MS Thinks OOo is 10 Years Behind

greengrass writes "In a recent interview with IT Wire, general manager of business strategy for the Information Worker Group at Microsoft, Alan Yates expressed the opinion that Open Office is at the same level that MS office was around 10 years ago. Supposedly only suitable for the single desktop, isolated user. After all, it doesn't even have an e-mail client!"

Re:Single, isolated users.

[maxwell demon]

As is Mozilla Thunderbird.

Re:Unfortunately for Microsoft....

[pythas]

Oh god help the IT people who have to administer those Office 2000 installations. :(

Office 2000 has to be the biggest pain in the ass to get patched and kept up to date out of any piece of consumer level commercial software I've ever seen.

Re:Perhaps it is...

[CSMastermind]

Maybe you should try Abiword. www.abisource.com It's an open source and simple word processor. I have three office products installed on this computer. Word Perfect came with it when I got it, I downloaded Open Office, and I bought Microsoft Office 2003. Still whenever I just need a word processor I pop open abiword. It works great.

Re:What's the wizz-bang features it's missing?

[brusk]

Its international support (for East Asian languages, at least, which I use heavily) really doesn't seem to be up to snuff. It's better than Office 97, by far, and probably better than Office 2000, but not as good as Office 2003 with the Proofing Tools pack installed (adds fonts and utilities for a variety of language needs). OOo basically cloned some of the Chinese/Japanese formatting from MS Office, but not all of it and not well enough. There are lots of very specific things it's nice to be able to do with East Asian text (notably vertical text and interlinear/supralinear comments) that OOo doesn't do very well.

Not a big thing for everyone, but essential for some.

Re:10 years behind? Sounds about right

[Baricom]

In retrospect, "leaps and bounds" was probably too strong an assertion. I also have to apologize to the other child poster, because I did indeed miss the original point of the post I replied to. I've been using Office XP since 2002, and just recently upgraded to Office 2003 only because a relative had an extra license. I do think upgrading from Office 97 to XP is a good idea. I've used 97, and I've had problems with documents getting corrupted and other similar problems. However, I was very happy with XP and wouldn't have upgraded to 2003 unless somebody gave me a copy.

I still would select Microsoft Office over OpenOffice.org on a machine that had both installed, purely for stability and speed reasons. Office is better optimized and rarely crashes. With the preloaders off, it takes 2 seconds to start Microsoft Word and 14 seconds to start OpenOffice Writer on my machine. (I've timed it.) I'm really not that fast a typist - I do about 60 WPM on average - yet OOo doesn't keep up with my typing. I can usually get through 3/4 of a line before the letters appear on screen. Menus are equally slow - it takes about two seconds from the time I hit Alt+Letter to when the menu is done drawing. I've also noticed fairly significant display corruption - parts of the screen that don't update until I resize the window, or random lines being drawn across the toolbar. Office (Office 2003, at least) doesn't have these glitches.

I acknowledge that these delays aren't that significant, especially considering that Microsoft is probably using undocumented stuff to speed up Office, but they're just annoying enough to make me uncomfortable using OpenOffice.org on a regular basis.

OOo is a good product, and I've recommended it to people who couldn't afford Office. They've all been fairly happy with it, though they do complain about some of the same glitches.

With a bit of polish, OOo can be a serious competitor to Office someday. I look forward to it.

(I do apologize for my incoherent posts - it's late for me.)

Re:No flight simulator either

[nfarrell]

ah, it does come with a space invaders clone though: http://digg.com/software/Open_Office_Easter_Egg [digg.com]

Re:Gates knows best

[Crayon Kid]

I mean, M$ has pleasing to look at icons, whereas OO has old Windows 3.1 looking icons.

I think Jakub Steiner would probably take offense at this statement. I mean, the dude spent all this time designing a huge set of icons [musichall.cz] for OpenOffice. Now, why OpenOffice doesn't actually uses them, that's another story.

Re:Maybe you should try Lyx...

[MooUK]

Latex-type things don't so easily do the web-based presentation the GP was discussing, however.

Or do they?

Re:They think "Free Software" is "Spyware" too

[strider44]

*sigh* For the mods who don't get the joke, the site linked is satire. Surely the poll at the side saying "Should Mac/Linux/Windows users intermarry?" might have tweaked a few neurons.

He means it's "excellent - the absolute apex"

[giafly]

...apparantly. See dog's bollocks (meaning) [phrases.org.uk]. Coincidentally similar meaning to the nuts [about.com] in poker.

