OpenOffice 2.0 vs. Microsoft Office 64
Jane Walker writes "Slashdot's own Robin 'Roblimo' Miller compares OpenOffice 2.0 and Microsoft Office in a recent interview with TechTarget and, when asked to identify one of the main obstacles facing widespread adoption, calls for the OSS community to deliver personable, usable training for new OpenOffice and open source software users."
The "Outlook" Key (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The "Outlook" Key (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The "Outlook" Key (Score:2)
It syncs with my pocket pc which is my calendar, address book, cell phone, etc.
Re:The "Outlook" Key (Score:2)
Re:The "Outlook" Key (Score:2)
Re:The "Outlook" Key (Score:2)
-stormin
Re:The "Outlook" Key (Score:2)
I have several locations
Re:The "Outlook" Key (Score:1)
Outlook Express vs. Thunderbird (Score:1)
I disagree. I find Outlook Express to be quite slow and a bit cumbersome to use (especially when trying to use a PGP plugin). Thunderbird on the other hand, is much more snappy and the extension API makes PGP functionality a breeze (e.g. Enigmail).
Re:You All Miss The Point (Score:2)
Threading...
It doesn't set in-reply-to headers, nor does it display threads, which make it completely useless for keeping track of complex email conversations and especially mailing lists... Imagine browsing slashdot in a non threaded way!
It also top-posts by default, and i could never work out how to make it default to bottom posting...
Another issue it has, is when used with exchange, it can't keep track of timezones correctly if you get an appointment from one
Re:The "Outlook" Key (Score:1)
Re:The "Outlook" Key (Score:2)
Seriously. The COO at the company I work for is moving all the salespeople to POP3 so they can keep their e-mail local because of how bad Outlook is with IMAP access and its broken offline support.
Re:What the hell are you talking about?!?!??!?!? (Score:2)
No doubt outlook includes poor support for standard protocols to try and pressure people into using exchange, it wouldn't be the first time.
Re:Are You Stuck On Stupid??? (Score:1, Redundant)
As for outlook being specifically an exchange client, the specific exchange client was the original "inbox" app that shipped with exchange, outlook was intended as a general purpose mail program with exchange support and came along much later.
And as for ISP's not supporting IMAP, this is due to the way IMAP is intended to store the mail on server rather than downloading it, this isn't in the int
Re:Are You Stuck On Stupid??? (Score:1)
Messaging Application Program Interface is originaly intended to allow program to intercomunicate with other programs. Outlook (or at leat in outlook 2000)uses a MAPI subsystem to talk to a MAPI service provider subsystem that uses another protocal to talk with exchange. I've seen it referenced as "on the wire" protocal but i do not know the official name for it. My understanding is that it consist of a mix between imap and ldap with a few secrete
Re:The "Outlook" Key (Score:1)
In these latter situations, Outlook 2K3 works pretty much as well as if you were on the LAN.
Re:The "Outlook" Key (Score:1)
About the Middle Manager making decisions; Until Middle Managers can spend how much they deem fit, bugets are always going to be in the fore front for the Middle Earth types. The office is also changing. Work taskings of office staff are changing, and understanding in the ways of computers is becoming better and better. When was the last time you heard, "Take a letter for me." In this day and age
Re: (Score:2)
Re:The "Outlook" Key (Score:1)
For God's sake. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:For God's sake. (Score:4, Insightful)
This is hardly flamebait. He says that no amount of "personable and usable training" is going to change the behavior of most users.
The most common user most certainly does not want to spend any time learning how to use any software. They just want to get their work done. If there is a way of getting the work done without learning anything they will.
There are only a few people in my small software development company, but the most common complaint of the senior programmers and adminstrators is that they have to keep on repeating the same instructions for the same tasks to the users.
There is no need for training - personable or not - when James is right there and already knows how to do it.
By the way, James, I forgot how to file my TPS reports, can you show me how to put the new cover sheet into these documents? Thanks.
Re:For God's sake. (Score:2)
Re:For God's sake. (Score:2)
I don't care what group of humans you are talking about 20% of the people do 80% of the work, with the others more than happy to wait for someone else to do the work. Be it a club, company, religious organization, or whatever there is always a core of people who do all the work and a larger group who reap the benefits of that core group.
