It has been years since Microsoft had any real competition for its Office productivity suite — the software package that includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. Once-popular competitors like WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 have been reduced to tiny niche players. This article evaluates Star Office in comparison to MS Office.
Sun’s StarOffice Still Can’t Rival Microsoft
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
People complain that it cant import MS formats….let us see how well MS works with StarOffice format?? Did they ever consider that MS itself is solely to blame for format troubles ??
Obviusly it cant import a closed format 100% correct.
> this program is mainly for light users preparing basic documents who either can’t afford Office
Not to flame, but what is missing from OO? He dosnt really go into detail… I just really dont know since I dont do many of these complicated things…
“The key virtue of StarOffice is that it’s cheap.”
“This program has a strong techie heritage, and is now controlled by a company and an open-source community that couldn’t tell a normal, nontechnical computer user from a bag of Cheetos.”
“…this program is mainly for light users preparing basic documents who either can’t afford Office, or hate Microsoft so much they’ll live with some complexity and limitations.”
StarOffice is very nice in many ways. If it and MSOffice cost the same (as is virtually the case in many cases, as MSOffice comes bundled with a lot of computers), I would chose MS Office nearly every time. Why? Because:
1). It’s still way faster than StarOffice 7 on Windows
2). It’s a lot more polished than StarOffice
3). MS Office document compatability is still not perfect. Importing a powerpoint presentation into StarImpress and exporting it won’t give back the original persentation in all but trivial cases.
I do see StarOffice eclipsing MSOffice in the future though. Perhaps one or two versions away. It just isn’t there yet though.
The reason that MS office opens faster is that it’s preloaded into the RAM during boot-up. It sits there leaching your RAM, and therefore allways starts faster than Staroffice.
I wrote my entire M.Sc final exam paper in it (SO Writer), and it worked great. Actually found it easier to use than MS Word.
Impress and Calc seems to do their jobs as well, but haven’t done more than a few spreadsheets and one single presentation yet so I really can’t say that much of them.
The reason that MS office opens faster is that it’s preloaded into the RAM during boot-up. It sits there leaching your RAM, and therefore allways starts faster than Staroffice.
Not it’s not because of that. I always remove such loaders and it still starts up much faster.
—–
I tried using OOo for a simple uni report but I discovered that it couldn’t restart page numering without inserting blank pages. The blank pages don’t show in the applikation but is very visible in the pdf file. Couldn’t use it.
Which specific feature (other than MS importing) is inherently inferior about SO/OO? I hate it when people give vagueries instead of specifics.
Open Office is perfectly fine, and imports MS Office formats fine.
besides that, in a few years, when the EU standardizes on the Open Office file format, MS will have to make filters importing and Exporting to that so companies can do business with the rest of the world.
there is no reason, if you are not trying to integrate yourself into a Windows Network with lots of office stuff, that you should use MS Office over Open Office…unless you got MS Office for free when you bought your computer.
The main drawback I see with star office is that it uses Java. I wish that it did not use it, because the little buttons on the screen are hard to read. Plus, they are so small it is hard to make out what they are. Actually, I found Lotus smart suite easier to use than star office. I used star office 5.2 and 6.0 but in the newer verions there is no email client. So you still don’t have a complete office suite. I like one that has it all, from mail client, writer, and so on.
Also, trying to convert a excel spreadsheet in star office often leads to data that is not coverted properly, or it gives invailid data. Being a small business owner, this could lead to serious problems in accounting. So in the end we still wind up using MS office, we are fixing to update to Office 2003 since we get the free upgrade since we had purchased Office XP earlier in the year.
“It lacks an e-mail, calendar and contacts program like Microsoft’s Outlook.
…
One annoying feature tries to complete words you type.”
Not having a biult in Outlook clone is one of the only drawbacks to this office suite that I have seen as far as basic functionality is concerned. Not everyone wants to download the reccomended Mozilla browser to have Email capabilities. I have Mozilla, and it is my primary brower, but many people do not want to download somthing else when after downloading a 51 MB file, or paying $80.00 USD, they find that the office suite is not yet complete. If I were a noobie, I think I would be pissed off at the “wasted” bandwith or money. After all, why buy or download an incomplete program? This needs to be fixed. Hopefully it will be included in OO.o 2.0 when that is released. As far as the autocomplete feature, I actuall like it. I would estimate that it speeds up my typing from 68 WPM to easily over 100 WPM.
The one drawback I find to this program that the author did not mention is the stupid help agent. People bitch about clippy in MSO, but they decide to include a replacement for it in thier alternative office suite? Makes no sence to me. What ever happened to stativ *.hlp files that were first introduced with Windows 3.0? I find that system more effective at finding what you want other than having some animated assistant telling you how to save a file. If I need instruction on somting, I will look it up via the help–>Contents menu just like I did in MSO 95, MSO 4.3, Win95, Win3.1x, and Win3.0. That system may be a little outdated, and not as “fancy” but I like static only on demand content better than an “office assistant” who thinks that the end user is the stupidest persion on earth. If you do not know how to save a file, you have bigger problems that an animated assistant can help you with. You need to take introductory computing classes if you cannot manage this.
Another bad part about OO.o is the UI. It looks rather dated, like it came out of 1997. If the icons displayed in 32 bit color instead of the current 16 color scheme, it would help with the end user experience. For a good example of what could be done, take a look at Desktop/LX’s Productivity suite. Thise icons are what should be included in a default OO.o install. 16 colors was fine when that was all your moniter could display, or in Windows 95, but in the modern age of computing with 32 bit color palletes, it is quite an eyesore. Another good example of what could be done with the icons is already present in AbiWord, Desktop/LX’s Productivity Pack, MSO 2003, and even Koffice.
Also, if it would be possible to get a photoshop clone that acutally supports CMYK, it would be a boon to the end user. The GIMP could do this if it were only updated, but unforunatly, the GIMP is about at the same level of ability as Photoshop 4.03 for Windows 3.1x. Either the GIMP needs to be updated, or a completly new program needs to be wrote. A good change in the GIMP would be to actually unify the the different pallets so it resembles Photoshop more closely. This would greatly help the aestetic value of the product. After all, shouldn’t a graphics editing program such as the GIMP or Photoshop acutally look professional, and not like some little kid designed the interface. Photoshop appears like a modern professional product, which it is. The GIMP appears to look like a half-assed drop in replacement with serious drawbacks, which it is not really, but the UI needs to be modernized, and also support RGB and CMYK color schemes.
If OO.o got rid of the stupid animated asssistant, had better icons on the taskbars, came with a sutible photoshop replacement,and came with an outlook clone, it would be a fully featured office suite that would be a drop in replacement for Microsoft Office that would in fact be superior. Until these happen, it will only be a second tier alternative to the defacto industry standard that MSO currently is.
The reason that MS office opens faster is that it’s preloaded into the RAM during boot-up. It sits there leaching your RAM, and therefore allways starts faster than Staroffice.
