OpenOffice 2.0 vs. MS Office Review 525
trewornan writes "There's an interesting, if partisan, review of OpenOffice 2.0 in comparison to Microsoft Office over on Real Tech News. Open Office gets a general vote of approval, as you might guess from the title 'Open Office 2.0 Kicks MS Office Around The Block'" From the article: "My primary use for OpenOffice has always been as a word processor and I believe this is an area where it excels (so to speak!). For anyone used to MS Office, the difference in the two interfaces is minimal. In fact, I find it easier to use OpenOffice's interface than MS Office's for various things such as inserting a header and footer. To create or change a header and footer in MS Office XP, you must go to the "view" menu. I'm not sure why something like a header or footer would be placed in the "view" menu before it is actually part of a document."
Who uses Office XP anymore? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who uses Office XP anymore? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Who uses Office XP anymore? (Score:3, Informative)
That only works if you have an existing header/footer. If you are creating a new document, you still need to click
MOD PARENT UP (Score:3, Informative)
Basing usability comparison on such uninformed statements can only be bad for the credibility of free software.
I'm fed up of "religious" software reviews from writers who write themselves: "I never bought MS Office after Office XP
David Johnson is not to blame. I'm blaming the editor who publishes this. Editors are not just messengers!
Re:Who uses Office XP anymore? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Who uses Office XP anymore? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Who uses Office XP anymore? (Score:5, Insightful)
See, Office XP is a load of garbage. Unusable, horrible UI, and the load time is horrible.
Office 2003 is a nice speed up from XP (although still not as fast as Office 2000), has features that actually work, and can do some downright amazing things.
Are the differences earth shattering? Taken alone, no, but on the other hand, XP is almost unusable, where as 2003 is rather nice to use.
Speaking of load times, that is the one BIG thing that is keeping Open Office from being widely accepted. Until the load times get under 3 seconds (Pentium 4 3.0GHz+ systems with 1GB+ of RAM should NOT be talking over 3 seconds to load a word processor!), OOo is going to go the same way as Winamp3, sure it may be superior, but does it feel good to use?
Re:Who uses Office XP anymore? (Score:2)
Re:Who uses Office XP anymore? (Score:5, Informative)
You'll probably enjoy knowing that without the preloader (which I never use) OpenOffice Writer from the 1.9m122 does indeed load in under 3 seconds on an A64/3000+ (with 2Gb RAM, but I'm well under 1Gb load right now so that ain't an issue).
Loading time seems around 2 seconds on this setup without any software hogging the processing ressources, and the processor barely peaks
You should give it a try again, 2.0 has been a huge step from 1.0.x from the beginning, but with each new beta release it gets stabler AND faster.
Re:Who uses Office XP anymore? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Who uses Office XP anymore? (Score:3, Informative)
not only do you never have to worry about finding the cd, but the accesses will be much faster from the hd.
Re:Who uses Office XP anymore? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, OOo on NT4 will consistently blue screen when running above 256 colors. Thie problem is independent of any hardware that is installed and has occured on every revision i have tried.
Re:Who uses Office XP anymore? (Score:3, Informative)
Applications crashing themselves is one thing, applications crashing the OS is another.
I believe the video drivers were moved from user to kernel space in NT4. A buggy video driver can therefore easily crash the OS.
Re:Who uses Office XP anymore? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Who uses Office XP anymore? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've looked into OpenOffice a fair bit - I don't exactly want to pay the Office tax, but at the moment, Office best fits my needs. OO.o tends to be slower, more crash-prone and missing some features I use a fair bit - so for the time being, I'm sticking with Office. When OO.o matures a little more, I'll look at it again.
Re:Who uses Office XP anymore? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Who uses Office XP anymore? (Score:3, Informative)
actually, ms initially participated in oasis workgroup that developed standard
Re:Who uses Office XP anymore? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Who uses Office XP anymore? (Score:5, Interesting)
Which is why incidently, I don't use open office either.
Re:Who uses Office XP anymore? (Score:4, Insightful)
1. If you select a range of cells, copy it, and make another edit, Excel loses what you copied.
I ran into this a TON when I was recording timesheets for a group project for a college class. The times were all kept in a single sheet, sorted by person. As the semester went on and I had to update them, the other members would email me their times as a separate Excel file and I would copy and paste into the master sheet. This, of course, required shifting down everyone's entries by however many lines were in the person's I was adding. Which means I had to open their timesheet, see the number of lines, change to the master timesheet, move down the cells, change back to the person's sheet, copy, change back to the master sheet, and paste. And if I didn't shift the other cells far enough down, I'd have to shift again, change again, copy again, change again, then paste. (There's probably a better way to do this, having it shift automatically, but I don't know it.)