My wife and I are active in our church as well as Scouts, and you al
Re:For God's sake. (Score:1)
It will last as long as the Vi vs. Emacs war did. This is yet another dsw (dick size war).
The funny thing is that I use both MS Office and OO.org, and I find both suites are good for what I use them for.
Mr.Clip for OOo? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Mr.Clip for OOo? (Score:5, Insightful)
I know this is /., so we should all hate users and consider them to be morons.
However, in the real world, there are millions and millions of users of the Office suite, and a surprisingly large number of them are power users in Excel. This is where MS has a true mind share monopoly. There are so many companies that have invested literally millions of dollars in "development" of Excel models, macros and procedures. Telling those people to switch to an inferior product just because it's a bit cheaper is quite futile. (OOo is much cheaper in percentage terms, of course, but only marginally cheaper in terms of total savings per employee per year.)
Excel is the best software ever written for the mass market, by quite some margin. The rest of the MS Office products are OK with deficits (Outlook) or just plain bad (all the others, except Visio, if one includes that).
Getting people to move away from Word is probably quite possible. Likewise with PowerPoint, I'd guess. Getting people away from Outlook is obviously possible, considering that people actually use Lotus Notes (Ugh! I get a pain in my stomach just writing that...) No one uses the MS Office Suite becuase of Access. And no one uses MSO for any other of the programs.
Excel, people, Excel. Give us a superior spreadsheet and you will see it catch on like wild fire. Unfortunately, anyone trying will find that making a better spreadsheet is pretty darn hard...
Re:Mr.Clip for OOo? (Score:2)
Hate to disagree (mostly because I really wish you were right), but a lot of mid-level managers (often an overlapping group who are Excel Power Users), also use Access because even some of them have gotten through the idea, that some things require a database instead of just really complex spreadsheets.
I've had to work with some of them and it was an eye-opening experience to see how much they love their (rather flawed from my perspective) tools, sim
Excel as a platform (Score:3, Informative)
In the corporate world, Excel is more of a platform than a simple spreadsheet these days. I have seen a multi-million dollar company essentially run off of three Excel spreadsheets with a ton of macros. The input data would come from some reports we generated off the database for them, and the finance people would enter them into the spreadsheets and let the macros morph the data into the views the senior management wanted to see.
I rather liked this arrangement because it empowered the users in finance
I wish I could agree with Rob.... (Score:5, Insightful)
And his remarks about OOo Base are a bit off. It's a buggy application, and unsuitable for "real" work. Believe me, I've tried. It's impossible to use the forms without resorting to macros (you can't even make a button on a form open a different form when it's clicked without writing a custom macro), and it has no equivalent to Access's switchboard. Sure, the reports, forms, etc. may all be there, but without a switchboard you only have Base's bizarre UI which no end-user will ever get.
It sickens me that OOo doesn't seem to excite people. I can't understand why businesses seem so happy dropping so much money on Office, and aren't willing to investigate alternatives. For most people, especially those using the wordprocessor, and maybe spreadsheets, OOo is more than good enough.
More than good enough? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's not. That's exactly why most people/businesses aren't switching to the free-as-in-beer alternative and still cough up the cash for MS Office. Contrary to popular belief, I rather doubt most people using an office tool really do just type letters and view using right alignment as an advanced technique.
Before I continue, let me just say that I personally use OpenOffice at home and MS Office at work, and have done for several years now. I don't use office software enough at home for MS Office to be worth the asking price to me, and I don't believe in ripping off other people's software illegally, so OO it is. I'm grateful to those who give OO away so I can use it, and I'm not criticising them for having an inferior product. They are several years of development time behind MS here so it's unreasonable to expect the two to be similarly powerful/refined.
Having made that clear, I have to say that OO simply isn't up to scratch on usability yet. The other day I was editing a word processor document, and using a lot of small capitals formatting. I wanted to add a button to the toolbar or a shortcut key to make this easier, but in OO you can't. I was going to report this, but found there's already an open bug to this effect and has been for years. In general, the keyboard support in OO is weak, which near-fatal in a word processor: where are the easy ways to set keyboard shortcuts for styles, special characters, specific formatting, etc? Compare and contrast with Word, which has done this stuff in its sleep for years.
