Submitted by InfoWorld’s Curtis Franklin reviews the four leading contenders to supplant Microsoft Office in business and finds that, while Google Docs is not ready to take on the full mantle, OpenOffice and Zoho provide viable alternatives should IT endeavor to wean business off Office.
Both articles basically (and probably unwittingly) deal with vendor lock-in. The review article doesn’t focus on the merits of the test piece but how they compare to MS Office. The second article is bluntly about switching yet also fails to realize that certain productivity tasks are better served by other products than MS Office. The author is not only locked into his productivity suite, but also in his mindspace. Sad.
What’s the benefit from switching from MS lock-in to Google lock-in? Moreover, MS is going to support ODT so no more vendor lock-in. But in the first place, why changing something that works great and that serves its purpose? The price tag is a little expensive, but spread out on a 5-year life-span, the investment is low for a company, compared to other expenses and to what the company earns. There’s nothing to win with small savings like that, especially for a business where a file must be readable consistently by all business partners with no tweaks and where people are not supposed to be computer savvy.
I would guess that that wasn’t mentioned because it’s not relevant to the point of the article or its intended audience.
Or maybe he’s professional enough to not indulge in editorializing in a review.
Yes.
I don’t know why you’ve been modded down. There seem to be many people who simply can’t imagine that it’s completely possible to get real work done without an office application, no matter from which manufacturer it comes from.
Several years of maintaining mixed environments taught me that OpenOffice is suitable for most of the purposes done (in these environments, mostly in the medical sector); these settings included mixed installations of UNIX, Mac OS X and even “Windows”. The most remarkable thing for me have been the users coming from MICROS~1 “Office” who suddenly wanted “this new ‘Office'”, which was OpenOffice in fact. After getting it installed, I could notice that their complains, their problems and their questions got fewer and fewer. Ineroperability between the different plaforms was not a big deal, and the ressources brought by OpenOffice (structure of menus and dialogs, templates and functionalities) created no real problems regarding the “usage migration” from another application.
Speaking from my individual background, I’ve been a long time StarOffice user, and OpenOffice afterwards, but for important things, things that have a serious background and that have to be done in a way where content, form and data representation have to be perfect without any compromises, more simple tools like LaTeX are my choice. This is, of course, not applicable to other fields where office applications dominate today.
So if someone would ask me: “Can You Really Live Without Office?”, I would be able to answer honestly and without any doubt: “Yes, I can.”
A note on the english language: The use of “you” may be seen with two different meanings: “can you” can be addressed towards a certain person (like me), or it can be a kind of a rhethoric question, such as “can man(kind)”; in the german language, we can differentiate this with “kannst du” (individual context) and “kann man” (generalized context).
but for important things, things that have a serious background and that have to be done in a way where content, form and data representation have to be perfect without any compromises, more powerful tools like LaTeX are my choice. The problem is that LaTeX being so powerful can become more complex and confusing to many people. Therefore, we have several choices available to make this direct or indirect use of LaTeX available, and for free.
These choices include LyX, Kile, TeXMaker, TeXShop. Even Emacs has complete support for LaTeX. Recently, Kate for KDE 4.x is including LaTeX support, albeit rudimentary. More tools exist then I have listed, but it’s clear that options away from Word processing exist and are far more professional/powerful for most needs.
Forms for Accounting, Business processing that includes memos, letterheads and more can easily be adapted to OpenOffice without the concerns of vendor lock-in.
Allready migrating clients away from MS Office. My preference is Open Office.
I think Open Office 3.0 will be a great milestone for migrating especially in Win/Mac mixed environments. Just hope they get the file save dialogue in Vista sorted as it is crap at the moment (can’t save a file through Vista native dialogues and have to use OO file handling dialogues instead).
The concern I see for OS X is whether it’s OS X 10.5 or greater compatibility only, thus forcing people to upgrade from a very stable Tiger, just to run OpenOffice 3.0 natively in Cocoa.
Everyone who I know uses openoffice at home now, it is simply an excellent package for most people. Version 3.0 is going to be a well deserved treat for me. The only two things was Ubuntu doesn’t install MSlooking fonts as default. Although it was pretty trivial to fix. The second is selecting whole lines with the cursor. PDF and html export really have been killer features.