OTOH, Excel's formula editor is nicer. OO color codes cell ranges with the formula as it's displayed in the cell, but Excel also color codes it in the edit box where you type in the formula. (Also, I thought that typing something like '=sum(A1:A3' then pressing enter would make it complain about an invalid entry, but I just tried it and it autoclosed the parens. Maybe it was like that in pre-2.0 OO?)
2. Excel operates in what I call a fake-non-MDI mode. In that it pretends it's not an MDI application, but it actually is. Each document you open shows up in a separate taskbar icon. And yet there's only one window. And if you close that window it closes all your documents. Congratulations MS, you found a way to make MDI even more frustrating. (In fact, I *never* found MDI frustrating before Excel. And yet I can't tell you how many times I've closed all my documents by mistake.)
For these two reasons I've stopped using Excel.
However, I cannot agree that the other applications in OO are up to MS Office's standards, at least in XP. And given that I think everything I've done in Word XP I've done in Word 2K, I think it applies there as well. See another of my posts [slashdot.org] for the gripes I have with Writer that I could think of at the time.
Finally, at least Writer 2.0 has track changes. I'm almost positive 1.1 has it too because I'm almost positive I've used it, though I don't have it installed anymore so can't be for sure. But in Writer 2, it's under edit -> changes -> record. (However, as I mention in that post, it's substantially inferior to Word's offering. Deleted text is shown strikeout (like, I think, Word 2K) instead of in an external comment (like in XP+). This both is uglier (harder to read,
Re:Who uses Office XP anymore? (Score:4, Informative)
You only have yourself to blame for not finding the setting for this. It's on the top of the first tab in the user options.
Tools | Options | View | Windows in Taskbar.
clear that check box.
Yeah, that was real tough, wasn't it?
Re:Who uses Office XP anymore? (Score:4, Insightful)
Second, it DEFINITELY shouldn't be on by default.
Third, why is Excel and Powerpoint MDI but Word SDI?
Fourth and not least, THANK YOU. That will go on my list of "annoying 'features' to turn off on a new Office install" list, along with clippy, the show toolbars in a single row, menu transitions, and menu item hiding.
Re:Who uses Office XP anymore? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah, yes, that's the "blame the user" approach to GUI design. It is practiced quite commonly among programmers.
The default mode is wrong. The default mode shouldn't even exist, even as an option, because it violates GUI conventions.
Fixes for your problems.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Who uses Office XP anymore? (Score:3, Informative)
Um
From TFA: I've personally never used these new programs seriously, but from the looks of it they could all be useful except for Draw. I haven't yet been able to discern what exactly you're supposed to be able to do with it that warrants its existence.
You're supposed to be able to dr
Re:Who uses Office XP anymore? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually Office XP is Office 2001 (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2001/Mar
March 5, 2001 -- Microsoft Corp. today announced that Microsoft® Office XP, the new version of the world's leading office software, has been released to manufacturing and will be available for retail purchase later this spring.
Then came SP1 and SP2 andOne more thing : This is my first post on slashdot! After 4 years of wasting my time just reading
If it makes you feel better... (Score:4, Insightful)
Because the review would be exactly the same.
Re:Who uses Office XP anymore? (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean, naturally, the reason to upgrade to Office 2003 is because it is better... so sure, say my employer has 200 users x $300 per upgrade license, that's $60,000.
Of course I can explain in my budget how when we upgraded 3 years ago to XP, assume again for the same reason... "it was better..." that it in 2000 it was just a temporary $60,000 expense, leading up to and preparing us for this EVEN better version in 2003.
OH, but wait, I forgot, just 2 years prior to that we spend maybe $50,000 to upgrade to the 2000 version from the '97 version. And two years prior to that we spent maybe $40,000 upgrading from '95 to '97.
In case you don't have Excel handy, that's...
$40,000 in '97, $50,000 in 2000, $60,000 in 2001/2, $60,000 in 2003 equaling $210,000 in 6 years just on licenses...
THEN there was the amount of time and labor necessary for my IT department to upgrade each of these 200 computers...
And the training time, to make the most of each new version, and teach my company's employees how to work together in the "even better" way that Microsoft has so carefully designed for us.
Plus the memory, and computer upgrades necessary to run the newer versions...