I try to think of a different example every time I make this point. Last time it was silly limitations in mail merging and fundamental weaknesses in the data sources model used in OO. Next time it'll probably be underpowered charting in Calc, or maybe the terrible keyboard and mouse behaviour when using things like tables and text boxes in Writer. The point is, MS Office products are quite mature now, and while they may not have changed much in years and certainly have places they could be improved, they have relatively few really daft shortcomings. OO just isn't there yet, which is why I'm happy to use it at home for fairly simple jobs, but wouldn't dream of recommending it for business use.
Ultimately, the feature list is a battle OO can never win, as long as they're trying to be a better MS Office than MS Office and always chasing the leader. Microsoft might give them a huge boost by actually sending MS Office backwards with the weird new interface, but I'd bet by release time there will be an option to switch that off. Meanwhile, if OO wants to start providing genuine advantages over the MS offering, it needs to stop trying to be that MS offering, and start focussing on improving its own features and particularly their usability, and on offering things MS Office can't (like page layout and typography options beyond kindergarten level, or genuinely useful writing aids, for example).
Re:More than good enough? (Score:2)
Well, my observation is that I'm about the only person I know at work who uses styles, which places 90% of Office users in the "Don't know what the fsck they're doing" category.
Emphasis and stylesheets (Score:2)
Indeed. As I've argued around these parts in the past, one area where today's word processors could seriously improve is to shift the UI focus and formatting tools from ad-hoc adjustments to the use of more powerful stylesheet and template features.
If they did this, a user who doesn't care about formatting would soon learn to add the "emphasized" tag instead of clicking italics. The way that emphasis within emphasis h
Re:Emphasis and stylesheets (Score:2)
But yes, it seems like word processors actively try to lead users astray. Even Apple does it in Pages, hides the styles away as an "expert" feature you have to turn on, and leaves the ad hoc formatting commands as the only visible way to change things.
Small Caps keystroke in OpenOffice.org (Score:2)
Can't? Try this:
Re:Small Caps keystroke in OpenOffice.org (Score:2)
I appreciate the reply, but AFAICS that workaround is only effective if you're not already using styles for anything else. Similarly, one could record a macro that went into the relevant dialog box and flicked the list box to the right setting, if one were brave enough to go near OO macros. But you still can't, say, add a control to the toolbar that indicates when small caps are active, as you can (and by default do) have with the bold or italic settings, nor can you use the expected UI to set up a keyboard
Re:I wish I could agree with Rob.... (Score:2)
In the states, classes in MS Office is are close as the your neighborhood public library, high school or community center.
Certification programs for the disabled and those on welfare are often free. Their ticket out of sub-minimum wage jobs.
can't understand why businesses seem so happy dropping so much money on Office, and aren't willing to investigate alternatives
L.A., New York, the high Artic or the Mississippi Delta, it doesn't matter.
You can draw
Re:I wish I could agree with Rob.... (Score:2)
Do I correctly read your comment? Are you arguing that people actually know how to use Office? Most people who use it are constantly fucking things up. They have all kinds of botched formatting, which in HTML would be the equivalent of a bunch of <strong> </strong> or equivalent.
Lack of manuals (Score:2, Insightful)
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"I do not wish to realise when I die, that I had not lived
Re:Lack of manuals (Score:2)
http://support.openoffice.org/index.html#oob [openoffice.org]
Macro editing (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, let me start by saying that for 90% of what I do, I love OpenOffice. However, I'm one of these constructively lazy people who would rather spend twenty minutes writing up a macro to save me a couple of hours than spending, well, a couple of hours doing it the manual way.
Unfortunately, I detest the macro creation/editing facility in OpenOffice. Just as a side-by-side test, I just popped open a document, recorded a macro to insert the words "This is a test!" and went in the edit (presumably, to customize) the macro.
Here's what I get in OpenOffice:
Jesus, that's a lot of lines just to insert a few words of text! And if I wanted to customize it, I wouldn't have a clue where to begin! Microsoft Word, on the other hand, gives me this:
Wow! I'm really not just cherry-picking one rare example. As the tasks get more difficult, the macro code gets exponentially harder in OpenOffice than in Microsoft's apps. In my experience, macro editing in OpenOffice is like pulling teeth, but so easy that even I can do it in Microsoft Office applications.
