Aditya Nag recently got the chance to ask the OpenOffice.org team a few questions about OpenOffice.org in general, and their upcoming release. The interview is fairly long and detailed, and there are a few interesting tid-bits, like Louis’ assertion that there will come a day when there will be no proprietory file formats for Office Suites.
Interview of the Open Office.org Team
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
No, Aditya Nag just reposted a story in which Bruce Byfield did the talking …
Original interview at http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/02/25/209222
Excuse me folks. I was the one who did the Interview. Bruce wrote the article. Kindly check your facts. You want me to post Louis’s and Colm’s emails???
Aditya Nag
Still won’t triumph over Office for a long time. I received OO.org 1.0 with a magazine I purchased a week ago. I installed it, but was very disappointed by it, the worst application has to be the Presentation Graphics program, it is just plain unusable. The installation was terdious and it spelt my country wrong Jamaica is not spelt (Jamaika), that was really embarassing.
I just don’t get Writer its too diluted and lacking, the spreadsheet does not work like Excel in anyway especially when it comes to calculating formulas, I have to do them manually. So, there is a lot to be done, and I’m interested in seeing how version 2 pans out. I have Office 2000 on that same computer and it does everything I like perfectly.
Back to competition, I still see Office dominating the market for the next 15 years, especially in the Enterprise, where collaboration has become so vital. Microsoft is engineering the next version of the Office System to work flawlessly, especially in terms of creating adhoc networks for collaboration.
Another thing is, Microsoft has a lot of advantage, they can cut the price of Office, add more applications to main editions of the suite, Software Assurance. Niche markets will also become dominant in the near future, Tablet PC’s and products such as OneNote will turn out to be killer apps, plus Office is planning working naturally on the Tablet PC in version 12. So, lots of work to be done on the part of OO.org.
>>The installation was terdious and it spelt my country wrong Jamaica is not spelt (Jamaika), that was really embarassing. <<
Especially when you are complaining about spelling, and you have spelled two things wrong in that sentence alone “terdious” instead of tedious and “spelt instead of spelled.
Other than that it was a fairly good troll.
<<I just don’t get Writer its too diluted and lacking, the spreadsheet does not work like Excel in anyway especially when it comes to calculating formulas, I have to do them manually. So, there is a lot to be done, and I’m interested in seeing how version 2 pans out. I have Office 2000 on that same computer and it does everything I like perfectly. <<
Most people would consider OO.o Writer on par with Office 97/2000. What “features” were lacking? I’ve yet to find any thing significant, save a grammar check.
I can’t comment on excel / calc as I do not use them all to often, but in general I have found them to be fairly similar.
>> the worst application has to be the Presentation Graphics program, it is just plain unusable.<<
Really? Did you REALLY try? While there is a short learning curve, I’ve found it to be mostly feature complete.
I have to agree here. I used OO.org for about a month, then I finally broke down and purchased a copy of MS Office 2k3. OO.org is certainly impressive for a free application, but MS Office it ain’t. I think like Linux, OO.org gets a bad rap because of some of the vocal minority who swears up and down that it is a feature-for-feature superior alternative to MS Office, and therefore people go into it with high expectations and are often let down. A better approach would be to advertise it like this: “Hey, it’s not as good as MS Office, but it has all the features that most people want, so give it a try.” That, IMHO, gives people a much better idea of what to expect.
I plan to try it again when version 2 goes gold – we’ll see how much it has improved.
OpenOffice.org is already at version 1.1.4 – in a few weeks version 2.0 will be out. OOO 1.0 in *ancient*, IMhO.
It would be better if you downloaded and tried OO.org 1.1.4 or 2.0 again.
“I just don’t get Writer its too diluted and lacking…”
What OOo Writer got and Word hasn’t is word auto-completion. It is one of the many reasons I switched.
No OO.O is not MS-Office, thats why I like it and use it. It is multiplatform (nice to be able to use it on other platforms than MS-Windows), requires less than 150MB (MS-Office is the prototype of bloatware) – it takes only a few minutes to install, supports import/export of other document-formats than its native formats (MS-Office is only compatible with MS-formats, even older versions produce compatability problems) and the native format an open XML formats (MS-Office uses a closed MS-variant for XML) – and 80% of the users of productivity packages around the globe only uses about 20% of the functionality of the modern productivity package – OO.O is more than enough.
OO.O is great – even though I still would prefer Smartsuite :o)
“spelt” is the correct spelling of the past/past-partical tense of the verb “spell” in the King’s English. “spelled” is the incorrect spelling that is only used in American-corrupted English.
See, e.g. http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=76424&dict=CALD
“past-partical” should be “past participal”
Well, I also agree that OOo is not as complete as usable as MS Office by a wide margin, but there are some things I like better. In Writer, you can create styles for Pages and Frames, for example. This is just really logical and I wish Word had that. (But Word 2003 now has Table styles, which OOo doesn’t. Also, the concept of “Sections” is different in OOo, I prefer Word’s.) Long document handling is also better, and creating Tables of contents (with hyperlinks) is also better, though complex and confusing at first.