Re:Perhaps it is...

[eebra82]

You mean like the packet installation of Office? It's been there for quite some time now and lets you choose whatever you want. Plus, the menus are quite customizable nowadays.

Re:Maybe you should try Lyx...

[bw_bur]

Pretty easily. [latex2html.org]

Re:Maybe you should try Lyx...

[Haeleth]

LaTeX is hopeless for anything that doesn't use a Latin character set. I've been trying on and off to get it to display Japanese for years, with no success. A couple of months ago I finally got pLaTeX to output a Japanese DVI that I could preview in a special Japanese-enabled DVI viewer, but I'm buggered if I can get it to print.

Quite simply, the TeX system was designed to typeset scientific papers written in English, which it does brilliantly. But for other tasks, it simply hasn't kept up with technology - as soon as you leave the core areas, it rapidly degenerates into layer upon layer of flaky hacks. The existence of LaTeX-generated Japanese PDFs proves that it's possible to get it to do what I want... but life's too short, and OpenOffice.org just works out of the box.

LaTeX beamer

[Anonymous Coward]

To create fine presentations with LaTeX, try the "beamer" class. The package comes with great documentation. See http://latex-beamer.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

Re:Perhaps it is...

[Chemicalscum]

Abiword has one great feature on Linux, it works with images on the X-clipboard which Openoffice 2.0 doesn't (I know it works with the clipboard fully in Windows). I am a research chemist and I incorporate 2D chemical structures my documents. I can copy a structure drawing from Marvisnsketch and Jmoldraw (both cross platform Java apps) or Xdrawchem (a QT app whose Windows version is called Windrawchem) and they paste pefectly into Abiword, while with OOo I have to save them as files and then import them.

I now generally use Abiword as my main WP on Linux, at least for first drafts.

?!?!? care to elaborate?

[hummassa]

See:

$ apt-cache search latex japan
debiandoc-sgml - DebianDoc SGML DTD and formatting tools
cjk-latex - A LaTeX macro package for CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean)
hbf-kanji48 - Japanese Kanji 48x48 bitmap font (JIS X-0208) for CJK
ipe - drawing editor for creating figures in PDF or PS formats
jlatex209-base - basic NTT JLaTeX 2.09 macro files
jlatex209-bin - NTT Japanese LaTeX 2.09 command and configuration files
jtex-bin - NTT Japanese TeX binary files
ptex-base - basic ASCII pTeX library files
ptex-bin - The ASCII pTeX binary files
ptex-jtex - ASCII jTeX with pTeX

Re:Maybe you should try Lyx...

[Gulthek]

That's crazy talk. I've used XeTeX [sil.org] to write Chinese for years.

Screenshot of Chinese/Japanese Unicode support [sil.org].

All the beauty of TeX, all the ease of unicode.

Re:Maybe you should try Lyx...

[lahvak]

I don't know about Japanese, but I never had any problem whatsoever with Chinese in LaTeX, and since the name of the package I use is CJK, which stands for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, I don't see why Japanese would be any more difficult than Chinese. For me, it just worked straight out of the box, with TeTeX on Debian system, and both MikTeX and TeXLive on Windows.

Re:Maybe you should try Lyx...

[lahvak]

I used to use LyX a lot, I think it has the only usable equation editor I have ever seen, but ever since I started using Vim with LaTeX-suite, I completely abandoned LyX, because I can type so much faster in Vim. Maybe if LyX had vi keybindings, I would give it a try again.

Re:Perhaps it is...

[chrismcdirty]

KDE-PIM connects with KMail, KOrganizer (Calendar, To-Do), KContacts, and KNotes (probably a few more, too). But I can't comment on how well it works, as I use them all separately, and rarely sync my Palm.

Re:Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not quite fair. Novell has people working on OOo (Michael Meeks and Pavel Janik), and I think Red Hat and IBM have a couple of people too.

Yeah, it still sucks and it's 95% Sun, but at least there's a _bit_ of outside participation. And I hear the monstrous OOo build process is being cleaned up, so hopefully that'll improve the situation.

Re:Perhaps it is...

[grahamlee]

Well the installer does allow one of installing a particular feature, installing on first use or disabling it, and is damn fine-grained; I assumed that this was similar to what is being discussed WRT to OOo in that if a feature is disabled, it never appears in the menu and the user doesn't have to be presented with it.