Like I said, in my day-to-day dealings, I use OpenOffice. The applications work just as well for almost all of my uses as Microsoft Office, and the price just can't be beaten unless Uncle Bill comes to my house and pays me money to use his applications. But whenever I'm doing something that involved more than just popping it open and tossing out a quick letter, Microsoft Word is the way to go.
I'm not a programmer, so unfortunately, all I can do is sit around and wish and hope that at some point, the OpenOffice development team, folks a lot smarter than I am, comes up with something a bit easier to use in automating the suite.
Re:Macro editing (Score:3, Interesting)
This thing is so freaking baroque, with all sorts of nifty objects, interfaces, patterns and god knows what. It's really overengineering at its best.
Re:Macro editing (Score:5, Interesting)
Was doing some data analysis and automation work using VBA in Excel for a client recently, and as I had a little spare time on my hands, and use OOo exclusively myself, I decided that I'd re-implement everything using OOo. I gave up.
It's not because it was difficult, although it's absurdly convoluted and finding the info you need to use the API is a pain in the arse, but because it would have taken at least 10 times as long to achieve the same results, and that was way longer than I had spare.
I've developed in some God-awful systems over the last 20 years, and even I looked at it and thought "I just can't be arsed". Can you imagine what a regular end-user with no programming experience is going to think?
Show them VBA for automating MS Office however, and even though they'll probably never really understand the full implications of what the simple commands they are issuing do, or the full extent of the object model, it doesn't matter. They work, and the commands they type just seem to make sense, they "read" right, and are straightforward enough to memorise and re-use.
What's really needed is a full re-implementation and extensive simplification of the object model, but obviously for a product as far along the path as OOo, that's not going to be practical. So, I'd personally suggest either a set of macros, possibly even implemented in OOoBasic, or the creation of a parallel API hiding all the messy nonsense and allowing users to interact with the suite in a similar way to VBA in MS Office. You need to get rid of all those cryptic Sun-isms like "com.sun.star.frame.DispatchHelper" if you don't want to scare off casual users.
Until this happens, nobody in a business environment is going to take OpenOffice.org particularly seriously. It's fine for individual members of staff just adding up columns of numbers and typing letters, but being able to automate things when your requirements go beyond that, is such a major thing even for many small businesses, that OOo won't get a look in until its macro facilities become significantly easier to use.
Re:Macro editing (Score:2)
But whenever I'm doing something that involved more than just popping it open and tossing out a quick letter, Microsoft Word is the way to go.
Exactly what I've kept running into with Open Office when I've been doing some consulting gigs for transcription groups. These are serious "power users" - huge numbers of templates, macros, abbreviation expanders, and so on. There's a lot of things I like about OO versus Office, from the security standpoint in how document templates are done, and the potential i
Re:Macro editing (Score:3, Informative)
It's interesting to note that the python script is much simpler: # HelloWorld python script for the scripting framework def HelloWorldPython( ): """Prints the string 'Hello World(in Python)' into the current document""" #get the doc from the scripting context which is made available to all scripts model = XSCRIPTCONTEXT.getDocument() #get the XText interface text = model.Text #create an XTextCursor cursor = text.createTextCursor() #and insert the string
Open Source (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, does it matter? Some things just won't gain huge, widespread acceptance, displacing a massive, well funded market monopolist. OOo is great (I use it now) but I can't see it getting supported. Christ, I just got off the phone to Tech Support at Bigpond (biggest broadband supplier in Australia), they don't support anything except Outlook Express and Outlook. If a simple email app can't get supported, what hope is there for a 100MB+ Office suite?
Re:Tuxedooo (Score:2)
Office Home (retail boxed, no academic ID required) lists for $150 US with a three-seat license. OEM Small Business Edition, $200.
MS Office is priced for the middle class, Microsoft's core market.
Free-as-in-beer has never been a middle class ideal or obsession. Talk of piracy hints at the adolescent's all-purpose excuse for failure: "It's not my fault!"