AND with 2003, to MAKE THE MOST OF IT, we needed to add a new server to run SHAREPOINT Server for our 200 people.
Yes, that is what Microsoft and Mr. "Who uses Office XP anymore?"' would have you do.
Fortunately, up until but not including the last sentence, my upgrade story is fiction. We're still using Office 2000. A few are using Office XP. Some of us even use the old Wordperfect and Quattro suite from Corel. And when the Engineering department told us they wanted 2003, I told them NO. (Unless of course they can tell me what features from 2003 it is that they NEED. And I gave them a link to Microsoft's webpage showing the differences between 2003 and XP.)
Now when time permits, we're going to find out just what features our company REALLY needs, and the suite that provides those features best, will be what we will convert the whole company to.
If that is Office 2006, (which of course will be EVEN BETTER, so you ought to go get it NOW if you can!), then so be it, but until then this IT Department is trying the OpenOffice 2.0 beta, and thus far, except for "Convert Text To Columns" in Excel, there has been no need for Microsoft Office.
OpenOffice 2.0 beta works great, has most of the USED features of MS Office, and removes most of the need having Acrobat (full version).
We've already switched most people from IE to Firefox, which most everyone had no problem with, they hated IE's "many" popups and like Firefox's tabs. AND we have MUCH less Virus/Spyware problems now.
And as Outlook keeps chewing up people's PST files, they are being moved to Thunderbird.
Hmm... before you know it, I may be able to CHOOSE which OS we're going to run too...
Re:Who uses Office XP anymore? (Score:4, Insightful)
$210,000 / $36,000,000 = 0.00583 ~= 0.6%
6 * 250 * 200 = 300,000 person-days
$210,000 / 300,000 = $0.6999 ~= $0.70 per day
$30,000 / (2040 * 60) = $0.245 per minute
$0.6999 / $0.245 = 2.856 minutes per day
So, assuming you pay your people shit, office is still a pretty minor expense. If it saves each person an average of 3 minutes a day(who knows!), it is paying for itself in reduced labor costs. Software is cheap, all of it, people are expensive.
Re:Who uses Office XP anymore? (Score:5, Insightful)
Users seldom update their systems. It is even more the case with their software. Therefore, I would be all but impressed learning that the most popular office suite be the aforementioned one, or maybe even Office 2000. There are many instances of Word 97 and Office 8 as well.
OpenOffice positions itself against this base. (Remember the user: those running 2003 will not update. Indeed, they are not in for a change - yet, and might be sticking with their office flavour as long as the hardware goes, much longer than a redmond-based company would favour.) That are those users who run MS-Office 8..10 now, who are targeted by the new release of OOo, because they need to keep running their ageing boxes. Mostly, the want them to run smoothly, and Writer is a smoother ride than Word.
If those users are willing to try Writer now, they will probably ditch their present office suite altogether, and this before long. The question about Word11 will not even be asked. Moreover, because OOo runs under GNU/Linux there will be no need for, say, a secretary to learn new tricks when her employer decides to migrate operating system this way or another.
However, from the purely technical point of view, it would definitely be interesting to learn how OOo 2.0 compares to 2003. I see your point: compare newest release to newest release and all is well. Unfortunately, life does not go this way as far as both competitors are concerned. OOo is wise enough to not compete in the field where there is virtually no demand -- they do very well in those markets, where discriminate buyers double chceck their needs and their means before adopting the best solution.
Frequently, the result is in favour of the Open Office suite, just like the article suggests. Your criteria may be different, but the result will be in many cases the same. If you relay on some proprietary technlology to the point of self-abandonment then it is another cup of tea, but in most cases the bottom line of the article is valid beyond any doubt.
Re:Who uses Office XP anymore? (Score:4, Insightful)
In many cases, you'd probably be correct. However, the fact that this article does is coincidental - it has already been exposed by another comment [slashdot.org] that the author of the article couldn't be bothered to get his own copy of office for the review. My guess would be that he grabbed the first pirated version he could find, and officeXP just happened to be it.
It's things like this which make me wonder if stories on /. are picked only for their anti-microsoft sentements. You'd never see "MS Office kicks OO around the block" or "Photoshop kicks gimp around the block" as titles for stories. It's also the same reason Apple is always shown in a shining white light here, even though they've been known to employ some of the same tactics as Microsoft. The editors of /. are too biased.
When will OO.org be released? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:When will OO.org be released? (Score:3, Funny)
grammar checker (Score:5, Funny)
Re:grammar checker (Score:2, Funny)
Looks like you need one too. That would be needs, not need's.