GoogleDocs is not a replacement for office. Especially when the formating when copying to and from Office is appauling. It has limited featureset. I had two problems one with a Visus scanner blocking GoogleDoc and one of my uses not being able to access it. It is excellent as a quick word processer, or to store documents like CV etc. The only other thing that I object to is adding a document to an email is less than obvious and not very functional. GoogleDocs for now should be exceped for what it is a simple Online office suite, and for that alone its an excellent package.
Office is criminally expenisve for home users and even for a relatively well off company. The price of Office is simply too high for students and low income/unwaged to have access to, and please don’t quote the student/teacher addition it lacks basic office applications and is only reasonable if you are 3 people.
Seriously though OpenOffice 3.0 Beta 2 is out which is bigger news than this considering the massive improvements each version brings.
The trouble is companies have way to much emphasis on process rather than actual work. That is why staff spend an entire week on a Powerpoint presentation which says absolutely nothing. Bosses waste hours a day sending and reading emails. Sensible employers should be taking away the computers/blackberries/phones of most their staff so they get some actual work done,
….welcome to the corporate world. No one really gets anything done here.
You are so right, style over substance, MSOffice is foscused on presentation over content. This is a problem in our organisation, with marketing, corporate relations and branding consultants having more resources than staff education or Research and Development. They are the ones using excel for lists, outlook for file transfers and word docs for emails and sharepoint/online help, WTF!
This is a tragic state of affairs and it is not a question of ‘could we live with out office’, it is an imperative to live with out MSOffice. Especially if you want your staff to be autonomous, smart and effective workers. I find MSOffice users tend to be more apathetic, less inventive, curious and thoughtful than their FOSS colleagues. MSOffice; its users, proponents and its ‘easy win’ UI are in essence to blame for this.
And users of OpenOffice would be smarter? Considering that office suites are chosen by IT management and used “as-is” by office workers, your argument is flawed.
MS Office does allow you to do fancy things with document formatting, but that is *good*. Users going overboard with formatting are *bad*. Tools aren’t to blame*. And the same people using now MS Office would still be using typewriters if they didn’t have office suites, they wouldn’t learn TeX…
* Don’t compare this to “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”, because guns are designed to kill, and the average Joe with a gun is a threat to society, even if he might not mean to be.
Wouldn’t the correct title be, “for the price you paid for Office, can you really justify it?” – sure, a lot of people *could* use something else, but those of us who have bought it (my case, Office 2008), we do so because we like the continence of features such as bibliography handling, bundled templates, dictionary and locale detection that actually work.
“…that actually work.”
That made me laugh. MS Office is the worst product out there, complete bloat and in real world business only 10% of the features get used. You must be the first person i heard saying that MS Office actually “works”.
Yes, and everyone uses a different 10%, so you can never have a situation where by everyone uses the same 10% – which is why there are so many features required to keep people happy.
I’m not running Microsoft Office for Windows either – I made no such claim about Office for Windows. The fact you can’t even be bothered to read my posts I make on this forum because of your position of ‘johnny come lately’ – maybe you should pipe down and learn a little thing or two about those of us who have been hear for more than just 5 minutes.
I use both, OpenOffice at home, and MS Office 2003 at work, and they BOTH work. They do their job with out too many issues. They open documents from each other with aplomb in 99% of cases.
At work, we have 90 people using MS office, and they all use it differently, to do different things (mail merges, presentations, database, spreadsheets, pivot tables, graphs, data conversion, automation).
You call it bloated, but everyone uses the features they need, and OpenOffice isn’t that much slimmer. On top of that, their Access replacement really kinda sucks compared to Access (Which sucks anyway). Sometimes you just can’t beat the real thing.
I’m usually the first to comment on Microsoft products as unstable, full of bloat… and so on.
However MS Office /is/ actually damn good. It’s one of the few products they’ve produced which I think deserves being market leader.
