Call me a prude but . .
I'm not particularly interested in licking anything from Microsoft . . . .
OpenOffice.org remains the most popular open source answer to Microsoft's ubiquitous Office suite, and in these recessionary times, the appeal of "free" software is stronger than ever. Many individuals are already heeding the call of online suites from Google or Zoho, which offer most of the important features found in their …
To be honest I am less interested in speed and new features than I am in compatibility.
It's a lot cheaper than MS Office ( :) ), so I don't expect it to be faster or to have additional features. What I DO want is to be able to open a .DOC file and have the bullets in the correct places and in the correct size and shape and the graphics correctly positioned on the page as the original author intended.
Without that, I will probably have to shell out for the Microsoft product.
One big failing (the biggest IMO) of OOo vs MS Office is the number of rows/columns allowed in calc vs excel.
Calc is still stuck at 64K rows whereas Excel 2007 can do ~1M. In the scientific community this is a real problem and OOo need to fix this now as many people are having to use Excel as there is no alternative.
Hmm.. I'd like to think OO has the grunt to take on M$O, but using M$O on my Mac just seems to be slicker and easier. In fact, my Mac version seems more accessible than the version on my works pc, so I can't see me swapping over on my main computer in the foreseeable.
I use OO on my Acer Aspire One, though and I think it's great. Perfect for my requirements and in-line with the whole open-source ethos. Perhaps it's just stigma, but I feel more comfortable working with software I've paid for. Maybe a little more time with OO on the 'One will change my mind...
One of the *major* sticking point for me when I last tried Open Office was the fact the damn thing seems stuck in what MS-Word calls "Print Layout" mode. Which is fine for those who deal with small individual items which need to be laid out correctly as soon as possible. I, on the other hand, generally work in MS-Word's "Normal" mode to do the bulk of my writing (and layout) and *then* switch to "Print Layout" to finalise the look-and-feel. Never found that switch/control in OOo and finding the constant page-format layout (and visual page-breaks) annoying to work with. Give me a continuous workspace, dammit.
The other peeve is not as major, but just as frustrating - trying to switch from MS-Word to OOo and having the devil's own finding the various options/controls I need. Now, I don't want OOo to have *the same* controls as Word (would be nice for *me*, won't press for it), but an easily-found comparison table (such as that found in Word's "Help->Wordperfect Help" menu item) would be nice. And I'm not talking about something on a web-page - half the time, I work off-line.
Mind you, it's been a while since I poked around OOo's menu structure, so they may have remedied all that since I last looked.
And I *am* trying to move off MS-Word. Just not finding it easy after using MS-Word for so long.
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Why can't they pull their fingers out and sort out the Mac version for god's sake. Even the key modifiers for moving the cursor around in the text are wrong on the Mac. And have they fixed the broken mail merge yet? Until they get this sort of stuff sorted out then we're still going to keep having to pay ridiculous amounts of money to bloody Microsoft for Office licences.
There is an open sauce equivalent to exchange and outlook (that has seamless tasks & calendar) then I wont be switching to open office. We get good discounts on office and the difference between outlook vs office pro isnt enough to warrant the major retraining costs.
shame as I personally like (and use) open office.
I used to be one of the zealots pushing OpenOffice way back when it was the StarOffice first offered for free in 1998 (lots of people forget it originated as proprietary tech). Even after Sun bought up Star Division I still kept installing it with my RedHat, working through the bugs and incompatibilities, and telling all and sundry that the next version would be the one that would really be a replacement for M$ Office. Nowadays, even with the painful shift to Office 2007 (change everything about the interface for the sake of change - who came up with that great idea?), I just can't be bothered with OOO anymore. I'll pay the M$ tax and take the product that does the job - Office 2003!
My fave quote regarding OOO was from one of our Sun reps, whom admitted that after Sun bought Star Division in order to avoid paying for thousands of M$ licences, he used to take his work home and finish it all off in Office on his home Windows PC, just so he could be certain it would actually be readable by his customers.
I'm just a wee bit wary. Here I am, on a netbook that would be a dazzling computer a decade ago, and works fine now (Eeebuntu NBR), and v2.4 is fine for what I do.(That's always the key test). But how will v3.1 work out? So v3.0 was slow? This is a little faster?
Your report doesn't seem much more useful to me than saying Windows 7 is faster than Vista. Some of us are in a different world.