Base in OOo 2.0 is a welcome sight, but it will be years before it approximates the versatility of Access. The biggest disappointment is creating Reports – it looks like major changes would have to be made to have the capability to approximate Access’s reports. That “Reports” wizard is just pathetic.
Winner ?! Most people don’t use 20% of MS Office features and they will be well served with OpenOffice 1.x and even more with OpenOffice.org 2.0.
The price of M$ Office is abusive. In my country I can mount a decent PC with the same amount of money of M$ Office Professional !
In my work we use OpneOffice installed on linux servers to let people use it on their (X based) thin-clients. We use Pentium 1xx with 16 or 32MB RAM boxes as thin-clients. If we used M$ Office on Windows Servers, it would be necessary to buy TS-CAL and M$ Office licenses for every client ! It is very expensive !
I am a power user and do my presentations with latex-beamer and I write long documents with LaTeX. However I use OpenOffice.org on linux to do little and medium documents without any problem.
> “past-partical” should be “past participal”
Nope. It should be “past participle”.
OO.o like 9/10 F/OSS apps has one god damn awful UI.
Works good, good enough for any average user, free – but there’s no way I could move to it until they sort out a UI on par with Firefox, the toolbars in OO.o do my nut, I cannot stand groked non-standard UI.
Over 2 years ago, I worked over 6 months with OO and I remember I was quite impressed by the way OO Calc could be used in text documents. I mean: I could cut and paste a complete set of cells to my text document, while still being able to do the calculations based on the formulas in the write document. That was something I couldn’t do in MS Office 2000 if I remember correctly. I general liked the program, probably because I only use 25% of the application (like most people, btw).
I switched to Mac and found out that OO wasn’t way as good as the Linux and Windows version. Too bad, so for a short time I was back with MS Office for Mac (which is a great product, must admit that … much better than Office for Windows), but nowadays Pages is my texeditor, OO my spreadsheet (the few times I need one) and I use Keynote 2 for presentations. Looking forward to OO for Mac (also tried neoofficeJ but haven’t had much fun with that either).
Do miss clippy though
To bring this thread back on topic – I started using StarOffice during version 5.2 about 6 years ago. It was rough. But when OO.o 1.0 came out, it was really a big improvement (bye bye docked windows!) At home, I don’t use pirated software so OO.o was the logical choice.
Well, I started using OO.o build 680 as soon as stable builds were more common. Let me tell you, the last few months, the 2.0 betas have just been incredible. They are stable as a rock and just fantastic. They look beautiful. I’ve actually installed it in my friend’s company on all the desktops, and they all love it.
If you’ve had a bad experience, give it another shot when 2.0 comes out. It’s a huge improvement.
If your budget is limited to “free”, then by all means try out OO.org. But otherwise, MS Office is just far more mature and usable.
In my opinion, Word Perfect is still the best word processor out there! Many secretaries where I work, still use a pirated copy of Word Perfect to do labels since MS Word does NOT do a good job with that out of the box. After having said that, additional good Open Office templates would help close the gap for non-technical people. Especially labels.
BTW NeoOfficeJ has improved a lot with the latest beta patch 9, for you Mac OS X people out there!
>>Well, I started using OO.o build 680 as soon as stable builds were more common. Let me tell you, the last few months, the 2.0 betas have just been incredible. They are stable as a rock and just fantastic. They look beautiful. I’ve actually installed it in my friend’s company on all the desktops, and they all love it.
If you’ve had a bad experience, give it another shot when 2.0 comes out. It’s a huge improvement.<<
I have to agree. I’ve been using 1.9 builds for some time now (~6 months) – and they are rock solid stable. Even Base is pretty stable for a new feature, and it gets better every time.
Heck, I would even reccomend using it now over 1.x since the file formats are set in stone now. It’s just that good.
>>If your budget is limited to “free”, then by all means try out OO.org. But otherwise, MS Office is just far more mature and usable.<<
StarDivision Staroffice / OpenOffice.org / Sun StarOffice has been around for quite a long time and is very mature and very usable.
If you want a bloat of features that you don’t need, and to use up a lot of your HDD hard drive space, then go ahead and by all means use MS Office.
I spent a frustrating day trying to figure out how to install and use LaTeX on Windows (or am I supposed to use MikTeX? or LyX?) for some math stuff I was writing up. Whatever I downloaded, it always seemed that I needed to find and download something else. I have MS Word but my cheapo OEM-installed edition didn’t come with the equation editor ActiveX control.
Then I discovered the functionality in OpenOffice. Easy to use, worked great, and the PDF document export option is a nice touch. Thanks, guys!
I’ve been running OpenOffice for about seven or eight months, almost exclusively for the last four.
Feature-wise (aside from the lack of a M$ Access-like database) it is comparable to M$ Office – even superior in some ways. The GUI in 1.x is a bit immature, you need to dig through menus or dialogs to get to some of the features, but it is very powerful indeed.