Sure I use KOffice (and OpenOffice sporadically) at home and sure I wish Microsoft would switch to ODF as their primary document format. Also sure I miss some of the functionality in KOffice and OpenOffice which don’t appear in a vanilla install of MSOffice. But on the whole MS Office not only does the job “good enough” but it seems to do the job well – often with great time saving features as well as great scripting language for building in new features.
That all said, I don’t see the point in Office package flame wars because for 99% of the time, any of the leading Office packages will get the job done (hell, even a 13 year old copy of Lotus Smart Suite will meet most peoples need most of the time).
That said – i don’t think MSOffice deserves to be the leader by any where as significant margin as it currently has.
The only reason it came to have so much of the market, is that MS relied on the fact that they also wrote the market dominating OS, and hence could come to market/deliver new features faster than the competition.
Worst product? How biased…
So I guess you’re flag is still flying Wordperfect 5.1?
The office suite is the best product Microsoft has in it’s portfolio. It’s the most “standard’ across all the products, in that, if you know how to use app, you can figure out the others.
I’m no fan of Microsoft, but I know a good product when I see it, and use it. And up until recently, the reason why Office was the standard for so many years was because everything else sucked.
tutorial for bibliographies http://www.tutorialsforopenoffice.org/tutorial/Bibliographies.html.
Implying anything not working with the dictionaries is a lie. Interestingly I have yet to see installed on a PC in the UK, a UK dictionary its all US.
Openoffice has a vast array of excellent templates http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/SunTemplatepack_1
I’m continually surprised at how you comment on things that you seem to have never even used.
Why aren’t they included with OpenOffice.org download by default?
And maybe you can stop being an idiot, given that I have used it:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v420/kaiwai/screenshotme.png
What the hell do you call that – a farting elephant in a tutu?
Templates aren’t included with the default OpenOffice.org download because they add bloat. They are however included in the derivative called OxygenOffice.
That’s called opening a program, taking a screenshot and lying!
I’m not saying you used it, but that screenshot doesn’t say much and your attitude is somewhat disturbing (on osnews and osol)
Edited 2008-07-18 19:01 UTC
When I was at university, I’ve seen the strangest tings according to the use and the form of bibliographical information. So this explains that it isn’t very hard, but most users treat their text processors as a worse typewriter, so they won’t use it. This is true even in professional contexts where you would expect that people think first, then do, and do the way it is intended to, but as I said, I’ve seen it all.
One of the parts of my work is to create (or, to be correct, to participate on the work of creating) documentation for sofware: the “in application” help, web-based manuals and printed documentation. I have to work with others who create content (text, screenshots, graphs and tables) and who translate text. We do use OpenOffice now for several years without big problems. Our machines include UNIX and Mac systems, so interoperability is of high value. Before we used OpenOffice, LaTeX, gnuplot and CVS were our most important tools. Of course it’s nice that we cann still profit from the work we’ve done with these tools.
Final note: It maybe off topic, but bibliographies (listing, sorting, referencing) is much easier with LaTeX (and bibTeX, if you like). 🙂
I installed open office becuase had heard it was better, and a real alternative to MS.
Worked ok, at home.
Then I actually tried to finish a ppt file that I started at work. Just 2 slides,
A heading and a bit of text.
First the header in the master slide never rendered completely, it was always missing. This header consisted of a grey rectangle and text field. Must have been too complicated for OOo to understand, right?
The text on the actual slides rendered fine. Except that the bold text was not bold and the color was wrong. Then I had to decide, do I carry on, and hope that it just looks like this in OOo, and that when I open it again at work in Office that it would look like it was supposed to? My presentation was the next day, I couldn’t take that chance, so I unistalled it and re-installed office.
The cost of having a document that looks nothing like I expected when I make my presentation using office is more important then the actual cost of the software.
Would I use it again? No. If has trouble displaying a slide powerpoint with nothing complex happening, I’m not even going to risk writing a complex word file or excel file and hoping it be all right when I edited late at work in office.
You think that is bad?
You should see what MS Office does when trying to read any document made in any other suite.
Utter fail.
If you want interoperability … installing MS Office is precisely the wrong thing to do.
Install OpenOffice everywhere … it won’t cost you anything, and you get interoperability.
