the rest compares. I wouldn't know, I use OpenOffice.org at home, and used (pre-Sun) Star Office before that. I would imagine (although I don't know) that OpenOffice.org beats the pants of Works!
OK, I am not a small business, but if ever I formed one, I would use openOffice.org in preference to Office (or Works!), because that is what I am used to. In addition, licensing would not be an issue. Neither would training and migration. Microsoft would not have a lock-in. As a small business, I would not need the extra features Microsoft talk about (but I would need the money I would have spent on licenses!)
And this is why Microsoft are on to a loser here. OpenOffice.org might not have the bells and whistles, but it is good enough. Certainly compared to Office it is cheap enough! And it is getting better.
(Oh, and talking of PDFs, one feature I do want of a word processor is the ability to export to PDF. As yet, I believe Office can't do this!)
Re:Little anecdote... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:some stuff (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Unresolved bugs. (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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!
undocumented unresolved bugs (Score:5, Interesting)
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:
One thing that you rarely get in the Open Source world is people lying about the existence of a bug.Re:some stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:some stuff (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember what happened to Israel.. They offered MS something like $7M to fix the Hebrew support for OSX Office. Microsoft basically wouldn't give Israel the time of day until they were halfway through porting OpenOffice to OSX.
If it's not in line with Microsoft's business objectives to fix your bug, you might as well just go hang yourself. With Open Source, youalways have the option of providing the needed support yourself.
Point by Point, Microsoft... (Score:5, Interesting)
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".
The correct term is "Double-Speak" (Score:2, Interesting)
CEOs & CFOs in our corporate boardrooms,
to our presidents and our congress. no
real surprise that MS would jump on
THIS bandwagon bound for hades
Re:There's only one really good reason to use Offi (Score:2, Interesting)
I couldn't do the work I do right now efficiently on MS Word even if I wanted to, really. I need the ability to read all file types and MS Office does not have that capability. My clients aren't restricted to just windows.
Just a thought.
Re:Unresolved bugs. (Score:5, Interesting)
Seamless Information Exchange (Score:2, Interesting)
Wow. I never thought that Microsoft would ever tout the seamlessness of its data exchange.
Here's a typical scenario from my work:
In my experience, MS file formats aren't even compatible when "shared" among 1 user, let alone 300 million.
Why MSO? (Score:2, Interesting)
But keep up the good work... OOo still does a good job that I have seen so far.
Re:some stuff (Score:3, Interesting)
Last week I was present at a discussion where they were seriously suggesting that if anyone was queuing to talk to someone for over 20 seconds we should just cut them off and let them call back because our 'stats' would look better that way. They totally fail to realise that people who have a problem with their computer and can't use it are just going to call back straight away and keep on calling until they speak to someone.
Once you have got through to them the main aim is basically to get rid of you in under 3 mins which means they analyst is only concerned about getting enough information to pass the call onto one of the 2nd line teams, most people expect immediate help which the analysts can't offer so because most users accept stuff like "check the power cable, reboot the PC" as being an actual soloution analysts suggest it to shut them up, stop them moaning nothing is being done etc.
It's interesting to see a lot of companies which jumped into the whole Call Centre idea are now realising customers are just fed with them and are advertising things like no automated IVR's, talk to one person who will fix your problem not dozens of clueless intermediaries, this is a good thing in my opinion.
Re:RTF != fine (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Unresolved bugs. (Score:3, Interesting)
I use the word outline view quit a bit --- I miss it in OO. Also, while the presentation software in OO does all the wacky slide transition and builds PowerPoint does, I never use them. THe one that I DO use is missing: having bullets simply appear at the bottom of the list with each mouse click. I like it because I want people to follow along with what I am saying and not read ahead. This is the ONLY effect I used in PP, and it appears to be missing on OO. It probably is there, but I just can't find it.
Finally, I use the grammar checker in word sometimes. It's advice on how to fix things is usually lousy, but I find it quite useful to flag sentences that are running on or too complicated. It's useful when you have composed something late at night under a deadline.
In short, OO pretty much does what an average user needs, but if you are a bit atypical in the way you use your office suite, you migt miss a few things.
That said, the database query builder rocks, although it is a bit unstable and how the average user is supposed to know its there is a mystery to me. If it gets a bit more stable, gets better placement, and gets a decent report designer, then I predict it will become a killer feature, a potential Access killer.
Protected VBA code readable in Openoffice (Score:3, Interesting)
No surprise that Microsoft dislikes this software that is just another example that security by obscurity is borken by design.
I have a Chinese customer... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Unresolved bugs. (Score:1, Interesting)
A company named Prismatic uses a different proprietary approach to steel coloring, which utilizes electrochemically-bonded chrome oxide on the 304 grade steel.