Re:grammar checker (Score:5, Funny)
>Looks like you need one too. That would be needs, not need's.
(Score:-1, WHOOSH!)
Re:grammar checker (Score:2)
Re:grammar checker (Score:2, Funny)
Looks like you need one too. That would be needs, not need's.
And grammar, not grammer. Fine, I admit it: the joke was lost on me :p
Re:grammar checker (Score:5, Funny)
Re:grammar checker (Score:3, Insightful)
It figures. Reviewed by a school kid. (Score:3, Insightful)
I generally wouldn't recommend using them in an environment where it was important to maintain compatibility with Microsoft products.
e.g. in real life. He's a school kid. Yeah, Open Orifice is great for school, where the profs are more open minded than, say a 'client' or a 'boss'.
Then he goes: My school even offers students copies of MS Office for $25 and I never bothered to get one since, for me, it would just be a waste of $25.
There goes all his credibility out the window.
Note: This review was written using OpenOffice.
Wow. What an age we live in. One can actually write a review in something besides MS Office. Wonders never cease.
Re:It figures. Reviewed by a school kid. (Score:5, Interesting)
Styles, tables, tabs, borders, etc. All of these things were not compatable between MS Word and OOo.
Further, working in a school environment, you frequently need to collaborate with other people. OOo was terrible for that. If I sent a file to a partner (who would be lucky if they could even open the file and get it to render correctly) who edited it and sent it back, I had about an 80% chance of getting garbage back.
Even if that person used OOo I could get garbage; if they used the linux version, and I used the Windows version, the files got mangled.
And submitting to a prof... no way. If they can't open the file, I don't get marks.
OOo is simply unusable until it plays well with others. Unless of course you only need it for editing documents where you are the sole consumer.
Re:It figures. Reviewed by a school kid. (Score:2)
Frankly, I'm surpised your prof won't take a PDF file.
Re:It figures. Reviewed by a school kid. (Score:2)
However, the submision aside, I still am unable to work with others, or even myself (if I'm on two different platforms).
Re:It figures. Reviewed by a school kid. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It figures. Reviewed by a school kid. (Score:5, Insightful)
You had me until this line, which makes it clear you are somewhere out in left field.
What do you most appreciate about the view from your Redomd, WA office window?
The main reaon I've standardized on OpenOffice for my own use is that it works equally well on Windows/Linux. I've had no issues whatsoever copying OO files to/from Windows/Linux machines.
OO reads office files fairly well, well enough that when I need to read/collaborate on tech specs (my primary need) I've not had an issue using my OO for about 2 years.
PS: The specs for OO are open and freely available, but those for MSOffice are subject to incredible (all but nonexistent) licensing. It's not an issue of OO "playing nice" with MSOffice, it's an issue of MSOffice "playing nice" with nobody.
Re:It figures. Reviewed by a school kid - WRONG (Score:5, Interesting)
We are a ~50 people company, everyone uses OO.org. We exchange documents with clients -- long, complex technical specs, with version control, the works. Every once in a while, there's a glitch in formatting after the document has been edited by both sides a dozen times. But that happens with different versions of Word too!
Of course, those formatting glitches are a problem when you are pitching for new business. Easy: we do have 2 licenses for Windows+MSOffice, which we run under VMWare to proof the documents when it's a document tender that requires MSWord format. Even easier: we send PDFs exported with a single-click from OO.org. Sending PDFs makes us look slick, doesn't have formatting issues, and the files aren't editable (at least for mere mortals).
OO.org is a perfectly viable business tool. Our main clients are government departments and large private companies. The MSWord compatibility is good enough that if you have $0.01 of smarts to negotiate the small glitches _and_ you're good at what you do, you are sorted.
If you are not good at what you do... there'll be all sorts of excuses. Oh! your logo is RED. I
Re:It figures. Reviewed by a school kid. (Score:3, Insightful)
"Open Orifice". How brilliant of you to come up with a name that describes the product better than its actual name, just by replacing a few letters. No, wait, you didn't.
But more to the point: In real life, you're not going to use
Biased... (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmm. Sounds to me like the review may be biased a little.
From the article... (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, unlike MS Office.
Just seeing a single line like this in an article should immediately tip you off that it's probably not worth the bandwidth you used to download it.
Re:From the article... (Score:5, Informative)
He kept saying how, while word processor is mature, that the other elements of the suite aren't there yet - not because of it's own features as much as 100% compatibility with MS's products (instead of it's own merits).