Edited 2008-07-17 10:09 UTC
To be honest,
I’m not interested in Other Office Suits since I don’t use them and neither does anyone I know. Admittedly, unlike many people here I don’t have a grandmother or 6 year old kid brother that happily use Linux and have no trouble using the command line. They are non-technical collegues, friends and family. All use Windows and some variant of office/works. Yes, in an ideal world everything would be inteop., and people could use what they like.
But in the world I live in, everyone uses Office or works, hardly anyone uses another Office suite or knows that they exist. Even at work (and even in the IT dept there) we use MS. One of the reasons is because all our customers use it and sending them stuff that looks fine in OOo but not in the word isn’t possible, there not interested in the MS is evil idea. They couldn’t care about open standards. We have to make sure our customers can open their documents today, if they can’t they won’t remain our customers very long. In such a case being able to open the documents in the future is unimportant since they won’t have any need to open them in the future.
Edited 2008-07-17 10:40 UTC
Weff if you wanted to send out documents that work for everyone you should send out PDF.
.doc looks different from one Office version to the next.
The documents need to be editable, our customers are very big companies receiving very large 150+ page .ppt’s.tens of thousands of people can’t all sit in on the one presentation, and different depts. want to see different info. The clients then break them down in to small presentations that get passed on, edited, passed on again to people who need to see the edited edited version and so on.
Also as far as office users are concernced the formats are the same, they only have a problem if a very old format is used. I never know anyone use an older version. We still use the office 97-203 version not the new office 2007 versions. And this would only be a problem in the future if someone was to downgrade their programmes. I never met anyone who did that. And when I think about it I have never updated office, and no one I know has. They just get new versions when they get a new computer. So it doesn’t matter if the format’s change.
If anyone you did know used OOO then they would explain that there is no requirement to be aware of a command line, or even Linux, in any way.
In the last day or so; I received a Word file from a client that displayed wrongly. This is on Office 2008 which cost me the equivalent of 600USD. The reason I paid was to stop this happening – which makes me spit.
In practice OOO is a lifesaver and IMHE better to use.
You should get out more.
It is certainly possible; I have seen it. Using MS Office is however the perfect excuse even if it is perniciously expensive.
My suspicion is that MSO users become so innured to stepping around its practical shortcomings that they forget it is less than perfect. Coming to it again after a couple of years; I found it less than intuitive and exhibiting occasional bits of weird and frustrating behaviour.
Getting the job done is key, I respect that. That is the deal though; don’t pretend you are using MS Office for its other qualities.
For the observant; I should mention that using Office2008 means I am Mac based; which in turn means I use the NeoOffice variant of OOO.
I’ll try and answer all your points.
This was an attempt at a joke, whenever you criticise a product round here, people reply mentioning nearly always (especially where linux or alternative software is concernced) that their grandmother uses it, or that there kid brother does without any problems. If you were to go by the posts one reads on tech forums on the subject, linux’s key users would appear be hoards of 6 year old kids and pensioners in retirement homes.
Can’t comment on this as I have never experienced a problem with office.
Each to there own.
I do, with my children and friends. And when we go out the last thing we do is talk about computers or peices of software. From my experience, if anyone needs to get out more, it’s people who use Linux and OpenOffice.
Yes, the new 2007 interface is terrible. maybe for new users who have never used the old it’s great. But everyone at work hates it.
Well, sorry, but I am.
It does everything I need.
Why should I look else where. It’s free (as far as I’m concerned (it comes with the PC I buy or the IT dept. buys me a license at work).
I like using it. I’ve rarely had it crash or have any other kind of problem. Everyone else that I work with or know uses it. Why wouldn’t I use it? Should I unistall it when I get a new computer? Why? because it’s MS?
Edited 2008-07-17 14:25 UTC
I love that statement!
It’s so cute and naive, isn’t it?
As free as the box the cookies comes in!
As free as Windows operating systems (OEM)!
Honestly, don’t people think they pay for the OEM-software? Do they really think they will pay the same price for a computer without Windows and Works (with Word)?
Somebody’s gotta pay for that software. It’s you, pal – they calculate it in on the price you pay for the PC.
But please, continue making statements like that – it brightens up my day – it’s fun reading (albeit getting old now).