Which processes is it so I can kill them? Or are is it preloaded stuff that is used for other apps too?
I’ve been using OO 1.1 at school on my Laptop in Windows XP. It is a little slow to load, but works very well otherwise. I especially like being able to save to PDF so that I can put things on my server and grab them or share them.
My goal is to be 100% free of the Microsoft Tax and not install pirated software either. So far, OO does what I need perfectly.
As a side note, I installed Mandrake 9.2 this weekend on my laptop. It is working very nicely (albeit, not perfectly, ie. no sound yet), as well.
So he complains about the export to Word format. That is a problem, but it is hard to do it right. It is getting better, but he dosen’t seem to complain about much of the other things wrong with it. The OpenOffice Developers are constantly testing their filters, so it in version 1.2 (or may be even 1.1.x bug fixes) his formatting problems will disappear soon.
For me, OpenOffice 1.1 is the first usable version of OpenOffice. It is so much better than OpenOffice 1.0, and it looks nothing like the Old StarOffice 5.2. It starts up faster than Office 2000 on my machine (Only takes 3 seconds, Office 2000 takes 5). No more ugly fonts, all anti-alaised, and matches your KDE or Gnome desktop theme.
I use it as my Office Suite at home, and it surprisingly does handle Office files very well, including My complex PowerPoint presentations with advanced transitions and sound, which was essential for me to give presentations at work.
I really like the Right click menu for quick formatting, which feels faster than going to drop down menu at the top.
So what do I feel that is missing. Not much, a format painter button, Selection Column and the Abillity to import export SVG files would be nice. I would reccomend it to anyone who wants a nice office suite without too much money. I don’t hate Microsoft Office (apart from the Paper Clip), but I can’t afford it for home use and it is overkill for most of my needs.
besides that, in a few years, when the EU standardizes on the Open Office file format, MS will have to make filters importing and Exporting to that so companies can do business with the rest of the world.
Who said that? url?
Basically what it boils down to in our Business is time and money both. We have been using MS Office for several years and tried some of the alternatives, but always came back to MS Office. The others may be ok for home use, but without a email client, this really hurts them. We rely on outlook for the calender and the overall functionality of the MS Office suite.
I have tried Open Office, but did not care for how long it took to load up when started. Plus, the appearance of it seemed dated and it was kind of awkard working with it. Star Office, I thought at first would do ok when it had a email client but they removed it in the later versions why I don’t know.
In the end there is plenty of room in the market for alternatives, this keeps all the competition on their toes, just like in my business. Maybe one day Star Office will get a email client and some other features and we might switch.
Chris M.
SO/OO can convert MS files. MS can’t convert SO/OO files.
SO/OO can work on Linux/BSD/Mac/Unix. MS works on MS and Mac
SO/OO $80 or less price tag. MS $100 to $600 price tag.
SO/OO can use just about any DB program. MS uses Access and few others.
SO/OO can be converted by any other suite because it’s based on XML. MS 2002 and prior can not be and 2003 is limited because of MS extensions added to the XML.
Outlook is unnecessary bloat, and I, for one, do not miss its absence in OO.o.
BTW, does anyone actually use the calendar, contact pages, et al? Everyone I know simply uses it for e-mail.
Oh, look! Windows comes with Outlook Express! Simply amazing!
You still need to perform voodoo to get pagenumbers to work, something is so simple todo in word.
Nearly everyone is missing the real problem with StarOffice: It fails to provide any incentive for an existing Office user to switch.
If someone is already using Office on their Windows or their Mac machine, why would they spend $80 to replace Office with something that is not-quite-as-good?
If someone is using, or planning to use, a platform (Linux or Solaris) on which Office is not supported, then StarOffice makes sense. But, consider the fact that those users have others reasons to use Linux or Solaris. If Microsoft marketed Office for Linux/Solaris at $80, how many users would opt for StarOffice?
Fussing about StarOffice’s Word import abilities, or declaring Microsoft is to blame for StarOffice’s weaknesses because Microsoft uses a closed proprietary format is just so much pointless whining. Only people who believe in the ideology of open, non-proprietary software will blame MS for the problems of open software.
It’s good that the open source community is attempting to make applications that can be used by the 99.9 percent of the human race who find computers about as interesting as a torque wrench. But, by merely mimicing Microsoft and others, open source has set itself up as a perpetual also-ran.
You can’t beat Microsoft by imitating it. You beat Microsoft by giving people a reason to stop using Windows.
try ACPI=on at the end of your kernel entry in /etc/grub.conf
it was either a story on here or slashdot about 2 or 3 weeks ago.
Academia might get a good deal, but that’s because it is being used. Everybody learned that trick about 20 years ago, starting with Apple. Where MS makes their money off Office is from businesses, where the deals are not so hot. Furthermore, in order to get any kind of deal they will force you to buy the full Office for each computer. So your secretary who only uses Word and Excel has to pay for the copy of Access that will just collect dust. And let’s not even talk about getting yourself caught in the MS upgrade cycle.
If you use OpenOffice, you won’t have the BSA at your door. Hmmm. That might be fun though.
The word completion is the most innovative thing to happen to office suites since the spell checker. Try typing an academic paper that uses the word “anthropology” about 60 times, and you’ll soon learn to appreciate that you can simply type “anthr”, see the rest of the word pop up, hit ENTER, and move to the next word. This feature is per-document, so the words it suggests completions for are almost always correct. Not to mention that you can turn this off. I didn’t see him mentioning all the crap MS does automatically as you type as a mark against Office.
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/10/26/1846217.shtml
it looks like nothing more than speculation
sheesh …
I’m very much dependant on Powerpoint to do a lot of work with charts and presentations. For instance OOo don’t offer even half the amount of chart types available in MSOffice. That’s just for starters… tweaking lay out of the charts in OOo will show that you can pretty much do less than half of what you can do in MS Office.
Unfortunately this is the most important aspect to me when choosing the office package as doing word processing etc can be done in whatever App….
The spreadsheet app in OOo also lacks several chart functions meaning it simply won’t give me the edge I’m looking for.
This also means MSOffice is very much cheaper for me, as OOo ‘s lacking features mean I have to spend let’s say 2 hours more every week while constructing presentations. My hourly fee is about 90$/h… so in less than a month, MS Office outperforms SO/OOo in functionality as well as cost.
“So your secretary who only uses Word and Excel has to pay for the copy of Access that will just collect dust.”
Have you ever heard of Office Standard? You can also buy Word standalone. Word comes bundled with almost every PC the large vendors sell.
“The word completion is the most innovative thing to happen to office suites since the spell checker. Try typing an academic paper that uses the word “anthropology” about 60 times, and you’ll soon learn to appreciate that you can simply type “anthr”
Until I want to type anthropologist or anthrax etc. Sounds annoying to me.
“The main drawback I see with star office is that it uses Java.”