While the review had a positive spin - it was hardly glowing as the summary made it out to be - regardless of its title.
Re:Hmmmm (Score:3, Interesting)
Such as using the Simple Standard based SlideShow System (S5) [meyerweb.com]?
(ps: this is not a joke, I'm usually doing my presentations with it, it's slick and fast and doesn't care about the presentation box' setup)
Title seems wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Title seems wrong (Score:2)
What reversed logic from the reviewer. It should read:
Overall, I've found Microsoft Office to be a fine Open Office replacement for my needs. Microsoft's word processor is more than ready for prime time. As
Templates. clipart, and artwork in general (Score:5, Insightful)
Some points:
- Professionally designed Powerpoint templates work in Impress, and are generally better quality than what MS produces, even more so because your presentation stands out more when you spend some cash on a unique looking template.
- OpenOffice.org really needs to hold a pre-2.0 design competition. . The best presentation templates created with OOo 2 beta should be included in the final, with links to the designers webpage.
Eg, under the bit where you select the template:
ModernFunkyThing v 2.7 by Professional Design Company inc. Visit www.professionaldesign.com for more info.
ProfessionalDesignCompany get good exposure for their other (paid for) designs, OOo gets templates better than MS Office and hence more users, users get better looking documents, everyone wins.
Re:Templates. clipart, and artwork in general (Score:2, Insightful)
Why don't they do something similar to what the firefox guys did for the NYT ad? Organise it so say, design company X has agreed to do 10 Impress templates, and 200 clipart items for $30k (whatever). And have people donate until it gets up to that amount. Then they can have professionally designed artwork/templates
I'd consider it objective (Score:3, Informative)
In defense of Microsoft they put in a few neat things in MS Office 2003. The group collaboration is probably better than anything in OpenOffice. Though I admit freely I haven't used any revision tracking or group collaboration features, does it even have either one? I'm using OpenOffice 1.1.4 also and newer things might have popped up in 2.0.
But all the same, for the basics, I'd see no reason to pay the premium for MS Office for basic needs. However for businesses I can see several advantages of MS Office still.
Re:I'd consider it objective (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, there are some improvements in Word XP, but collaborative editing is not one of them.
I haven't used OO enough to assess whether or not there are any comparable features there. I'm basically constrained to use what my customers use, and so far none of my customers has sent me any OO files. I'd be delighted, but...
Difference between OO and Word - Minimal? (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean, props to Open Office, they have a really good product, and their Powerpoint equivalent saved my life when I found out I didn't have powerpoint and needed a PPT presentation. I learned that program on my own quick enough and well enough for the project I needed to get done.
But switching from Word to OpenOffice? No. It's not that easy. It's like...I guess you could compare it to, Photoshop -> Gimp. Perhaps not that bad, but still it's something that will take time to get used to. At least it did for me.
Re:Difference between OO and Word - Minimal? (Score:2)
The quality of the track changes (edit -> changes -> record, which to me doesn't make much sense, though how much is due to it being in a poor location "objectively" and how much is it not being tools -> track changes I don't know; I do think that the latter makes more sense though) is around that of, oh, Word 2000. At the latest. XP adds a substantial (IMO) improvement.
The header/footer being in View makes sense if you look at the perspective of using it in the Normal view mode. The
Re:Difference between OO and Word - Minimal? (Score:3, Interesting)
IMO, the main difficulty from "migrating" from one to the other is getting used to all the default behaviors and context menu stylings.
I don't use a word processor much these days. However, I used to use one profusely - back in 1996 - 1999. For the most part I was using Windows, and I started off with Office '95. I liked its default actions. I stuck with it for as
Terminal Services? (Score:2, Interesting)
If it doesn't work flawlessly in Terminal Services it will limit its adoption in the Windows world.
Is it just me... (Score:4, Insightful)
Made me look (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway, I have used the beta 2, though I was basically constrained to do so. The company has a corporate license for Microsoft's garbage, but it's restrictive. Not having Powerpoint on a particular machine, and not wanting to risk any attempt to tiptoe past Microsoft's lawyers (or our own lawyers), I went ahead and installed OO. Unfortunately, I must report that Microsoft is (predictably) still succeeding in protecting their incompatibilities, at least as regards PPT files.
I really dislike having Microsoft products rammed down my throat, and I really would like to switch. Won't happen, however. My employer would have be make a major commitment to support OO. Basically, they'd have to insist on and guarantee that I not be penalized for any impact on my work that came from using OO instead of the Microsoft Office "standard" files.