Nalle Berg
./nalle.
Perhaps you have received documents theat were prepared on Openoffice and you didn’t even know it.
For the past five years or so, I have prepared work related technical documents at home on OOo (as doc and ppt files) then distributed them to colleagues at work. At first I would check them in MS Office at work to corrrect any formatting errors that occured but now OOo has got so good that I don’t even both to do that except for the most complicated documents.
OOo 3.0 beta is so good now that it makes my Office 2003 at work seem slow and clunky by comparison. It is a complete turnaround from the way it was five years ago when OOo was the slow and clunky one compared to Office 97 which we were still using then. No I have not tried Office 2007 nor do I want to.
Edited 2008-07-17 14:47 UTC
Maybe I have, I don’t believe so, but it is possible.
My laptop at home is old, everything on it is slow, but of the two MS office is faster. I couldn’t care (as an end user) if this is due to secrets about the OS that MS know and thrid party developers don’t.
I need something that is useable on my laptop, and OOo wasn’t it. At work I must use whatever the IT Admin installs on the network.
On my XP work system when there are not a lot of programs loaded and I am not using virtual memory, Office loads lightninng fast, but once XP starts to use virtual memory it really slows down in this respect. What is fast in OOo 3 beta now is the loading and saving of files which used to be very slow compared to office.
What I find irritating is that Office takes a long time to draw large images as you scroll down a document with a lot of them in it. OOo though it used to have this problem no longer has it in 3 beta. It was already pretty good in 2.4 in this respect too.
It is difficult for me to give a precise comparison as I am using systems with similar but not identical hardware and I am running OOo on Ubuntu Hardy at home and Office on XP at work. I have a couple of Windows systems at work with OOo on them but they are running old versions of OOo and don’t have Office on them for a direct comparison, while all of the IT administered systems have Office but no OOo.
Edited 2008-07-17 15:15 UTC
I see what you’re getting at, but your post just sounds like a series of excuses for sticking with what’s comfortable rather than reasons for using whatever software would be best for the users and work required.
Let me break down my reasons for saying this (these points directly respond to statements you made in the above quote):
1/ MS Office and Works are not compatable with each other so you’re only creating more problems for your non-technical users by encuraging them to use a suite thats not compatable with other suites.
2/ You don’t need to be technically minded to run Open Office, Google Doc or KOffice. In my experience they’re just as user friendly.
3/ You don’t need linux to run Open Office, Google docs or KOffice.
4/ You don’t even need to know the command line to run any of the above office suites in Linux. Plus in many distros of Linux you wouldn’t even need to know the command line to install said suites.
5/ If you want to garrentee that documents to work between different computers then you should be using PDFs rather than DOC / PPT
6/ PDFs are editable (this is in responce to a later comment you made).
7/ Just because your IT admin haven’t heard of other office packages, it doesn’t mean that other office packages aren’t up to the job.
At the end of the day though, it’s all preference and you are entiled to prefer something for no other reason than an emotional response. I just thought your reasons sounded inaccurate and, at times, like poor excuses.
Edited 2008-07-17 17:34 UTC
“3/ You don’t need linux to run Open Office, Google docs or KOffice. ”
KOffice 2 is alpha, hardly useable or production ready. KOffice 1.6 is not available on Windows, except via Cygwin or similar – non native install method, feels (and is) alien software to Windows.
“6/ PDFs are editable (this is in responce to a later comment you made). ”
Most PDF editors are laughable. Perhaps the best free PDF editor is by coincidence OSS too, and it’s Inkscape. And it can edit only one page at a time. Again, hardly production material. There’s a Qt PDF editor – http://pdfedit.petricek.net/index_e.html -> pretty unstable, and editing PDFs with it isn’t comparable to editing RTFs of DOCs in OO.org or MS Office.
I have used MS Office a lot. Open Office too. And trust me, the deeper you go, more you see why MS Office > Open Office. OO.org didn’t even have custom filters for Excel till relatively recently (for Excel power users, as those in an audit firm, for example, they’re priceless).
I was never arguing which software was better (if you read my other posts in this thread you’ll realise that I’ve said MSOffice is, in my opinion, the best Office package.