Because it still uses the tired old interface that was designed 2 decades ago and is only that way because of the limitations of computing resources at the time.
Microsoft realised this with Office 2007 and whilst many luddites who fear change whine about the idea of a new interface, the reality is that it does offer massive productivity increases, partly due to the interface, partly due simply to innovative new ways of doing things.
What Microsoft did took guts because of the whines of those who fear change, but it was absolutely the right thing to do simply because it really does allow people to be more productive.
The fact is the open office team need to accept that they too need to consider a change to their application's UI, in 20 years technology has increased massively, and UI research has moved along well, yet we still have the likes of Open Office (and even some of Microsoft's apps) using these age old interfaces.
Many will say the good old saying of if it aint broke don't fix it, but the reality is that it is broken, we can do things so much better and faster than these old interfaces allow us to and if the only excuse for not creating such improvements is "Well it's easier to code the old style interfaces than think up something new and better" then that product is doomed to get left behind.
Export to PDF does not support OpenType fonts with Postscript outlines.
Pasting into an HTML editing application, Dream Weaver or FrontPage, pastes in an extra HTML and BODY tag.
Both these things lead to - support calls - "Steve, why does this look different" and both are faults that seem always to have been there. My small band of users are not interested in "work a rounds" or for that matter computers, things should just work, they don't.
I like OO, I dont like client calls, there is no competition!
Steve
For those moaning about compatibility, maybe you should ask Microsoft for fully documented file formats that allow interoperability with 3rd parties.....*now* do you see the real problem? I mean, how many of you can honestly say that the formatting hasn't been borked every time MS changed the .doc format over the last few decades. Did any of you moan to anybody? No, you just dealt with it like I did.
At least now you have a choice. Pay to keep up with MS's latest features, or do a bit of reformatting and use a free office suit from now on. No one is forcing you to do anything. You can choose.
And as for the MAC critics, have any of you actually bothered to file a bug report to fix the things you see as broken? I for one couldn't give a toss about the OSX version, as I doubt I'll ever use it (Again, my choice). So don't expect me or anyone like me to come to your aid unless you ask for help in a constructive way. That's how FOSS works. That's how you PAY for your software. YOU contribute in any way you can.
So, thank you Sun & the OOo community. You have created a fine office suite that is more than good enough for 80% of my company's users. Maybe by version 4 you'll get to the other 20%!
>What Microsoft did took guts because of the whines of those who fear change, but it was
>absolutely the right thing to do simply because it really does allow people to be more productive.
No no no no no
What MS did took stupidity. We have lots of people who see the Office 2007 eye candy walking round PC World or the like and then come in a demand that they get this great up-to-date software. We give it to them, and say "You had better save the spreadsheet your working on in a different name, just to be sure. Use SaveAs".
... and we wait. It takes approximately 5 minutes until they realize that all their long remembered menu commands are not there anymore. Then they want Office 2003 back because, at the end of the day, they are paid to do work - no to figure out where the heck their software has gone to.
What were the retraining and loss-of-productivity costs of upgrading to MS Office 2007?
When it first rolled out, IT had to send out specific instructions to find the Print function!
I *still* cannot find half the stuff I used to use.
I spent ten minutes yesterday looking for the Crop tool for embedded images - I found it once, but I have no idea where it was and can't find it now.
That's just the latest example of the myriad of productivity hits caused by changing the interface.
There are apparently real improvements between MS Office 2003 and 2007, but other than Excel row count they're so well hidden by the new interface that they may as well not exist.
Not to mention the total disregard for a consistent interface. Have a look in Outlook 2007 - where's the ribbon? In email editors, but NOT in the main app.
Never, ever forget The Law Of Least Surprise.
This is Rule One in user interface design, and always has been. Some researchers phrase it differently, but the key tenet is that the UI should respond the way the user expects.
For example, if something is clickable, it should *look* clickable.
If you radically rearrange stuff then you *surprise the user*, because it's not where they expect it to be. And thus they hate you for it.
Yes, menus are old. WIMP is old - but users expect it. They're used to it.
I've been racking my brains for months now, and the *only* benefit of the Ribbon interface is that it works better than standard menus on a touchscreen, because the hotspots are bigger. That's it.
Open Office understands that for users to truly accept something *new* and *different*, it has to look *pretty much the same as the old one*.