It does not.
My sister, who has a young family of her own and is pretty tight financially, had been using Wordpad for almost 2 years because she could not afford Office.
In about half an hour on the phone I had her download OO.o and install it on her computer. She was ecstatic. She had no Idea you could get something that fit her needs for free.
She does much of her work at home, and she was suffering for a simple word processor. It seems like such an effortless thing to us geeky types, but for many, free software options like Open Office are a lifesaver.
“Have you ever heard of Office Standard? You can also buy Word standalone. Word comes bundled with almost every PC the large vendors sell.”
Did you read the post? MS won’t let your business purchase those as part of a package deal. They will sell you 3x the software you need for 5% less than you would have paid for what you actually do need. Great deal, right? Except in three years you won’t know what you need anymore, because you can’t base it on what you have. It might be easy to sort out with 14 employees, but not with 1400. MS can use the oversell in a hundred ways to screw your company in the long run.
“Until I want to type anthropologist or anthrax etc. Sounds annoying to me.”
But you haven’t tried it, have you? I find auto-capitalize to be annoying, but people rarely turn that off. And if you used it you would know that it still allows you to type anthropologist faster than you could otherwise (1 less keystroke), as well as remove the suggestion as soon as you type the last “a” of anthrax, replacing it with the anthrax completion (if you’ve typed it before). Seriously, until you try this on a long paper you probably won’t appreciate it. But then you can always turn it off, can’t you?
SUN! Make a native version for OSX. Us MAC people are just dying to uninstall MS Office from our MACs. When I say native I mean one that uses aqua not X11.
It’s all about market forces. My shop uses mostly Office 97. Frankly, it does everything I need. My boss about sh** when I wanted to pay $230 for OEM OfficeXP SBE. Problem is that nobody wants off the teat. I find OO.org find for all my docs..there’s not much it can’t do right now, but interacting with MSoffice is still patchy. Frankly the solution for the office suite problem is for the others [KDE, Gnome, OO.org] to spend some energy ganging up.. they all handle MS docs pretty well, if they could just handle each other’s we’d be all set…and quite having to have OO.org and Abiword and Koffice…just to interact with other linux users. As far as MS, I’ve had a project recently where some files with links refused to play between MS versions nicely, destroying a lot of work…far more anoying than the OO.org issues I have!
The outlook replacement is a waste of time for them. OSS has Mozilla and Evolution…Why bother duplicating efforts..and again It’s only windows users that have to spend time downloading…OSS distros usually include these for free!
I find few docs OO.org chokes on, but it does loose more complicated formating at times. I Use it most of the time on my work PC along with MSOffice97. If I could “flip the switch” and change all the internal docs over…OO.org would be 100% useful and not limiting right now.
A reviewer starting out with …
“But there is a competing office suite that is the darling of those companies, software developers and users who have made hating or battling Microsoft into a sort of religion.”
… should of course not be taken seriously.
And anyone who interacts witth other people and wants only one office suite is stuck with StarOffice/OpenOffice anyway as MS Office can not load these formats.
Olav
“I’m very much dependant on Powerpoint to do a lot of work with charts and presentations.”
Well then your job much be a complete waste of money because power-point tends to suck the intelligence out of presentations. Please see Professor of Computer Science and statistics Edword Tuft’s work on “the cognitive style of powerpoint” here:
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters#powerpoint
The Draw Office, which is the vector engine of all OO components, is far superior to the one in MS Office, in particular for Powerpoint. Can you make such shades and transparency with Powerpoint ? No (at least not with the same quality).
MS Office has a lot to learn there.
1. I wrote my entire M.Sc final exam paper in it (SO Writer), and it worked great. Yup, and I wrote a 70 page Honours project in OO and it worked fantastically.
2. It is easy touse page numbering in OO.
3. Java in optional in OO. You do NOT HAVE to have Java.
4. Try going to FreeBSD’s website and finding the Handbook. Go to the ‘entire Handbook in one HTML page’ link and copy and paste it into OpenOffice. About 835 pages later you have a huge beautifully formatted document. Cool!
The real benefit of OO will start to show when people start writing applications that can access data using the xml format of the OO documents.
When people start seeing the benefit of open document formats then the market will sit up and take notice.
I believe as soon as you start seeing applications that can do things with OO documents that can’t be done with MS documents then the tides will change.
Imagine what can be done to document storage and retrieval applications when the systems can catagorize content of documents and not just user attributes of documents such as author, subject etc.
Just my two cents.
I’m using OOo (1.1) to write my phd thesis. It’s great, and I have no problems. Normally, I hate the’bells and whistles’ that come with so much software, but the word completion in OOo is fantastic. It really does save time when typing a lot of complex scientific words.
The calc is also quite useful for some basic data analysis (I cannot afford SPSS), and I have never had a problem with imports except for a friends conference paper in the Impress which changed the bullet points.
However, the article missed an important point: there are occasions when MS Office has problems importing MS Office formats (yes, even those originally made in MS Office, not just from SO/OOo).
Frankly, I think this ‘review’ was not well focused and I disagree with many of its conclusions. A product should be reviewed on its own merits, not how closely it matches a Microsoft counterpart, or how well it plays with that MS counterpart.
The author mentions that “Word Count” is too hard. Yes, it is called “Statistics” instead of “Word Count”, but StarOffice 7 gives you more than just word count. It gives you the number of pages, the number of graphics, the number of tables, the number of OLE objects, the number of Paragraphs, the number of characters, the number of lines, AND the number of words. Therefore, “Statistics” more accurately represents the information they are providing than would “Word Count”. Page numbering is also simple (and similar to MS Office) in my opinion.
StarOffice doesn’t handle complex MS formats absolutely perfectly, but then again, neither does MS Office. It doesn’t take much to really screw up your document is MS Office. Besides, this is Microsoft’s fault for not opening their formats. StarOffice does a great job considering the developers don’t have all the format details of MS Office.
What is the reviewers point about the Teacher & Student version of MS Office? That is irrelevant to a review. He might as well have said that it is possible to pirate both StarOffice and MS Office so costwise they are the same.
StarOffice 7 is a solid contender to MS Office. It comes with a lot more templates and fonts, and even if you are tempted to cheat and finagle a copy of MS Office at the student discount, StarOffice is still nearly half the price. It also handles complex Japanese documents much better than MS Office; which always tends to indent Japanese incorrectly (not that this is a concern to most of you).
I own both and use both extensively, and in my opinion, StarOffice 7 is by far the better buy.
I don’t really care about how long my word processor takes to load because I leave it loaded all day. However, Open Office is still subjectively sluggish to use, with noticeable delays after keypresses on an Athlon 2600+ with 512 megs of fast DDR RAM. As someone who writes for a living I find that intolerable. It probably doesn’t actually slow me down, but I find it so unpleasant to work with that I would never use the program. Another problem I ran into is the inability to quickly set the language of passages of text, which is essential for me because I often work on documents in multiple languages.