The reason for my post (to reitterate what I’ve already said in the aforementioned post) is because most of the reasons he listed for using MSOffice didn’t ring technically accurate and sounded a tad like excuses rather than genuine reasons.
To again reitterate my point: To say that the It admins haven’t even heard of other office packages doesn’t sound like a good reason to use Microsoft Office or demonstrate how poor the competition is. All that shows is his IT Admin are clearly biased towards Microsoft software and unwilling to discover new software. Thus it’s not a reason for not Using MS office but an excuse.
Also, you make a point about KOffice not being Windows native, but that’s only one alternative office package out of 3 I meantioned and even then I only name 3 of many other alternative packages which all work adiquatly for the average Joe User.
So my point was this: While MSOffice is in my opinion the best package – the best isn’t always required (espcially when you take MSOffice’s price tag into account) and sometimes even the best software lags behind it’s competitors in some areas (cross platform versions / PDF support / ODF support / etc). Hell, even Lotus Smart Suite 95 has features still not included with MSOffice (Lotus Smart Cam).
So while MSOffice might be good, it’s ignorant to at least not consider competitors software as well.
OpenOffice 3.0 will apparently have PDF import and export.
It is fairly typical of posts like yours to mention an obscure feature that MS Office supports better than OpenOffice but curiously somehow fail to mention other obscure features that OpenOffice supports better than MS Office.
Even more typical of posts such as yours is the utter blind spot to the enormous feature that OpenOffice has in spades and MS Office almost utterly lacks … That feature being that OpenOffice will enable an organisation to use any platform of choice, or even a mix of platforms, but MS Office will tie your organisation to a monoculture of costly, hard-to-maintain, keep-you-on-the-update-treadmill and not-designed-for-the-users Windows platforms.
Edited 2008-07-18 14:02 UTC
You don’t need to travel that far. Just try what happens when you open a DOC file from an older “Office” version; go back in time, try things like “Winword 2.0” or “Office ’97”. It’s fun! 🙂
Precisely.
That’s what I could experience, too.
Until you need to make an access database. (lots of office workers use it).
What I find strange is that I have seen loads of office workers using an Excel spreadsheet when they clearly should be using a Database. When you point this out to them, and show a database in action, they are baffled, amazed and confused… but they then go straight back to filling in the spreadsheet.
I’ve seen the very same thing, and spend a lot of my time educating users on why a database is better than a spreadsheet for a particular task, it usually takes a bit, but they catch on.
It depends on how complex your queries are. For many (if not most cases), a filtered table in a spreadsheet can be faster and easier to use than setting up a database schema, creating queries, etc.
I was going to (ironically) suggest that *all* you need to do is get every single person who you exchange documents with to install OpenOffice (because people love downloading and installing a new office suite to view a single document).
But I see someone beat me to it…
At home? Yes, most people could without a doubt live happily without MS Office.
At work: Maybe, depending on much of your company documentation and forms use Office specific features. Chances are pretty high they do and then you’re screwed. “Sorry boss, I couldn’t do my job because the document didn’t work in OO and I don’t want to use Office” isn’t a valid excuse anywhere.
Of course, if the company make a serious effort to move away from MS Office it’s an entirely different ballgame.
Both articles lack a broader perspective.
The first one deals with feature-to-feature differences and the second one deals with some interesting features but without getting too deep into them.
First case: home users.
This case is quite simple. The choice rests on each person to switch or not. So features compared to uses made by the person come in a great deal. Also, questions of “ideals” like using open formats vs. closed formats should influence the choice. But in the end, it all comes to whether or not you will be able to be fully functional in a reasonable time with the alternative.
Second case: company-wide switch
This one is more touchy by the fact that the switch touches at the same time a whole bunch of people.
The question of switching office suite is one of systems administration and should be considering all that systems administrators should be considering.
First of all: what are the features missing in the alternative? hardcore users of the present suite might be frustrated by the lack of maturity of some features they were used to using which made their life easier, or the lack alltogether of very special features. Asking people to work 3x, 4x + more than before because of lacking features is not desirable.