And the people who have thus far rejected OO, have rejected it on the basis that Writer *isn't similar enough* to MS Word 2003. (etc)
Take a little look at what your fingers are poised over - that layout is technology that was designed about 13 decades ago (I am assuming that you have QWERTY - if not make that 7 decades ;). It is known to be broken - it was designed to slow typists down.
Not all that is broken REQUIRES fixing, particularly when it comes to user interfaces. Hell, even the UI for cars is far from optimum, but personally I doubt any manufacturer has the cojones to fix that.
Irrespective of the "improvements" in OO....
1. Pie-charts are a poor way of representing data, the human eye is very poor at measuring and comparing angles or radians.
2. 3D-graphics should be reserved _only_ for when you have data with three co-ordinates. They add nothing to this figure other than distort the information that is trying to be conveyed.
See Tufte E (2001) "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information"
Does it *natively* support printing multiple pages per sheet like ..... oh, dunno, just about every other application? Or do I still have to print my document to a file, and then run this through KPrinter?
It's not a total showstopper, because there's KPrinter (and even if there wasn't, I know enough about PostScript to do it the hard way); but it's still just non-obvious enough to get in the way of the non-hardcore user.
As for migration, sod compatibility. The simple fact is that most of your old, archived documents will only ever need to be viewed, not edited. So just get the PostScript printer driver for Windows from Adobe, and print all your documents to PostScript files on the Windows / Office side. Now you have a reference rendering (and under Linux, this can even be compressed using bzip2 -- your document viewing application will sort out decompressing it all by itself). If you do ever need to edit a pig of a document using OO.org, it's probably going to be as quick to retype from scratch.
Fearful luddites are we? Surely it's not a case that we've used teh same interface for over a decade and to change it so dramatically has cost business everywhere fortunes in retraining and has sapped years off my life as a techie having our user base fill up the call logging system with "where's this button?" and "how do i do something i've been able to for years until now?" calls??
I'm all up for change but for not change' sake, the only arguement which can be used to defend the new Office layout is that is far more easy and intuitive for someone who's never seen MS Office before but as those folks are so rare it's pretty much an epic fail
Mine's the one the bottle of Yager in the pocket...
The functionality you mention is typically the functionality that occasional users of Office applications are impressed by - woooooo graphs ! Sadly OO calc is woefully behind Office on more fundamental functions, in particualr pivot tables which are the mainstay of a lot of analysis, and which in OO are practically steam-driven. Sorry
If you want to consider migrating away from Microsoft at some point you have to decide to move people off MS Office. You can't just switch OS without first going OS-neutral on the major office applications. The question is when do you bite the bullet? Is OO good enough now? At least you can install and run OO in parallel with Windows so things can work in both.
My intuition is that for smaller businesses at least, now might be a good time to making the first steps away from the MS lock-in.
"Take a little look at what your fingers are poised over - that layout is technology that was designed about 13 decades ago (I am assuming that you have QWERTY - if not make that 7 decades ;). It is known to be broken - it was designed to slow typists down."
No, it wasn't!
QWERTY was designed to help prevent manual typewriters from jamming by spreading out certian key combinations. Nothing to do with slowing typing down.
Then, when computers and electronic typewriters came along the same layout was kept so that there would be minimal retraining required.
"1. Pie-charts are a poor way of representing data, the human eye is very poor at measuring and comparing angles or radians."
"2. 3D-graphics should be reserved _only_ for when you have data with three co-ordinates. They add nothing to this figure other than distort the information that is trying to be conveyed."
Both of the above are the exact reason people like to use them, don't tell me you've never had to hide some bad news.
I actually like the new ribbon thing in Office 2007 - once you get used to it it is faster to work with. I realize it's the "getting used to" part that's the problem, people are stuck in their habits and their workflows - which is good and bad.
I'd like to see a comparison between Powerpoint and Impress. Impress hadn't done so last time I saw it - slow as continental drift, buggy and generally no fun. And of course, there is Access.
As a Word replacement OOo is very good, and the price can't be beat. It's OK for light Excel usage too.
OMG! Scientific computing using Excel and 1 million rows/column ... I fear for the world.
Also, have to agree with the other Richard .. first rule of UI design is definitely do not surprise the user (learnt that whilst doing a PhD in UI design tools 20 years ago and it has not changed since then 8-).
Personally I hate Word and Powerpoint ... Word because it has taken the simple process of page markup and bastardised it with overloaded functions and Powerpoint because ... well ... I've suffered too much of "death by powerpoint" and wish it would die die die.