I forgot to mention that StarOffice also exports PDF files, which I use a lot. If I use MS Office, I either have to buy Adobe Acrobat, or one of several print to PDF applications. I’d rather have it all it one program.
That’s interesting. I only write documents containing English and Japanese, but they both work fine for me (of course I’ve only done that using StarOffice 7 and not OpenOffice.) I also deal with documents that contain English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish, but those are all part of the same codepage, so of course they don’t cause any problems either.
“The outlook replacement is a waste of time for them. OSS has Mozilla and Evolution…Why bother duplicating efforts..and again It’s only windows users that have to spend time downloading…OSS distros usually include these for free!”
OK, is there a Evolution port that is native to Windows? As far as I am aware, there is not. It is part of the Xiaman Office suite, and that runs under Linux using the Gnome widget set. There is a GIMP port that is native to Windows, but it is far from adequate for professional needs. For one, GIMP has no CMYK support, no RGB support, is not graphically consistant with the Windows UI, and is lacking a certian appeal that Photoshop has. If the GIMP were improved on so it was actually a sutable replacement for Photoshop, and Evolution ported to the Windows platform, this would help out OO.o greatly. See my previous comment for further details about what needs to be changed in the OSS alternatives to be competitive to MSO, and Photoshop.
Java:
It does use Java, but fairly little. Small components use Java, like the Report wizard. Anyone can write components using Java (like the Report wizard) that connect to OOo through its component technology, UNO.
Word Count:
There are patches (Ximian’s version includes then, and soon Red Hat’s) that move the Word Count to the Tools menu.
Mac OS X port:
There is the equivalent of 2 or 3 full-time people working on this. WE NEED MORE PEOPLE. Aqua work is going on at http://www.neooffice.org which recently moved up to the 1.1 codebase.
Native Look & Feel:
There is an effort called the Native Widget Framework going on to be able to use Aqua, GTK, and Win32 native widgets with OOo. Screenshots:
http://www.bigw.org/~dan/nwscreen.png
http://www.bigw.org/~dan/so-blue.PNG
[No Aqua screenshots at this time]
Dan
fa@ooo
Nothing to see here… very superficial article… move along…
Actually, it should be Apple’s job, and they should invest in OpenOffice to get it properly ported to Aqua. That way, Apple gets a good office suite, and has file formats that everyone can use, and we no longer need to depend on MS Office or Appleworks.
Well then your job much be a complete waste of money because power-point tends to suck the intelligence out of presentations. Please see Professor of Computer Science and statistics Edword Tuft’s work on “the cognitive style of powerpoint” here:
Luckily powerpoint isn’t aimed for professors working with Computer Science, but is aimed for me as a simple tool adding the benefit of visualizing something while talking. And assuming that Powerpoint isn’t the best tool for the job, it still outperforms Impres. So I guess this professor then would ahve to say Powerpoint suck, Impress is not even on the map…
Then again, I guess that’s why I make bucks while he’s just teaching computer science..
http://www.bigw.org/~dan/so-blue.PNG
That is a good look for OO.o. It makes it look more professional, and like it should be in production. Too bad that it is only in StarOffice 7. What are the chances that this look will be available in a future OO.o release?
The first shot is OOo, the second StarOffice. But the actual code that does the Native Widgets is all OpenOffice.org. A near-future release should include these patches.
The code is in the “cws_srx645_nativewidget1” CVS tag. It is being developed by myself (GTK+ and Aqua) and Stephan Schaefer (Sun employee, Win32).
There are also the Ximian icons for OOo, which Red Hat will soon be moving to. NeoOffice as well. Ximian’s icons are GPL (LGPL?) so theoretically could be included in OOo, and hopefully somebody’s set will be because the current OOo icons look God Awful.
Dan
I have some CDs that have a bunch of WMF files {clipart}. Gimp could open some of the files correctly but some of the files Gimp seemed to whine about it. So I did a search on Google and Freshmeat to find a WMF converter. Well, I didn’t find anything promising. I thought about starting up my windows machine to convert the files to TIFF or BMP, but I was real curious if I could find a solution on Linux.
After a bit, I decided to start up OO.o because I knew it was capable of opening DOC files. I was able to place the WMF files into documents. The WMF files came up fine with no whining. Then I thought of OO.o Draw. I was able to open the WMF files then export the files as TIFFs. Gimp was then able to manipulate the TIFF files.
Obviously, this would not be a good way to convert a whole CD worth of WMFs. But it is another interesting use for OO.o.
If anyone knows of a nice graphics program that can do batch conversion of WMFs, I would appreciate hearing about it.
This is the same problem that I have seen over and over for many years. We had similar difficulties at an engineering firm when we moved away from an old mainframe CAD setup to using AutoCAD and Microstation on PCs. There were some legacy files from the old but still extant projects that could not be ported. The only way would have been to duplicate the entire file from scratch.
Same kind of thing with MS Word vs. OpenOffice. When you have a client who hands you a disk with their entire library in Word 97 or PowerPoint 2000 format, you can’t risk the possiblity of unnoticed formatting errors slipping through. It may be that OpenOffice would easiy do everything needed. BUT, if you cannot export your editing result or your new additions in a format that is completely, 100% compatible with the original, then you dare not use it. Not when the customer/client is trusting you with several thousand dollars worth of data.
Most especially in an engineering or legal setting where you can be sure that there is an excellent chance your work is going to end up in a courtroom someday.
It isn’t a question of innate quality. I use OpenOffice for most of my needs, unless I just scratch off a quick text file in some editor. But when you are dealing with several hundred thousand words, with associated graphics, in a client’s existing data you cannot take any chances on messing things up. So you use something that is completely compatible with the original, even if the new options might be technically superior.
Good, I look forward to the new interface. This should help things out quite abit as far as the apperance is concerned. I also just happened to find this:
http://tools.openoffice.org/releases/q-concept.html
I have just started reading the document, but it seems like OO.o is just beginning. Now I am wondering what features will be in v2.0. Here is a request: A grammer checker. A grammer checker would be greatly appriciated if it were included with OO.o. And I was wondering if there was a way to intigrate the spell checker with Outlook Express like Word does, because this is one of the major drawbakcs that there is to not using MSO. Is there a plug-in available, or will there be in the future?
Speaking about file formats, of course it’s because of Microsoft. But knowing this doesn’t help at all right now.
Here are some issues that prevent me from switching (as of OOo 1.1):
1) Writer doesn’t export inserted pictures to .doc format (issue 21573).
2) Writer incorrectly exports tables with merged cells (issue 21575)
3) There is no usable comment system (it’s “Notes” in Writer). You can’t assign a comment to a range of text, and author’s name isn’t saved there. Comments are essential for me: I work in a publishing house.
