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Yeah. One of my users has been whining about how she needs MS Office and can't use OpenOffice 2.3 because the spreadsheet doesn't have drag 'n drop reordering of columns. This should silence that feeble excuse.

Damn those whining users that you're being paid to support and help to do their job. Always whining and not using *my* preferred software.

1. They are not paying me. Their employers are. And they appreciate not having to shell out for 60+ MS Office licenses + upgrades.

2. The other 60 some odd users have no problems or complaints about using OO.o and are able to do their jobs just fine. The one employee in question is also quite able to do her job with the current tools available. Drag 'n Drop column rearrangement, available in 2.4, is a nice convenience, but the lack in 2.3 is simply not a show stopper.

Nice try, but my professional conscience is quite clear.

Edited 2008-03-30 02:10 UTC

i think its mostly "mental muscle" pains thats being complained about.

as in, being able to do something is a way builds up muscle memory, and when that memory and reality no longer match, some people will complain, quite vocally often, but will (hopefully) keep on doing what they are paid to do.

this is one reason why we have "tech inertia"...

I use OpenOffice at home. Its is getting better, but its a long way from being at the point where I would prefer it over MS Office. For a business the money is well worth it and my when I purchase my next notebook I will be purchasing Office 2007.

I always find it hard to comprehend. Businesses spend obscene amounts of money on their employees salaries, medical, etc and then they get them some old computer with cheap peripherals. In the case of your company they give a fraction on software of the employee's total cost to company and in doing so give them an inferior product.

If you value you're time and want the best then MS Office is the only competitor right now and I have tried most if not all except the latest version of iWork but that does not run on Windows or Linux so I can't use it anyway.

At the end of the day, I think it depends on the kind of job that is being done. For example, if you're working as a quant in some big financial firm, no employer is going to begrudge you the software you need. The amount of money you make each day for the company is easily enough to cover the cost of a license. On the other hand, if you're working in a small business where the turnover is considerably smaller, the price of an MS Office site license can be prohibitive. Shelling out $500 for just one staff member can be quite an expensive prospect.

So the question that really needs to be answered is whether the switch to MS office will increase productivity enough to justify the price of a license?

Don't forget the additional administrative costs and consulting fees. In our case, OO.o is centrally hosted on our XDMCP/NX server, and all management is centralized. The 60-70 (complete) desktops that we run require relatively little time to support and administer. A one-off MSO installation on Windows has to be maintained separately, and has a very real per user cost that, over time, exceeds any initial licensing fees. Especially when it is at a branch office which is 220 miles from my location.

I simply cannot be expected to change from one system to another, the outside world is all bright and scary !

That would be nearly my point. The users I have to support are using OpenOffice for some years now, they're using it cross-platform - the same application and the same files on Linux, BSD, Solaris and, yes, it's true, on "Windows"; some of them who had tried a MICROS~1 office product started complaining: "Hey, this can't export to PDF!" or "Automatic sectioning, numbering and referencing leads to strange results." up to "You tell me: Why is it sooo slow?!" And the best one: "What's this? It doesn't support Linux?!" :-)

From my individual experience, OpenOffice is a great office suite. For real typesetting success I still prefer LaTeX.

Thanks to ODF, stand-alone applications can produce OpenOffice documents as their output (!) so they can be opened, changed and saved (!) with OpenOffice. For some appliances, this is a real good idea.

The development of new features is impressing, but that's what I always may say: Home users treat their office applications (no matter who made them) like a worse typewriter; they won't benefit from it, because they don't want to enter the "bright and scary" world of document and section templates, adjustable margins, multicolumn alignment and automatic enumeration. :-)

http://www.oooninja.com/2008/03/new-features-openofficeorg-240.html... is the article on the subject--but I am bias.

So it is not for you, and hopefully in the future they will change it so that it does the job for you ?

Tell me, when it was not up to the job the last time, did you give feedback to the developers ? Did you ask them to include the features you wanted ?
Did you help them at all be even sending something like a screenshot of what you were after ?

Are they supposed to be psychic and instinctively know what each and every user needs ?


The computer world does not exist purely for YOU.

Office 2003 is sufficient as a target. Seriously, there are not enough improvements in Office 2007 to warrant trying to clone it. I'm still hunting down some features and options in its "oh so original" UI.

Office 2003 (and even Office 2000) were the height of usability and features for me. Hitting that target would be sufficient for 98% of users.

No need to be so defensive. OOo is still really not up to par with MS Office in many significant respects. Heck, some of the basics that OOo Writer sucks at (like para selection, bullet/numbered list editing, normal mode) are implemented better in Abiword! OOo deficiencies (some of them - quite ancient and glaring ones) are well documented by many people, including filing bugreports (many of which had no real action on them in 5 years).

Could you tell me more about this "para selection"? What exactly does this mean?

Sure. "Para selection" means simply "paragraph selection". The visual presentation of paragraph selection in OOo Writer is not very intuitive. This is best demonstrated on a bullet or numbered list. Try selecting a paragraph in the list in Writer and Word and see for yourself what looks sensible and what does not. Also, see if you can reliably distinguish between selecting only paragraph text (without indents etc.) and the whole para with associated formatting.

OpenOffice.org 2.x only has notification of updates, and IIRC, it by default checks once a week. In OOo 2.x, all actual updates are manual.

See, the premise of such arguments are based on pure speculation. The "average user" does not use over "50%" of all the features? Calc is fairly annoying for me in that I work with people who use DATEDIF a lot. OO has no support for such a function and I guess most people have no need of a function to find the difference (i.e. time elapsed) between dates ... There are ways of solving it (http://www.openofficetips.com/2007/07/18/who-needs-datedif/) but that is no where near as elegant as a simple DATEDIF function. I guess not "enough" users need it to warrant such a simple fix.

OO is not there yet. Sure, it might be there for some people, but do not chastise them if OO truly isn't suitable for them.

the trouble with these arguments is that, even if true, every user likely uses a different subset of 50% of the features. Hence, having 100% of the features to please everyone, or 50% of the features and pleasing no one.

Or having 80% and pleasing most people.

Then again, a fair question might be "What percentage of OO.o's features does MSO support?". Depending upon which way you ask the question, one or the other side is always put at a disadvantage.

I agree! I'm retired and my 'Office' requirements are significantly reduced (although I still need a good quality word processor). MS Office is out on cost grounds. I tried OOo for several years but find it over-kill so have recently switched to Atlantis Word Processor (http://www.atlantiswordprocessor.com/en/) and while I have to pay for it I find it has all the features I need and is very lean and uses few resources. I have also acquired copies of GS Calc and GS Base from JPS Developments (http://www.jps-development.com/) and for the limited amount of spreadsheeting and databaseing that I do these are good enough.

Regards,
Peter

It was the killer feature for mee, too: I could not for the love of god understand why it was so hidden away beforehand.

That, and the 'set a background image' action in the presentation app.

There are about a bazillion improvements ooo can have without getting into exotic features that about 1% of the userbase cares about.

My next pet peeves are, eg:
- the viewport moving on its own in writer when you scroll back and forth. It somehow every now and then thinks that it should go back to the caret on its own
- eliminate the slow text reflowing that will move all text lines up/down a couple of pixels, one line at a time, while I am reading/editing a page. Either get the algorithm fast enough or stay with the initial, imprecise version