I'll stick with the Google Docs spreadsheet app and notepad 8-) on Windows and vi (vee eye) and LaTeX on Real (tm) operating systems [*BSD (the one true Unix) and by extension OSX].
Well, if even MS Office can't be fully compatible with itself, it's hard to criticize others for not being... My boss runs XP and Office 2003. Other researchers in the lab run Macs, also with Office 2003. I run Linux with OOo. Yes, there are some compatibility problems sometimes (minor stuff, usually) with .doc files between my boss' Office and my OOo. But the funny thing is that there are times when my OOo will open the Office file fine, but the Office on the Macs will have some problem with the same file -- that seems to happen with graphical elements in docs.
Not to mention MS support of its own older file formats, which is abysmal as everyone knows. After all, how would they make you upgrade, right? Better software quality in the new version?
Yup, OpenOffice has its problems.
Ask for your money back, then.
Or better, donate them some money to help develop the features you need, fix the bugs, etc.. Funny how people will pay a lot of money for buggy software, and quietly swallow (or loudly defend) it just because they have no other choice and/or can't get themselves to admit they payed so much for that thing... They are so smart, so they can't have been conned. But when it's free stuff, then they fell that if it is not perfect then it is totally unusable crap. If only the same standards were used for all situations...
The "bug" you describe refers to a behaviour where OpenOffice.org fails to connect to Windows network shares on servers whose names contain illegal characters. If you had read the Microsoft documentation, you would know about that. But you probably didn't get the manuals with your pirated copies of Windows and Office, did you, you filthy pikey?
I'm guessing that the OO.o development team probably have drier lentils to soak than clueless sysadmins with misconfigured networks. It's not as if you can't patch the Source Code to bypass the check anyway, if you really prefer a horribly broken network.
I use Ubuntu for all my work and therefore need to use OpenOffice for all documents I write. I'm quite happy with it but the problem is that you have to eventually send the finished document out in Word format as most people and their computers will be stumped when they receive an OpenOffice .odt file.
This is where the problems start. If I open a Word doc in OO that has headers and footers, then these get completely munged when opened in Word again. Images I insert from files get moved about and tables, notes and tables of contents just plain don't work properly.
So if I save a doc as Word and send it out, it could look very wrong to the recipient which does not look very professional...
Consequently, I have to get my colleague to open all my documents in Word and correct them so they look right when sent out. Sometimes this is more effort than writing the document in the first place.
So in this unfair world where everyone expects a Word document, until OO can reliably create documents that format correctly when opened in Word, there will be a barrier to adoption.
Don't get me wrong, I know this is MS's fault for having a proprietary document format, but unfortunately they have a monopoly on documents at the moment and to do business efficiently we have to bow to that monopoly.
I backed out of an update from Office 2003 pro because OO was xml based as was Office. I reasoned that OO would provide flexibility and extensibility over and above what Office would provide, much as Firefox provides flexibility and extensibility far and above what ie offers. When the productivity pluses of Office were tied to binary files paying the MS tax seemed worth it but if both products are xml based and MS offers a minimal productivity boost tied to a proprietary xml standard then it seems to me it a good time to jump from the good ship Office pro and ship out with OO. At least that's what my precursory reasoning led me to.
I've been using OpenOffice for most of my word-processing/spreadsheet needs for a year now, and I'm really pleased with it. I also have MS Office (2003) but I don't intend to buy any further versions. I'm tired of Microsoft's focus on lock-in (poor interoperability with almost everything else, dodgy compatibility between versions, tie-in with their own technologies and no one else's, etc, etc) rather than simply providing great software.
I also found I can organise quite complex documents without worrying that numbering/outlining/styles/etc all suddenly start to do weird things as they frequently do in Word (I can't count the number of times I've had to revert to older versions of Word documents because the current version has gone irretrievably 'insane'). OO hasn't been absolutely perfect either, but far more robust.
The most difficult thing was simply learning to use a new piece of software. Yes, almost all office suites are doing the same things, but they also have their own methodologies. I would encourage anyone to have a go at OpenOffice, but commit yourself to spending a bit of time getting used to it. And definitely check out the PDF import plug-in.
BTW - the reviews of OO on The Register seem really shallow. The previous one seemed obsessed with problems installing on Linux, and this one seems to think speed differences are really important. Can we have something more in-depth?