Overall, the usability is inferior, too. Some things that aren’t showstoppers but annoy me:
– You can’t directly assign a hotkey to a symbol or a style — gotta record a macro
– The choice of hotkeys is limited compared to Word
– Macro recorder is usable only for simplest cases where you don’t have to edit the code manually. The code produced by it is incomprehensible, unlike the examples provided in SDK.
There is more, I just can’t remember right now.
Anyway, the suite has potential. It just isn’t ready yet… for many of us
)
“For one, GIMP has no CMYK support, no RGB support…”
If you actually used The Gimp you would know it does have RGB support.
Im glad I dont send anything external in MS .doc format, I always use PDF. That way it can be read and viewed everywhere and nobody can change anything easily.
1. Spell checking across multiple languages works fine… I just tried it to make sure. You need to set the language in Format/Characters — probably easiest if you define a macro. I agree that the hotkey assignment could use some work. (I am sure volunteer assistance would be appreciated.)
2. It is easy to use page numbers in OO if you plan ahead a bit and you are planning to print on both sides of your pages. You just need to set up some page styles.
Hint: create a page style for the first page of your chapter, and link it to the style for chapter headings. Then create two more page styles, one for left-hand pages and one for right-hand pages. The ChapterPage page style has LHPage as its next page style and the LHPage has RHPage as its next page style.Then you can automatically put the chapter heading in the right hand headers and the Document title on the left hand headers.
Now you can set up the headers on the LHPage and RHPage to automatically insert the Document and Chapter Titles, respectively.
This might take you half an hour the first time, reading the online help, but if you are planning on producing a 70 page document, it is half an hour well spent.
The key is that OO has a clear idea of what left and right pages are, and always puts odd numbered pages on the right side (I suppose it is on the left side if you are using Hebrew or Arabic, but then that would still be right, no?). That is usually the right thing to do… if you have a table of contents, say, with little roman page numbers, and then you go to the first page of your document with arabic numbers starting at 1, you almost certainly want that page to be a right-hand page, assuming you are going to duplex print. If you are planning to kill extra trees by one-sided printing, then you have to use the facility to offset the page number on display.
“The new version retains my favorite inscrutable option choice: “size optimization for XML format (no pretty printing).””
Wow.. people find that hard to understand? We really need more natural selection in our society
“And some tasks, such as inserting page numbers and viewing word count, are still too hard. One annoying feature tries to complete words you type.”
Never tried to insert page #s… but I have had to do the wordcount. Umm… it’s painfully simple. That feature that he calls annoying is definitely my favourite feature of OpenOffice.
“But as I said last year, this program is mainly for light users preparing basic documents who either can’t afford Office, or hate Microsoft so much they’ll live with some complexity and limitations.”
I could use MSOffice… money isn’t an issue. MSOffice runs well under wine, so there’s no problem there either. I choose to use OpenOffice because it’s superior. Limitations? what can’t it do except export flawlessly to MS office? Guess it doesn’t cash often enough
OpenOffice and SunOffice are way above MSOffice in quality.
First of all time and money will make any product much better. Now lets look at the facts Microsoft Office has been around in some form since the late 80’s. OpenOffice (Star Office) has not been around for more than 5 years, I don’t know the exact time. Microsoft has pretty much unlimited cash for one of their premier products. OpenOffice has pretty much no cash and relys on programmers that have time to hack at the code. Microsoft has a great product and nobody is going to deny that but the only reason that is true is because it is 10 years ahead of OpenOffice.
You can’t expace your 5 year old kid to be able to do the same things as your 15 year old. I am just saying the two products shouldn’t be compared next to each other because the one with more time and money will always win.
I was going to purchase MS-Office. I was shoked to see its price tag being close to 300 bucks for the student version. There is no way i am going to pay that sort of money for an office suite i mainly use to write letters.
So i downloaded Open Office 1.1 and i find it awesome. I can save my document in pdf format and be sure that everybody can read them, no matter what platform they use.
Admitably Ms-Office is technicly a bit supirior and it comes w/- Outlook – but this alone doesn’t justify the price.
IMO MS products are a rip off.
Try opening a MS Office N version with MS Office (N-1) – even though there are no significant feature differences between the two versions, it cannot be done.<BR>
If I am wrong, and there is a pair of versions which can open each others files, do they also pass the reviewer’s test of save/edit/save/open-in-original? Do the reviewer’d documents pass theses tests? (Oops -can’t check that, he didn’t supply any test data, only a statement).<P>
Can anyone here truly say that they had to upgrade MS Office for a new feature it offered? Not just to be able to read other peoples’ version (N+1) files?<P><P>
An application I have written (www.sysview.net), which originally wrote TXT/HTML reports, took a lot of work to add the effectively undocumented RTF file format so that its reports could be opened in MS Word; When OO.o came out with its documented XML file format, adding that functionality was very little work at all – comparable to adding HTML support, as compared to the reverse-engineering required for RTF. The few queries I had, which I could have taken the time to work out, instead I discussed with the developers themselves on the OOo developers mailing list.<BR>
For a small application such as mine, adding MS Word compatability is not even a possibility. The RTF support in my app is expected to work, but there is no method of testing RTF other than “does it crash the entire Windows OS when I load a generated document in MS Word?” – a single typo and the whole machine goes down!
I really like StarOffice, but still have my gripes about it like everyone else. But there is one more thing I discovered that could really hinder it’s success: the incompatibilities of MS VBA vs. StarBasic.
In the StarOffice programmer’s handbook it mentions that there will *never* really be a way to convert MS Office forms, (I think VBA too, I’ll not entirely sure) because the object models are too different.
This would mean that if you have Word or Excel documents in which you’ve invested time in creating macros and forms, that you’ll probably have to rewrite it in StarOffice/OO.org. So even if the automation capabilities of StarOffice are comparable to MS Office, there is not going to be a great incentive to switch if you have a lot of MS documents using automation that will have to be re-written.
Apart from that, the other thing that really sucks is that there is really nothing even remotely comparable to Access reports. The “report wizard” creates a database connected document which you can’t really do much with.
But I still think it’s functionality is pretty good overall.
First off before you start beleiving this guy RTF has not changed since Office 97 up until 2003. If you do not beleive me click File > Save As and Check out Microsoft Office 97-2003 & 6.0/95 – RTF. Also the DOC format hasn’t changed since Office 2000 so any of those documents can be opened in the 3 version backward and forward. That is 2000, XP, and 2003.
Stop spreading FUD and trying to pawn off you software.
The GIMP appears to look like a half-assed drop in replacement with serious drawbacks, which it is not really, but the UI needs to be modernized, and also support RGB and CMYK color schemes.
Have you tried version 1.3 of the Gimp? The UI is much nicer, and the new Toolbox/Palette holder works great. I also like the menubar at the top of the image window. I use both programs and I can’t say that one has a better UI than the other. Different, for sure, but not better. So GIMP doesn’t have a top window that contains the drawings – big deal. Using different windows for each image works just as well, and does not look less “professionnal.”