Re:Single, isolated users.

[buchanmilne]

When you have a small to medium business all with computers on an active directory domain

But, then this doesn't qualify as Office, but as Exchange ... they are not inter-dependant, and using Office without Exchange won't get you these features.

I mean, I use thunderbird

Which has a standards-based calendar plugin. Granted, this doesn't quite provide the same features yet (except maybe with Kolab via synckolab [gargan.org]).

and I think office is way overpriced. But, for what it is, outlook 2003 is a pretty good business product. It's relatively secure (compared to past iterations), the shared calendar is easy to use (yes there are open source alternatives

Actually, the open-source alternatives would be Kolab+Kontact on the Linux side, or Thunderbird+synckolab or Outlook with a (proprietary) connector), or horde (which has full calendaring support for Horde). IMHO, web-only based tools don't count. In a while, Evolution and Kontact will likely be available on Windows too ...

but integration and ease of use are hard to match here), and with Small Business Server, the outlook web interface has a lot of Ajax and DHTML type features which make it look almost exactly like you're at your computer.

Except if you use a different browser. If you look closer, it's not just DHTML and Ajax, but one large dll which gets downloaded to the client machine on first use, and relies on insecure and proprietary technologies (ie ActiveX).

It's very well executed.

I wouldn't agree, it is quite poor under Firefox (ie no better than a run-of-the-mill webmail client from the 90s), which is why I avoid it (and use Evolution to access our Exchange server - I use kmail for our non-Exchange server).

Re:Perhaps it is...

[MoogMan]

This is a bad idea for anyone who doesn't compile from source (And for Ooo, I'm sure that's the majority!), but you do have the right idea.

A better idea would be a clear distinction between the main programs, and a plugin. I'm not sure if they've done it however, because I'm a vim+LaTeX guy (cue jokes).

Package openoffice-base, openoffice-writer, openoffice-calc, etc. etc. seperately, and then e.g. openoffice-commonplugins as an add-on package. All the rest could be seperated.

I believe Debian/Ubuntu does this already, but again I'm not sure if Open Office has 'plugins'

Re:Maybe you should try Lyx...

[Reality Master 201]

I regularly use LaTex to do my Czech homework; also, being a linguistics student, I frequently use wierd charcters (a fair amount of Russian and German, as well as IPA) in my text. I've never had a problem. I can even get those nice example-gloss-translation blocks that are all lined up without a lot of hassle.

I started out using LyX like some of the other posters here, but I eventually just cut out the middle man and moved to plain LaTeX with vim as an editor. Get latex-suite [sourceforge.net] for vim - it makes things a lot easier and faster. It took a little getting used to, but is now quite simple to use.

Re:Just you wait!

[zlogic]

It already has a lightbulb in its own window (ala Clippy'97) sometimes popping out and making statements (at least in OOo 1.1.4).

MS Word word count feature

[Kagami001]

One of the few things I can think of that I like about MS Word over OpenOffice Writer is that MS Word's word count feature understands the difference between space-separated, word-counted Western languages and non-spaced, character-counted CJK languages. In a mixed-language document, MS Word's word count function will tell you how many Western words there are and how many Eastern characters there are, whereas OpenOffice Writer will return what are effectively garbage values, a total count of all characters (Western and Eastern together) and total count of all "words" as it tries to count blocks of CJK text as single words.

http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=1 7964 [openoffice.org]

This is the sort of thing that one could write a macro to accomplish, though.

Re:Gates knows best

[Anonymous Coward]

Have a look at the current 2.0.2rc4. Industrial iconset has been included into OOo

Re:Perhaps it is...

[Maxo-Texas]

I can support this as well.

I use Openoffice to fix corrupted word documents.

Word says it can't read it.

I open and save it to Doc format in OOo (it usually shrinks by a couple megabytes).

Now it opens in Word fine.

Word clearly needs some kind of "listen damnit- just read it in as best as you can so I can resave it" read mode.

Re:10 years behind? Sounds about right

[Sangbin]

Multi-lingual support is better, especially Chinese and such using Unicode fonts.
Do you know how that compares to OOo's multilingual support?

Korean user here.
Generally speaking, MS does Korean better than non-MS overall, mainly because the computer usage in Korea(not speaking for China or Japan since I don't know) exploded with the use of Win98 or WinXP. It could be said that MS almost defined what CJK handling should be like.

I could go into details, but I'll leave it at that for now.