To me, this reveals a M$ lock-in strategy; if they can force enough existing users to familiarise themselves with the ribbon while ensuring that they recruit the fresh kiddies to this interface, they make OOo &c unfamiliar, "dated" and as annoyingly unusable as the ribbon currently is.
This obviously extends beyond just Word, or Office; it is a bid to discourage new users from becoming familiar with current, standard (one could similise QWERTY) interaction methods, and as long as M$ can simultaneously convert enough existing M$O users, they can hope to make the OOo (and Google docs &c) menu interface outdated, unattractive, uncomfortable or even unusable to their future market.
The ribbon is evil.
If you"re using a spreadsheet to handle that many rows, you're doing something very, very, very wrong.
The scientific community called, they want the badge back.
(and I seriously hope you did not publish anything out of your >64K rows Excel spreadsheet, as it would probably be completely inaccurate anyway.)
I don't have to generate either Word Documents or Excel spreadsheets very often, but I receive a fair number of both in my e-mail. The major problem that I've had with previous versions of OOo was just how long it took to open a word document - 15-20 seconds just to start the application up.
3.1 seems to be significantly faster - attachments are opening in under 5 seconds. I'm sure I'll encounter some issues as I play around with it some more, and I see that go-oo.org still only has 3.0.1, but first impressions are pretty good.
and for idiotic reasons. Many months after 3.0 came out, and with extensive searching, I found a Mac PPC pre-release version of it. The code is stable and feature-complete; apparently the only reason it hasn't been released is that no one has officially verified that the English language localization is correct.
Fact: depressed economy.
Fact: most people use about 20% of features (principally, most people would be OK with an enhanced version of Wordpad for word processing work
Fact: OOo handles the majority of Office work just fine
So, unless you ab-so-lu-te-ly want that ribbon and the incompatible file format (read: if you want to force others to "upgrade" - I use that word advisably), or if you really need Outlook, go ahead, give them your money. In most smaller companies you don't need to: install a networkable printer, Collanos to share files (in p2p mode), add Thunderbird and OOo and off you go.
And if you need a central mailserver you can stick a "tsack installer" version of Zimbra community on a Linux box (easier than manual install, but I have questions about how this is kept up to date).
There isn't actually a reason to run anything from MS at all, but since you have probably received Windows with your PCs you might as well use it - it's more work to remove it..
Oh, and if you like access you MUST experiment with Base because it can also handle grown up databases.. But that's advanced stuff.
OO compatibility with Word documents seems to be getting progressively worse. I get .docs from work all the time, and OO fails to handle about 25% of them. Generally, though, AbiWord can cope with them. Which is nice, because it's a hell of a lot faster than OO and just as not expensive.
I once tried to use OO Calc to view an Excel spreadsheet for the budget produced by a school district. Some incompatibility caused it to display incorrect results. Upon investigation, I discovered that the bug could be considered a feature, and the incompatibility was a matter of interpretation. I posted a problem report to the maintainers' site. The response I received was about ideological purity: how OO does it right, and MS does it wrong. No interest in resolving the compatibility problem.
It was then I realized that MS will maintain dominance for a long time. Very discouraging.
how can you have an office suite with no email - the main office application I and most of my colleagues use is Outlook (connecting to Exchange) - how can you have an office productivity suite without an email program?
btw there's people at work that need more than 65k rows (there's just that much data around) and we have to get Excel 2007 especially for them - so Chris isn't the only.
"Some incompatibility caused it to display incorrect results. Upon investigation, I discovered that the bug could be considered a feature, and the incompatibility was a matter of interpretation. "
Which raises the question is the development spec for this part of Calc "show an excel sheet *exactly* as it is in excel" or show the *correct* answer is *regardless* of what file format is being read.
If the former then they are failing to cater (or pander, depending on your POV) to Excel users and therefore discouraging them from switching. If the latter then it would seem that Excel is at fault for reporting inaccurate calculations, something I am not unfamiliar with. I have presumed the actual numbers Calc is reporting are accurate, if not then whatever the spec that would be a clear failure anyway you slice it.
"This is where the problems start. If I open a Word doc in OO that has headers and footers, then these get completely munged when opened in Word again. Images I insert from files get moved about and tables, notes and tables of contents just plain don't work properly."
When I evaluated OOO 3.0.1, I was quite taken aback by how badly OOO ruined DOC files. But this was a serious bug with tables in that version. Ver 3.1 seems to have fixed that problem. I am impressed. We will be migrating our organization to OOO shortly.