As far as the CMYK issue is concerned, this is a bit more problematic as it depends on non-free patents held by Pantone. The good news is that version 2.0 of the GIMP will modularize this allow for proprietary vendors to provide with their own color compositing plug-ins.
GIMP is a great program. It’s 95% of what photoshop is, and that’s enough for the great majority of graphic uses. Most people don’t like it because it’s a bit different – that doesn’t mean that it’s inferior.
I don’t know about other platforms/distributions, but Debian has a quickstarter applet that does some of the same preloading that MS Office does. You don’t have to use it, of course, and it slows down the login time, but starting Writer takes only 3 seconds on my 800MHz PIII. Additional instances start in less than one second.
Looks like it takes up ~40 MB of RAM to live resident like that. That’s a lot, but it is tolerable for me when I am using OOo frequently.
Nearly everyone is missing the real problem with StarOffice: It fails to provide any incentive for an existing Office user to switch.
OpenOffice.org does have an advantage: price. At my office, we’ve switched all non-designers and non-administrative personel to OpenOffice (on Windows). They don’t need the full set of Office functions (like the oh-so-useless AutoSummary – yeah, it’s impressive, but who in heck uses that!), so OO.o fits the need just fine.
Most of the posting I read seem containing fanatic notes of SO/OO user which keep on bashing the writer. Before anyone stamp me as MS zealot or what ever, I wish to tell that I am an ex-Windows user, a full time Linux user and use OpenOffice for my daily work.
And I agree with the writer, OO/SO need a lot of polishing. Among the thing that I hate most is that when I launch OO, its splash screen just block my screen for about 1 minutes even though I change my virtual desktop. Someone above jaust say about the trick MS did to speed up their MSOffice but to me, the method is not important as long as the result gave what I want.
Furthermore in my opinion, too much effort wasted on porting OO to different platform which lead to slow improvement of the functionality.
Arrrgh…. If I want to write the weakness of OO, I’ll reach the 8,000 character limit here but my messages is that the OO/SO developer should start evaluating what are the users need and provide it, rather than using anti MS sentiment to get user.
So disable the splash screen.
In your .sofficerc file in your ~/username/OpenOffice…/program/sofficerc set the Logo=0 works for SO under Linux as well. Not an issue with Windows if you enable the quick start.
I really like StarOffice, but still have my gripes about it like everyone else. But there is one more thing I discovered that could really hinder it’s success: the incompatibilities of MS VBA vs. StarBasic.
That is a good point and this could resolved through having a plugin infrastructure thus allowing different languages to be “plugged in” to OpenOffice.org/StarOffice. For example, we could have a Python plugin which would allow people to write macros in Python.
Getting back to the VB issue, if more people help with the VB.NET Mono implementation, then what could happen is Mono could then be plugged into OpenOffice.org/StarOffice. There is some incompatibility between VB “classic” and VB.NET, however, by using VB.NET via mono, OpenOffice.org/StarOffice future proof themselves as the future versions of Office will be embracing C# and VB.NET over the “classic” VB 6 which is currently used to write Macros.
This is just plain tripe, I’ll prolly stop reading articles by the publication now.
Note to self, contracostatimes’ editor is a failure.
He mentions that Star Office acts as if it’s meant for techies to use. Hardly, I’m a big fan of open office (especially 1.1 nice work guys); and I’ll tell you this: Ten thousand different features that I won’t use only confuse me. Colapsing menus piss me off, if you need collapsing menus than you obviously need to break them off into submenus (or cut useless features like the help sidebar).
I’ve also run Office XP, it’s bloated and dogged my system down worse than Kazaa.
I’m not anti-Microsoft. But I’m embarrassed that OSnews.com posted this crap. You guys need to watch what you post harder. Staroffice may not be perfect with .doc (a horrible format by most standards), but MS word isn’t either. The most difficult thing for users to understand is probably that Office XP formats are only compatible with Office XP formats, and it goes back that way too.
Hello, update your software to deal with your new formats!
I’m not anti-Microsoft. But I’m embarrassed that OSnews.com posted this crap. You guys need to watch what you post harder. Staroffice may not be perfect with .doc (a horrible format by most standards), but MS word isn’t either. The most difficult thing for users to understand is probably that Office XP formats are only compatible with Office XP formats, and it goes back that way too.
Hello, update your software to deal with your new formats!
I can understand the problem with backwards compatibility if you are transferring files from a more modern version of Office to and older version, especially if you’ve used Office XP only features in the document, however, with that being said, Microsoft should offer the user the option for Office to disable features that are unsupported in the format which will be transferred back to an older version of Office. This would go a long way to stopping those sorts of incompatibilities from rearing its ugly head.
As for StarOffice, I really don’t understand, like you, why this person (author of the article) complained so much about StarOffice. I’ve seen what users do in the Office and IMHO, the vast majority don’t even use 1% of the features. Basic things like tables and so forth are used, but things like autosummerise, cross-reference, or merging data into a document.
I have yet to see a user sit down and write a Macro or even attempt to use the Macro record feature. Same goes for many of the advanced features of Excel.
The problem is, however, we have CIO wizz kids out there wasting shareholders money on things not required. Instead of doing what they’re employed to do; investigate more efficient and cheaper ways to doing this in the organisation using information technology, they’re off gas-bagging to the sales rep about how great something is because it has 5billion features and the users only actually use 11 our of the 5billion.
Umm hey troll you can have OO pre-load in both Windows and Linux. So stop with the Linux bashing.
As for StarOffice, I really don’t understand, like you, why this person (author of the article) complained so much about StarOffice. I’ve seen what users do in the Office and IMHO, the vast majority don’t even use 1% of the features. Basic things like tables and so forth are used, but things like autosummerise, cross-reference, or merging data into a document.
Should be:
As for StarOffice, I really don’t understand, like you, why this person (author of the article) complained so much about StarOffice. I’ve seen what users do in the Office and IMHO, the vast majority don’t even use 1% of the features. Basic things like tables and so forth are used, but things like autosummerise, cross-reference, or merging data into a document are rarely, if not ever used in a normal work day.
For example, we could have a Python plugin which would allow people to write macros in Python.
There is one: http://udk.openoffice.org/python/python-bridge.html
Also, there is: http://udk.openoffice.org/cli/cli-uno.html
The CLI-UNO language binding allows to write UNO client programs for OpenOffice.org with languages like C# or VB.NET. The language binding will probably become part of OpenOffice.org 2.0. Until then one can use an OpenOffice.org 1.1 and the language binding package which is separately available
Archie, price isn’t an incentive when you’ve already purchased something you’re satisfied with.
My point is that StarOffice and OpenOffice — at any price — don’t provide an incentive for current MS Office users to chuck their investment in that product (in a large organization that can be significantly larger than the mere purchase price) abd replace it with a cheaper or free Office clone.