Re:Tuxedooo (Score:2)
Photoshop isn't an indulgence for the professional. It is a part of his basic tool kit and its purpose is to make him money. The same can be said for Office.
In the states, a single pair of ink jet cartridges costs $50 and will need to be replenished after about three months of casual use.
Joe will upgrade Office when he upgrades his PC. For
"You should use it because I prefer it" (Score:3, Interesting)
So he prefers OO. So what? If this was a pro-Office article they'd be people here calling "FUD".
He writes that he's "used it [Outlook] and do not find it impressive". We all have opinions but as an Office user I'm not swayed by this. He continues "I use Thunderbird for my e-mail, and it beats Outlook in stability and ease of use by many miles". I can put my finger in the air to come up with unqualified rubbish too. In my experience Outlook is not unstable. Not at work, not at home. I can't remember having to restart it or watching it crash. This is just mud-slinging or the type that gets shot down when MS are perceived to do it.
Then there's the "more logical division" of separating other apps from email. I'd suggest otherwise. Working in a real office I notice there's quite of a lot of emailed Office documents going around. Word has a toolbar button to email the current document. Real people find this useful. There's also a lot of general emailing happening and quite a bit of meeting organising. With Outlook. I can even get someone's telephone extension by right-clicking their name in an email. Outlook 2003 also tells me when they're free by checking their calendar. All useful stuff. Can't see why they're shouldn't be a division in the real world: I can write Word documents without Outlook so what's the problem?
It might be that Office users are all working inefficiently or somehow incorrectly. But what they have works. In a real environment it could be argued email makes more sense of part of an office suite than a browser/internet app as some organisations limit web-browsing.
Re:"You should use it because I prefer it" (Score:2)
These aren't really features in Outlook itself; this information is provided by the Exchange server that your organization is using. If you were to use Outlook outside an Exchange environment -- say, for checking your personal email from home -- you wouldn't have these features either.
Outlook's advantage in this case is simly that i
Yes, but... (Score:3, Informative)
This isn't possible in a corporate environment that uses Microsoft Exchange. The Evolution ximian-connector/exchange plugin is a good start, but there are some features that it doesn't support (the 'categories' field/column in your inbox, for example).
It's a shame, because I have to agree - Outlook is really REALLY bad. The version I'm using in work can't even block images!
Very condescending... (Score:2)
Hmm...not quite yet. (Score:1)
Then I started attempting to make a document in traditional outline format. Something so easy to do in MS Word. In OO, however...
It is what my old buddy Clarky used to refer to as having a "50M-50B" problem: 50% of the problem is that it is mysterious, the other 50% of the problem is that once you figure it out, you realize it's broken.
So, while I will continue to use OO, I'm not fooling myse
Use th right tool for the right job (Score:4, Insightful)
Both Office suites have advantages and disadvantages. MS Office is fairly expensive, OO is free. Microsoft's VBA is relatively straightforward, OO's scripting is convoluted. Microsoft has annoyances like "personalized menus", while the Open Office interface is relatively static. Outlook provides some powerful tools for cooperative scheduling, which OO doesn't support. Open Office is infinitely more "tweakable" (if you're willing to poke around in the innards) while MS only provides the customization the they think you need. The list goes on and on.
My advice: Choose the feature set you need and then pick the office suite the provides it. If you can't live without macros and scripting and you aren't willing to deal with the convoluted scripting language of OO, pick Microsoft. If you're ethically opposed to using software you haven't paid for and can't afford MS Office, pick OO. If you prefer one interface over the other, choose the suite you prefer. But don't do the Office Suite Taliban thing... dare I say that it's "just" software?
Anyone willing to look at both suites openly and fairly will admit that Open Office is still somewhat behind MS Office in usability and functionality (in most areas). There are a lot of reasons for this: OO is relatively new, MS has more money to spend, MS's development efforts are centrally coordinated, etc. Open Office has, however, made some big strides forward from when I first used it, while Microsoft Office development seems to have stagnated.
As someone who spends most of my days writing, I can tell you that for some tasks, Writer works great, and for others, Word is a good choice. For a lot of my writing tasks, I use FrameMaker, because neither Writer nor Word can do the things I need. I pick the tool that works and use it.