Medical dictionary? (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Free publicity for OOo (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Oo still missing some useful features. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Unresolved bugs. (Score:2, Interesting)
No, no, no, please, no. Send me the Word documents; OpenOffice does *MUCH*
better with Word documents than *anything* does with RTF. Have you ever
actually tried to work with RTF? It preserves things like boldness and
italics, but that's about it. It doesn't preserve margins, doesn't properly
support tab stops (I think it does left tabs only? Not sure; maybe this
depends on what app you use to read or write it), can't handle columns,
much less frames, tables, sidebars, images, draw objects,
and italic and underline, but not outline, shadow, or other text effects,
doesn't handle borders properly (e.g., on paragraphs) and, in general, is
a steaming heap of freshly boiled rabbit dung.
Opening Word documents with OO is also better than anything I've tried
(Acrobat Reader, xpdf, GSView) does with PDFs. When I open a Word document
in OpenOffice, I can select any text I want, easily perform a document-wide
search, scroll from the bottom of one page right through to the top of the
next (none of this nonsense about scrolling to the bottom, hitting "next
page", and scrolling back to the top to read the top of the next page),
and, most importantly, the font color is usually already set to Automatic,
and if it isn't I can set it that way, and then I can comfortably read the
text in my chosen colors, instead of squinting into white, trying in vain
to pretend that the screen is paper or that I don't mind going snowblind.
No, PDFs are evil.
HTML is okay, but only if you write it by hand, which most people aren't
willing to do. The autogenerated stuff is, again, worse than the results
I get opening Word documents in OpenOffice.
Ideal would be if everyone would send me documents in OpenOffice format, of
course, but barring that, Word format is preferable to these other options
that you list.
Old-school Unix geeks will of course vote for TeX, but they suck so who cares.
NMCI and the US Navy (Score:3, Interesting)
Establishing a monoculture environment leaving the organization vulnerable
Excessive costs by requireing MS office on desktops that never user it where something like OO may be sufficient.
Restricting the use of a emerging class of IP enabled devices (from UPS to IP telephones)
Forcing the use of Win2000/IIS/SQL server where a Unix box is more appropiate and secure and cheaper to operate. I am sure other could add to this list.... But I hear customer satificaton is high [gcn.com]
If this was a poll... (Score:1, Interesting)
It's a steep learning curve though. It's easier to use a WYSIWYG word processor, as long as you don't have to battle with it to make it do what you really want.
Perspective of a Student (Score:2, Interesting)
As an engineering student, I often have to perform statistical analysis on data I collect in the laboratory. Although I have the option of doing my calculations in OO Calc or MS Excel, I usually choose the latter for two simple reasons: speed and simplicity. To this day, I haven't come across an easy way to plot data points and a best fit line on the same graph along with the equation of the best fit line using OO Calc. In Excel, it's merely the matter of a few clicks.
I realize that I could theorectically combine OO Calc with Octave and gnuplot to produce the graphs that I need, but I shudder at the thought of having to hack together a solution when Excel makes it so easy.
Excel's not perfect, either, though. It's a pain to export Excel graphs so that I can include them in TeX reports, and there's no built-in function to print multiple plots per a page (useful for getting a quick overview of data). Nevertheless, Excel is still A LOT more friendlier for a student who needs to quickly process their data.
Re:Dare protocol (Score:1, Interesting)
I do agree that Genesis (and perhaps the entire Christian Bible) is reflected well in the Big Bang model. But to me, that has more to do with the perspective of the scientists who dreamed it up. It's a good model (for the moment), but it's limited by the intellectual heritage of those scientists - which includes the entirety of Judeochristian thought before them. People coming from a different relgious heritage might come up with an entirely different (yet equally apt) model.
The point is that it's difficult enough to see past one's preconceptions without indulging in self-serving tripe that plays on that very human weakness. You can do better, and without compromising your beliefs.
Analysis and Rebuttal (Score:4, Interesting)
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
boy was i dispointed... (Score:1, Interesting)
i wish i had the time to compare the following:
windows/m$office/explorer/.net-develo
Re:Just De Facto (Score:3, Interesting)
The crucial question is not whether there are NDAs or patents, but who you trust. And no, I don't trust MS, and I'm guessing you don't either. With their compulsive bit-twiddling, and their underhanded tactics, they will always demand a watch-your-back attitude. My only point is that their apps should be a lot more open then they were when the native format was a trade secret and the interchange format (RTF) was a nightmare to parse.
It's also an important point that Word 2003 is not tied to any Microsoft Schema. MXML is just the default. You can plug in any schema you want using the built-in schema engine. (Which, astonishingly, uses the W3C schema language with no MS "improvements".) The idea is that Word can be made the part of any XML-based workflow. But it doesn't seem to have occurred to them (or maybe they're just too arrogant to consider this a threat) that you could wire Word to use the OO schemas in place of MXML. Which would eliminate the problem of Word/OO interoperability. Which is the only issue keeping people from using OO.