That’s the limitation inherent in modeling open source software on existing proprietary software: there’s nothing new to entice prospective users to switch. Put something in open source software that people decide they want and they’ll switch and they’ll pay for it, just like they pay for Microsoft. Every argument posted here — about how closely those StarOffice or OO.o mimic Office, or how they’re fine examples of open source development, or how MS is evil — is simply beside the point.
No, I have not yet tried version 1.3. The current version on Windows is only up to 1.2.4. When it gets ported over to Windows, I will install it instead of the current 1.2.4. I would use Linux, but my damn Intel 536EP connects to the internet, but nothing will connect through it. Damn intel, and I also damn thier drivers that do not work correctly. Also, when is the GIMP 2.0 going to be release, and will there be a Windows port?
“Did they ever consider that MS itself is solely to blame for format troubles ??”
You just don’t get it do you? –It does not matter who is to blame. This is a barrier to entry, and it does not matter who put it there! IF you want to steal market share you must be cheaper, better, faster, and have more features, plus less problems. Full stop. Right now, SO 6, 7… do not cut it. Free or not.
I use Office XP at work and I need to work on files at home. At the moment OpenOffice can’t successfully open MS Office files. It doesn’t matter how good the features are, I need software that can open my documents.
it is impossible to rival against MS as long as you think you have to make OOo/Starsuite as much as compatible with MS. It is easy for MS to knock you donw by changing a format of files. In long run, Sun can face2face with MS once they get succeed in Java Desktop and/or Linus Desktop gains rate% in market. This will push Staroffice up anyway. I myself do not think OOo /SrtarSuite bad, it has helped me so much in work, from a simple doc(s) to a complex formula as f(x) = f(n)…
The key factor is that whether or not a gain of Linux/Java Desk in the market for home use.
//end
You just don’t get it do you? –It does not matter who is to blame. This is a barrier to entry, and it does not matter who put it there! IF you want to steal market share you must be cheaper, better, faster, and have more features, plus less problems. Full stop. Right now, SO 6, 7… do not cut it. Free or not.
In terms of MS document compatibility, it is not 100%, granted, but when you say “do not cut it”, you do not specify who is using it?
A current MS Office users do not need to worry about switching because MS Office works good, but for students and Office apps in many other countries the PRICE is a big difference.
Just specify what one cannot work on SO/OO and identify those features for MS Office, for the rest OO will do the job beautifully – in its own format and direct to printing or PDF.
My view on why OO and SO will have a VERY hard time gaining acceptance outside of the tech community is that MS Office works and it works well, why switch and spend time re-learning the way I do common tasks.
This is hard for many tech people to understand because we have learned how to generalize our knowledge of software. This is why it is easy to switch apps or OS’s. For a non-tech person, they learn how to use one version of an app and any change to the interface can drastically cut there ability to use that program.
So for most people, since it works they will not change.
Maybe it’s because I only use the word processor from these suites, but I much prefer StarOffice 7 to MS Word.
A lot of it has to do with the “feel” of the software; Word somehow feels like a toy…
Most of these posts are missing the point. It doesn’t matter how hard it will be for SO/OO to gain significant market share: it is inevitable that they will do so. Every couple of years a CIO has to look at the new price tag for their office suite, and every time they have to place that next to a purchase price of squat for OO, not to mention the ability to create their own custom plugins/versions anytime they want. In addition, SO/OO are cross-platform. The world is changing, and MS is not even trying to stay on top of it. If a CIO wants to keep his options open in the future, he needs to start moving to cross-platform software. Yet again, consider the student market. Discount it all you want, MS Office is not free and it’s not available via download. And we all know how important the education market is when you’re trying to get a footing in the larger marketplace.
For all the people interested in improving their compatibility between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org, I suggest that instead of saving your documents as doc files, you save them as RTF (Rich Text Format). You will not lose any formatting in doing so and it makes it much easier to open them by third-party apps as the RTF file format hasn’t changed dramatically in the last few years. Microsoft did extend the standard RTF format, but this has been known for a few years and it is taken into account by all modern RTF filters.
Finally, stop complaining and thank all the developers that have given all of us a package as stable and feature-full as OpenOffice. XML is the way to go. Openoffice.org’s XML is open and documented. It is now also an OASIS approved standard and thus carries a lot of weight.
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office
http://xml.openoffice.org/
The biggest problem with a project such as Open Office is breaking into a market place that is dominated by Microsoft to such a huge extent, that there is barely even a niche market to operate in.
When software has cornered 99% of the market, as MS-Office has done, it becomes the defacto standard. Straying away from that standard can have impact on business in the form of lost man-hours.
Microsoft can also easily throw a spanner in the works by modifying their proprietry formats to such an extent that Open Office can no longer import or export reliably.
Then there’s price wars with Star Office. If Star Office starts gaining too much ground, Microsoft will simply cut thier prices.
As much as I’d love to see an alternative that can challenge Microsoft on the Office software front, I don’t see it happening any time soon.
Certainly amongst more clued up computer users, Open Office is an alternative, but the vast majority of computer users just don’t care – when you say ‘word’ they automatically think microsoft office.
I’m user from the times StarOffice 5.2, and now, I use OpenOffice 1.1 and Linux Mandrake, and never ever it failed to me, I found it easy to use, complete, and robust.
When I needed to do the job, the job was done.
With the cost of MS Office and a Windows, I can eat more than two months in my country, so I wish that I can never give up OpenOffice.
I’m a college student, and I’ve done each work with OO without any trouble, printing it, and preparing the typical reports that any college ask.
My mother, medic, also does all his profesional work with it, and is very happy ; and my mother is not a geek.
So well, long live OpenOffice…
Where I work we have MS Office 97, 2000, 2000 premium, XP, XP small business. And guess what – we regularly have problems with one version not working correctly with anothers files. Now add in the problems with work done by volunteers (we are a non-profit) and the problem explode to unbleaveable levels. Our solution was to go with StarOffice’s free version – OpenOffice. The main problem has been getting the MS onlys to switch. With OO we can all use the same version of OO and I give a cd with OO to all volunteers and end of file format hell is at hand.
It seems that – unlike the article – the readres comments here accurately pin down the problems with StarOffice/Openoffice as it exists now
Readers may be interested to read the planning guidelines for OpenOffice 2.0 (current release is 1.1)
Among the plans are:
Use native widgets on GNOME and Windows (should lead to faster operation as well as better desktop integration)
New converter set meeting more of the MSOffice standards
Less, but better, code.
OpenOffice is good – for an OSS project it’s outstanding – but I think the v 2.x will be a killer product.
A current MS Office users do not need to worry about switching because MS Office works good, but for students and Office apps in many other countries the PRICE is a big difference.
That would be true, if the price was high. Students however, can get Windows XP, MS Office and Visual Studio for 50 euros. Even so, most of the times MSOffice is just copied.
Interesting.