As it actually worked out in this recent case, the post-OO PPT files were hopelessly mangled, and I wound up working late on several evenings to redo that work on a different machine that has Microsoft Powerpoint on it.
Powerpoint defects (Score:4, Informative)
In the case I was referring to, the files seemed to open without problem in OO 2b, and I seemed to be able to work on them effectively. OO even said it was saving them in the PPT format, and I was able to open them up again within OO and they still looked normal. It was after returning to Powerpoint that the files were revealed to be hopelessly mangled. I spent a while trying to unmung them, but without success. Microsoft had conquereth.
However, since you've mentioned DRM, I'll note that I recently encountered an example (from a different author) of DRM problems within Powerpoint, and that was broken even beyond the design. Powerpoint at MY end insisted that the files (actually two versions of the same file) contained embedded read-only fonts, and were therefore uneditable. The author of the files at the other end, and one of his colleagues, insisted there was no such problem. The versions of Powerpoint were apparently identical right down to the build number and patch level.
Amusingly enough, I was able to sort of fix that problem by using OO 2b. From OO I was able to save the file under a new name, and that file is now editable using Powerpoint. It was slightly damaged, but the original author confirmed that he could still edit it, and he said he could fix the new version, so I should work from that one. (It's actually a current project, second in the queue...)
Getting off the original topic here, but that's one of the main reasons I'd like to see more competition in all of these products. I think the software without DRM will crush the DRM-crippled versions--as long as there is some real competition that allows people to freely choose their tools.
From What Follows Behind (Score:5, Insightful)
Given how long Open Office has been chasing after MS Office, it's about time it got close enough to give MS Office a kick; but, in my experience, Open Office comes off like Charlie Brown kicking that damn football.
I'm not a Windows apologist. I run a wintel box as a multimedia web box because too many formats are locked into MS apps and I'm not enough of a zealot to forgo information.
I've had MS pro copies of Office for many years and I've had years of experience with Linux. My opion is Open Office doesn't yet touch MS pro office, especially Power Point.
I'll keep MS Office Pro because it's not a big expense in terms of the extended latitude it offers.
Does it really matter? (Score:3, Insightful)
So, like most programs, people don't care about quality, security, or amazingly even cost. In the end, all they care about is doing some task in using the fastest assembly line that they know.
(I like the assembly line comparison because it illustrates the desire for speed, but one can still make the point that if an assembly line produces a terrible product, the job is still accomplished)
A semi-offtopic question here. Does anyone think that the "It comes from brandname X, therefore it must be good." mentality of previous decades still exists? Or are cases like OpenOffice/linux/etc. ones where people are worried about compatibility and such concepts?
FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
It was a one page review with some luke-warm analysis of some of the functions of either product. Nothing really in-depth here. Rambles a whole paragraph about PDF exports which is kind of irrelevent. I have a PDF phaser that I use to export to PDF, let the processor do the real word processing.
I have been using Word as a power user writing on average documents up to 300 pages a shot. Sure, Word has some shortfalls - I have seen times when a doc has shit itself in a few rare occasions. I have tried Oo, its quite good but I think it has a few more years to catch up to anything remote to Word. And I love Linux! Its unfortunate that I am stuck with Office in some respects, although no religious war will win me over when you have no choice but to be 100% collaborative with other Word users on very large documents, the slightest change to the formats can screw you big time, no Word importer will do.
I recently moved to a mac with Office 2004 which isnt bad although I'm still trying to get use to less use of shortcuts that arent consistant with the Windows version. I only moved to the platform for the *nix backend and to ability to contine my c++/dev hobbies outside of working hours on a platform built for development.
Saying that I think Oo has a real chance, especially in areas of the free market, small business, students and home users.
My OpenOffice Experience (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately the poster people didn't mention such requirements to the IT people who had the interns all set up with Fedora Core 2 systems. Fortunately OpenOffice was installed on these systems. I could only hope Impress was on par with Powerpoint.
I was a little skeptical going in, I knew that the OOo guys had worked fairly hard to make their tools as good or better than the commercial products, but this was a fairly unusual niche requirement. I was creating a single 48x30 inch slide with all graphics being very high quality so they don't look like crap when blown up.
The results were superb! I used Calc to do graphs, and cut-n-paste between Calc and Impress worked flawlessly. I used Draw to do line art graphics, and once again cut-n-paste worked perfectly. Throw in a touch of gimp to clean up some of the graphics being used and the whole thing had a professional look to it on par with any of the Powerpoint posters from years past.