Then, you have to consider the cost of formation _and_ the acceptance factor. People will be resisting any change and need to be convinced that the switch is necessary. Formations will have to be given, cutting down work hours and employees will have to get used to the new suite, which may take from two weeks to simple users to some months for frequent users.
The question of portability also comes to mind. For this, OOo is dealing pretty well at the application level (the application is able to run on many architectures) and also at the file format level (uses open file formats which can be read and written by any other applications).
From what I’ve seen, OpenOffice could be quite suitable for office use. But the impact on employees could be problematic.
If it is used from the start in a company, then acceptance will be less of an issue, but then if you make the choice of using an alternative, you have to use an alternative to the file formats and stick to it.
Acceptance of OOo should be easier for home users. For office use, a lot of preaching will have to be done. Preaching for people to try it in other contexts than directly for work and to give feedback so that it can improve to their hardcore office needs is the way to go.
But I’m a bit to optimistic sometimes, meh..
OpenOffice.org is good, but I use Gnumeric much more often (due to its speed and general excellence). Abiword is good too.
It’s great to be able to write spreadsheet functions in Python (as you can with Gnumeric). With Gnumeric currently getting crosstabs (in the present “Summer of Code”) it will be even more outstanding.
http://www.devshed.com/c/a/Python/Python-and-OpenOfficeorg/
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Python
Good links – thanks for those!
Yeah, OO.org is also extremely flexible. I’ve heard it has a good bulk file-conversion utility too (I haven’t used it though).
I’ve been using OpenOffice for years. I was offered a free version of MS Office by a friend, for free, and I turned it down because don’t need it.
I’ve written about 150,000 words in OpenOffice writer. Because .odt files are compressed, I can keep more versions of my books for less space. The .doc files could be compressed, but not without slowing the workflow.
The .odt is 240k
The .doc is 1290k
It all adds up after a few thousand files.
As far as I’ve been told (I haven’t checked because I’ve got no MICROS~1 software), “Office” has the habit to let file sizes grow even when no content growth happens. For example, put an “A” into a file and save it. Then delete the “A” and put a “B” instead. Save again. Do this a few times and the file will grow with each step. As I’ve been told, this is due to the saving of prior file content. I would think about something like CVS where you can undo changes just by ordering an older version of a file. But “Office” cannot access these older data. It is stored in the file, but you can’t use this information.
Furthermore, one of the fantastic features (that made me look like an archmage to some customers) is the abiliity to read defective “Office” files that “Office” can’t open anymore, maybe because its memory dump file savoing technology 🙂 didn’t work as intended. “All the stuff I wrote, and I can’t open it!” – “Well, just wait, I’ll open the file for you.” – “But it can’t be opened!” – “Look. Is this your TPS report?” – “YES!!! How did you do that?”
Returning to OpenOffice files, one of the features I like is the fact that I don’t need the OpenOffice application installed to get the content of an OpenOffice file. It can simply be unpacked, and I have access to the text (in XML format which can be “translated” in a way that you get the pure text content) and embedded content, such as figures or images. All I need are the basic means that are already provided by the operating system.
You can both use it and turn it off, the problem is most people who even use office all day professional don’t know where it is or how to do it. The pre 2k7 office UI is proof that the menubar/toobar thing doesn’t scale past a certain level of complexity in an application.
Thanks, learned something new today. 🙂 Maybe the observation that most users don’t find the proper menu entry or dialog window to handle this “builtin CVS” is due to the somewhat strange arrangement of the menu entries. Especially things like how the functionalities are named and where they are placed are a bad predicate of “Office”, especially in the german version. Things aren’t where your logical considerations would expect them to be, or they are named in a way that you don’t recognize what you’re searching for, so “trial and error” has developed into the most common way to learn how to use “Office”, and this takes time, which, by the way, is one reason why users don’t use good functions like document templates, they just fiddle with font size, bold, italics (“microformatting”) in order to get headings, cites, and even multi column text. I’ve already seen it all. 🙂
if you enable compression on the folder you are working in, they they would both be compressed. Without slowing workflow. Just one right click on the folder, then check compress, then apply.
There is more than one way to skin a cat.