MS has no real competitors in the market space of office products, maybe thats the reason why there is almost no real added value or feature to newer releases of the whole office suite.
Its just like with the browser war, after netscape was gone, nothing really new happend with the IE.
“As far as the CMYK issue is concerned, this is a bit more problematic as it depends on non-free patents held by Pantone. The good news is that version 2.0 of the GIMP will modularize this allow for proprietary vendors to provide with their own color compositing plug-ins.”
I can’t think of any reason why Pantone patents would affect CMY or CMYK support. Lots of programs (on other platforms) support these colour spaces. You do need good algorithms for conversion from and to RGB, including (for CMYK) settings for UR/GCR.
For any serious work, Lab and spot colours/duotones should also be supported. As it is, the GIMP is not much use for graphic design or print, which is where Photoshop shines. It would be OK for preparing images for the web.
Who cares ? OpenOffice works for 99% of people who uses only 20% of resources.
VBA doesn’t work ? I and most of people don’t use this.
And M$ Office is ultra VERY expensive for your function.
I tried using OOo for a simple uni report but I discovered that it couldn’t restart page numering without inserting blank pages. The blank pages don’t show in the applikation but is very visible in the pdf file. Couldn’t use it.
<BR>
This is because, by default OO.o uses a “book” mode, i.e pages face eachother. This means that if you stop counting on an odd number, and want to continue from one in the next section, it will need to insert a blank (think of a book).
This is the procedure I’ve found for getting around that: Let’s say you’ve been using style “default”, you insert a section break on an odd page, restarting page counts at 1. The style for the new page needs to be modified, choosing the style “left page” will work, but specifically, you need to right-click the style in the page style window, choose modify, go to the page tab, under Layout Settings, set Page Layout to “Only Left”. At the end of this page (do it after you’ve finished typing in all your text and have flowed onto the next page). Put your cursor on the last line, and do an insert “Manual Break” and select the next style to be “default” (or something with Page Layout “Right and Left”).
I hope one day they will make this easier by allowing you to specify a “non-book” format.
That really is the red herring. I use Open Office at home. Nobody using MS office has ever noticed it. And the day they complain, I’ll send them a CD with OO.org on it and tell them to install it so that they can open and edit my documents.
If they are not happy, I’ll ask them to send me a copy of MS office for Linux.
But the big strength of OO.org is that it’s moving towards what users have been asking and moving fast.
And functionaly, anyone who’s tried to tame MS Word erratic picture embedding will be more than happy with OO.
I receive a lot of Powerpoint jokes, using a lot more effects than would be bearable in a professional presentation and Impress has never had any problem with it.
the author writes…
…But it’s still not flawless at interchanging documents with Microsoft Office, and for that reason I still can’t recommend it wholeheartedly for users who need to exchange more than very basic documents…
There have been many times that I have received Word Documents where opening them in Word resulted in no graphics being visible unless I used print preview. The solution I found was opening the documents in Open Office. All the graphics where visible!
Unlike the author, I find Microsoft Word is only stable for the very basic documents (one page memos and letters). Anything more complex and especially documents with graphics and tables and I always use Open Office.
Cheers!
I am the IT Director for a college in NY (2000 students, 75 faculty members, 150 staff and administrators). After evaluating SO6 we felt it was a good value and that we were going to make the transition from MSO 2000 to SO. e have not experienced major problems with file compatibilty (SO7 is even better at importing document).
Our major problems with SO is that it appears to be written for the tech savies, not for the regular users. Try to have 60 secretaries calling the help desk when the try to basic document creation functions and then you will realize where the problems are.
1) Page numbering – who was the genius who implemented that basic feature? At a minimum, an entry in the Insert Menu should be present, that is where most user expect it to be. Why is buried in Insert > Fields which in turns bring an overly complex dialog box. Why not having a simple Wizard that guides the user in inserting Page Numbers (position, formatting, number style text before and after, etc) like all other modern word processors?
2) Mail Merge – oh boy this one is a real disaster. No even one of our secretaries was able to figure out who to do this without help and they still have a lot of difficulty. To top it off, the out merged documents are individually generated instead of just one file with all the merged subdocuments in it. SO/OOo mail merge function is for the propeller heads.
3) Labels – label handling is anothe usability disaster. try to produce multiple pages of labels and you will end up with no hair on your head. To make it even worse, the templates provided by SO do not match Avery types too well. Choose and Avery letter size label template, fill it out, send it to the printer and the printer will complain about a non-standard page size. Isn’t letter size suppose to be 8.5 x11? How come in SO Avery letter size the page is set to 8.45 x 10.52 instead?
4. Statistics needs to provide word count for a selected content or per section. If the user has a long multi parts document and he/she needs to know the word count of lets say page 5-10, there is no way to do it directly. The workaround would be to copy the content to a new document and get a word count for it. Ahhrgg!
5. Envelope Bar codes – we get a discount on out mailings if bar codes are included in out mailing labels. SO/OOo does not print bar codes.
I have to admit that SO7 moved in the right direction but did not addressed ANY of the issues listed above. My department was given the financial resources to go back to MS Office, otherwise I will end up being linched. Going back to MS Office means that our plans for Linux on the desktop in 2 years got totally derailed.
<I submitted bugzilla reports about these issues but unfortunatelly they sat in OOo database without not even one comment for months and months>
A Email client is Not needed in open office (this artical seems to be Window$ centric Ximain evolution covers the Outlook Replacement Nicely. as far as on windows if you look hard enuff thire is problay a Outlook killer out thire
I’ve just moved my lot from WordPerfect 8 to MS Office. The key issue for me was Wordperfect importing along with loads of user pressure. I know WP Import *is* being worked on (I’m on the mailing list) but it wasn’t there in time. However, I personally use and recommend OOo for home use.
To me the position is:
• If you have Sun boxes, find MS too expensive and need support go for SO.
• If you’re a home user, run *nix or find MS too expensive go for OOo
• If you’re a business on a windows only platform and can afford MSOffice then it’s probably the best bet *at the moment*.
I think the real lesson is that MSOffice is better at many things (Anonymous’ comments on usability I can fully support) but there are some places where SO/OOo has the advantage – cross platform support anyone – and what is best for you has more to do with your own requirements than any “ya boo!” debate.
“I have to admit that SO7 moved in the right direction but did not addressed ANY of the issues listed above. My department was given the financial resources to go back to MS Office, otherwise I will end up being linched. Going back to MS Office means that our plans for Linux on the desktop in 2 years got totally derailed.”
if i understood correctly, ooo 2.0 will exactly adress these issues-so if you could wait (and continue working with ooo1.1 for) 9 months, i guess you and your college will be fine without having to switch back to ms office:
http://tools.openoffice.org/releases/q-concept.html
and yes, pagenumbering currently _does_ really suck!
Synergy, the release cycle for OOo2/SO8 is 18 months, not 9 months (sometime 1st quarter 2005)