The only thing that didn't work was exporting as
Re:My OpenOffice Experience (Score:2)
I suggest you try to deal with posters created with other tools. It's less fun than it sounds like it. PDFs have their share of problems [at least on hp designjets], and PowerPoint is even worse [
-My- OpenOffice Experience (Score:3, Informative)
Just this weekend, I needed to plot some coffee roasting profiles that I had taken data on, so I thought I would use OO Calc to enter/plot them.
What a disaster. I ended up fucking around quite a while trying to get the chart I wanted, and when I started trying to copy/paste charts, the whole thing froze up. Repeatably.
I ended up switching to Gnumeric, which has its own quirks, but at least didn't crash. It also has a nice object tree kind of interface for working on chart options.
Based on my attempt t
Microsoft Falling From Power (Score:3, Funny)
This process will continue until Microsoft will just be one company, amongs many, who have major holds and controls over various aspects of computer science. Thought this will probably still take quite some time.
This report is a waste of time... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a complete waste of time and does not merit the front page of slashdot. C'mon - did Zonk even look at TFA?
Just off the top of my head, there is no:
- comparison of file sizes
- analysis version tracking
- comparison of printing/preview capability
- review of scripting capabilities and availability of scripts
- review of the style system
- interoperability of: templates, objects etc
I am underwhelmed.No grammar check is NOT a feature (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No grammar check is NOT a feature (Score:3, Interesting)
Spell check is more of a grey area, but less of a crutch in my opinion. Almost all of the things it catches are errors in typing since I typed too fast.
As always, proof it before you send it. Read it aloud if you need to. Or at the worst have a co-worker/classmate look your writing
Re:No grammar check is NOT a feature (Score:3, Interesting)
for example "its" when you mean "it's"
Proof reading important documents is always a good plan
Foreign languages - you insensitive clod! (Score:3, Interesting)
I very much agree with you - when I'm writing in my native language, Swedish, the grammar checker is more or less a PITA - it only objects to stuff that I know is correct (I know my grammar). Same thing, more or less, in English.
Where it really shines though, is when I'm writing in German or Spanish. Yeah, I should learn the grammar of those languages properly too, I know, but it takes loads of work to really do it and especially in German,
Re:No grammar check is NOT a feature (Score:3, Interesting)
Neither are spelling checkers.
And yet I think almost anyone agree that they are very useful.
The idea is not that Word will proofread your document, n
A Better review, quicker. (Score:5, Insightful)
First few versions sucked in terms of compatibility, ugly UI, and general bugs. Most MsOffice users, including me, played around with it and went back to Office.
The first really usuable version was 1.1. This really rocked in terms of compatibility, and though it still had some bugs, was infinitely better with word docs and general usability.
Upcoming version 2 is slated to be real good. the beta I'm using is nice, with much improved UI, better word compatibility, Database tool etc.
Writer is the best. Calc follows. Impress and Database app need some work, though impress has improved a lot in the recent version.
Office has MUCH better version tracking, sharing and collaborative features. OOo can't touch it here. Writer is catching up with Word in terms of pure Word processor features, in fact has some features that are better than word. (predictive typing)
OOo is suitable for SOHO operations where word processing is major app. Larger corporate users need to stick with Office for many reasons. You know what they are.
The article is more like a comparision of Writer with word, and it totally ignores the advanced features of word..
I love OOo, and use it every day, but that doesn't mean that I can't see where Office kicks OOo's ass...
Here's a longer review I did a while back. [adityanag.org]Re:A Better review, quicker. (Score:3, Insightful)
I take it you've never used Office's version tracking and collaboration features?
svn will store versions of the files, sure. It might even be able to diff things (depending on the file format you choose to save in). What it won't do is give you the "at a glace and as you type" version change information that Word does a fantastic job of, especially the later versions that use margin callouts to show you exactly where, how and who changed things, right d
Shallow Author? (Score:2, Interesting)
Qualified? (Score:2, Insightful)
and goes on to write a comparison between OO and MS Office...
Guess we can wait for better reviews.
Better Alternatives (Score:3, Interesting)
I always recommend http://www.abiword.com/ [abiword.com]. It handles MS formats fine, it loads faster, the interface feels more polished and like OpenOffice it's available for about every OS. OpenOffice has a great set of features, but it feels slow and bloated, of course that's just my opinion.
A long time ago, before the office suite concept, companies believed in "best of breed" software. You have to hand it to the marketing goons at Microsoft who convinced the corporate world that besides a word processor, every employee needs a spreadsheet and a copy of PowerPoint on their desktop.