Um, but I the Windows disk folder compression has been woeful ever since they lost their suit against Stak electronics. Microsoft is equally as bad as a thief or coder.
uh, that was like 20 years ago, the compression in ntfs is an entirely different beast, and quite functional.
works fine for me… in XP.
Under Linux (Ubuntu) it exhibits a number of weirdness and ergonomy issues, sadly.
I’m a programmer, so the only time I need to use office suites is to read/write specs, and for outlook of course. For years, I have hated having to use word simply because it is an extraordinarily complex program, and I just never use it enough to learn it properly, so half my time is always spent hunting for the feature I need to do whatever it is I need to do.
With office 2k7, they have even more functionality, but it is dead simple to find and get to. Office is always been something I had to use at work, but 2k7 is the only version I have ever bought and used at home voluntarily.
unless you are a specific kind of user, office hasn’t changed much since office 2k, which is pretty much where OO.o 3.0 is at. OO is more bloated, but considering it doesn’t cost anything that isn’t much to deal with. So I would say if the comparison is office 97-2k3 vs OO.o, go OO.o. But honestly, 2k7 blows the competition out of the water in both features and UI.
Yes, I can. Next question?
Let me be unpopular for a minute. Here is an alternative to Microsoft Office (albeit one that cost money): WordPerfect.
With that said. Out of the choices in the article I think OpenOffice is really the only viable one. In my opinion Symphony isn’t really worth the effort of downloading it. I’m not going to rely on online services in a business environment so GoogleDocs and Zoho are out.
Of course it also comes down to what you really need as well. A lot of people can get by with simple text editors. For a lot of people Notepad/WordPad would be fine.
I know some people prefer WordPerfect to Word, but does the spreadsheet in WP Office compare to Excel?
Strange, it’s one of the most compatible and full-featured ones. No macro recording though (it’s planned for future releases). There is however a macro language called BasicMaker.
OpenOffice 2.4.1 (linux)
real font support (feels like nothing changed last few years, bugs filled several times)
– openoffice does not support ps based otf fonts (ttf based otf fonts are better handled)
– openoffice recognizes glyphs and ligatures as bitmaps
– openoffice has real problems with many ps based fonts (if afm info is incomplete which happens quite often, so manual editing is required)
– openoffice can’t handle properly extreme font weights
Also openoffice does not have decent database
Also openoffice calc is no match to excel flexibility
Also embedding multimedia is poor.
For limited home use openoffice is an option, though once in a while would be nice to do something more sophisticated even at home.
I don’t use MS office at home (my wife and daughter do). I think that this is still long way before any of the offerings available will reach MS Office flexibility and power.
I would try IBM’s Symphony but it is offered only for rpm based distros.
“For limited home use openoffice is an option, though once in a while would be nice to do something more sophisticated even at home.”
I have found openoffice particularly good for large documents, i.e. 50,000+. These were technical documents with the emphasis on structure not an attempt at DTP. I have written something over 300,000 words with OOO and found it very much up to the task.
I have been told that MS Office in the past was not particularly good at this. That may have changed with recent versions of course.
I keep on reading “Just use OpenOffice everywhere!”… Well, at my job, they are hooked to MS Office. Even if I wanted to use something else, I would not be able to send my docs/spreadsheet/presentation to anyone else without the fear of file format and bad conversion.
I’m not the IT BOSS, I have to live with the decision that are being made for us.
So, can I live without MS Office? NO.
Anyway, I did try OpenOffice, even the latest 3.0 alpha or beta, don’t remember and I don’t like it. Feels like their is something missing, can’t put my finger on it.
Today with the advancements in Open Source, the need
to purchase expensive Operating System specific
Office suites is over.
I use RHEL5.2 Server on my laptop with OpenOffice,
Evolution with Exchange connector and I have
never looked back.
Also, on my workstation I have Fedora 9 loaded with
OpenOffice and Evolution same setup and I have no
need what-so-ever for any vendor locked in apps.
I have all of the tools I need available free.
When people finally realize Open Source apps do
as good as job or better than one that you
pay a license fee and often have issues that
go unresolved.
When people finally make the switch, the bloated
Office suites will pass on to a distant memory.