Re:Better Alternatives (Score:2)
Is she talking about compatibility here? (Score:2)
> As far as compatibility goes otherwise, I haven't noticed any difference in the look of my slides as I switch between PowerPoint and Impress. The only thing that is keeping the new 2.0 version of Impress from matching PowerPoint is the lack of slide backgrounds and clip art that really are essential to making a good presentation. Background designs and clip art used to make a PowerPoint slideshow do, however, open in Impress without problems. That said, I still prefer PowerPoint for maki
How about WordPerfect and OO doesn't have.. (Score:2, Interesting)
OO.o Express (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's a review I'd like to see (Score:4, Funny)
Under Linux OO2.0 can do .
MSOffice
There you have it folks.
OOo in enterprise? (Score:4, Insightful)
OTOH, the customer support dept uses MS Office exclusively. In most cases they get emails from the customers as common emails. Sometimes some dumbass customer sends the content of the email as attachment with Word
Intuitive or RTFM - please stick with one (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmm, so which is it? If I ever bring up usability when it comes to Linux apss, I get lambasted (probably by people that weren't even born when I got into the computer game). So next time you tell someone to RTFM, ask yourself if there is a way to make that app a little better so they don't have to RTFM.
One thing I HATE about OOo... (Score:3, Interesting)
When I started using Excel back in, what, 1992, I used it to make a LOT of presentations. They were financial with lots of numbers and computations that the customer would like to tweak, so Excel was appropriate. Nevertheless, despite being for a spreasheet, I was required to make the documents look VERY ATTRACTIVE. (Not to say that my lowly artistic skill accomplished the goal, but the boss thought I did okay.) I would do things like color-code cells, add borders, fiddle with fonts, etc. And one FREQUENT thing I would do was ctrl-click to select a disjoint set of cells and then apply formats to all of them at once.
OOo cannot do this.
This very basic feature that I and the people I learned from have been using for a VERY LONG TIME is something that OOo cannot do. When I first started using OOo at version 1.0.0, I immediately noticed this oversight and reported it in their bug database. The bug report disappeared. I've since posted it a couple more times, and this bug report seems to consistently disappear.
Sure, it's possible that that (a) I'm a niche user who is unusual in his need for this feature, and (b) I don't know how to use their bug database to retrieve old bug reports. But the fact of the matter is, they have consistently left out this feature. I don't know if they've added it to 2.0, but I doubt it.
Why does such a relatively small oversight bother me so much? Because I need it, and I cannot imagine that it could be THAT hard to fix. (But I wouldn't know, because the size of the OOo source is a bit overwhelming for me.)
Re:Meh (Score:2)
Even Nuffer.
Re:Meh (Score:2)
Re:HEY! (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm totally sick of reading pro-OpenOffice.org articles on Slashdot. The community is far too biased.
The product is really not of the same calibre, I'm sorry. However, every time there is an article about OOo, the only comments that get modded past +1 are pro-OOo. Anything that speaks ill of the product gets demoted to 0 or -1.
It's unfortunate that the product can't receive even remotely objective coverage.
Re:HEY! (Score:2, Insightful)
This accusation is made every time there's an OSS/commercial product comparison, but it only takes a quick look at the posts below to see it's completely misleading. Almost all of the posts modded 3 or above (including the parent post) are pro-MS or at least dismissive of the review.
Re:HEY! (Score:5, Insightful)
I tried OO (including the newest release version) and keep going back to MS. It's just too crashy. Yes, it's amazing it works at all, but everytime I try to do a serious project in it, I spend too much time trying to recover from bugs.
Re:HEY! (Score:3, Interesting)
I find the exact opposite problem. MS Office will hang and die on large doccuments, oo has no problem with.
I concur. Word is terribly crash-prone when documents get big and complex. I have a terrible time with anything over 50 pages or so. My understanding is that the legal industry primarily uses WordPerfect for exactly that reason. I use OOo 1.1.4 Writer for big documents whenever possible. When it's not possible (because I have to exchange documents with Word users), I use Word and save constant
Re:Nice review! (Score:2)
Re:To each his own, I suppose. (Score:3, Insightful)
But what if you want to edit it after you inserted it? Then it makes sense to have it in 'view' and not under 'insert'.
To me, the situation seems as follows:
* When you're adding them for the first time, it makes the most sense to have them in the 'insert' menu. However, having them under 'view' does make a small amount of sense, and furthermore is unlikely to cause the user to think about whether tha