HOWEVER
I reported one I ran into (I will keep it brief – if you want the full report check out the OOo bug tracker): I had a spreadsheet which M$ Excel can open in under ten seconds but OOo took 43 to 45 minutes to open – and it wasn’t a large or complex spreadsheet, just a moderate-sized one. A member of the OOo team responded and stated that they’re focused on adding features rather than fixing bugs.
Now: this is not a Linux vs. Windows performance issue. I’ve since configured wine and installed Office 2000 to run on my Linux environment. M$ Excel, much to my surprise, actually opens the file FASTER on Linux than it did on Windows!
I have another spreadsheet which opens even FASTER in M$ Excel (three seconds) but OOo takes over two HOURS to open.
What the heck? Gee, let’s keep adding more parts to a leaking ship! If you keep developing on top of a broken architecture, you’re setting yourself up for a MAJOR headache down the road when you finally decide to deal with it.
OOo has some SERIOUS performance issues. Query the bug tracker for the OOo project, and you will find many, MANY reports of serious file I/O issues. Developers on the OOo team invariably bump the severity down, and state that they’re focusing on adding features, not fixing bugs.
They (the OOo team) are shortsighted and need to reconsider their philosophy. Granted, designing new features is more exciting than fixing bugs. I looked into fixing it myself – very briefly – and immediately quit when I discovered that their file I/O code is not centralized into one class, but intermingled throughout the project. No freaking wonder they are not interested in fixing it, because it’s a lousy architecture. I believe they should have spent their time on making the project more modular and organize related features into reusable classes for the 2.0 release, but no, they had to spend their time making the application more pretty and adding more features.
Hey guys: clean up OOo now, before it becomes an impossible task.
I write everything using my text editor (ee) which weighs 147 kb, wraps at 72, formats paragraphs, save everything as .txt, i open .doc files with Antiword, and use Gnumeric.
My text editor/word processor opens in a jiffy.
As a student, I have been using OOo since 2003. I must agree that it has all the features required by me till date. Most of the assignments required me to be submitted in PDF. OOo’s PDF export did trick for me. OOo has all the basic formatting I need.
Even for submitting printed reports, I have used PDF exporter so that I could print my documents on University printers.
I have also used calc for my research purposes. I have always found it adequate. As for Impress, I have not used it much.
I personally feel that OOo has all the basic features required by student like me. The best feature is that it runs on FreeBSD and Linux :-).
I am really looking forward for 2.0 version. Beta releases have been pretty impressive.
If you want a bloat of features that you don’t need, and to use up a lot of your HDD hard drive space, then go ahead and by all means use MS Office.
Perhaps you’ve never heard of MS Office Custom install, where you pick and choose which features you want. It even lets you not load the feature until the first use. Not surprising you FOSS guys don’t know this. Try dusting off your wallets and buying a copy of MS Office before you bash it…
Actually, I find the equator editor in OOo severly lacking and slow, perhaps you had a bad first expirience with LaTeX, but once you’ve learnt it is much easier to use than any word processor.
You are right, it’s not as good as MS-Office. It is better.
It actually do what I tell it to do and doesn’t try to guess my intentions (that MS-Office often fails at).
The PDF and Flash creation feature is very useful.
The autocompleation of words as I type is great.
The bibliographpy database function would be very useful to people writing academic papers and such.
As opposed to in MS-Office Images tend to end up where I want them even in long documents. And they tend to stay in the right places even if I edit the document.
It have a documented file format that esily can be used for integration with other applications.
Perhaps you’ve never heard of MS Office Custom install, where you pick and choose which features you want. It even lets you not load the feature until the first use. Not surprising you FOSS guys don’t know this. Try dusting off your wallets and buying a copy of MS Office before you bash it…
This is an extremely irritating feature. If you don’t have the CD handy you are stuck. Even if you try to install everything, it asks for the CD now and again. This usually happen when lesat want it.
[Office Custom install]
This is an extremely irritating feature. If you don’t have the CD handy you are stuck. Even if you try to install everything, it asks for the CD now and again. This usually happen when lesat want it.
My exact thoughts. It falls in the category of things I have to deal with when using Word. Good thing it is so easy to install OOo.
>>Perhaps you’ve never heard of MS Office Custom install, where you pick and choose which features you want. It even lets you not load the feature until the first use. Not surprising you FOSS guys don’t know this. Try dusting off your wallets and buying a copy of MS Office before you bash it…<<
.msi deploys of Office via Group Policy Objects using .mst? Yeah I’ve heard of it somewhere…let me see…oh yeah I teach it. Doesn’t take away enough of the bloaty goodness. And with the MSOCache (on by default) taking up LOTS of HDD space, it is still, well, bloated – even bloatier than 2000 or XP
MSDN Universal clean enough dust off my wallet for you? I’ve got it, I run it. I even *gasp* love Outlook. I love InfoPath. But for me, the rest of the apps are done just as well, if not better by OO.o or other FLOSS Software.
Maybe Microsofties such as yourself should give these programs more than a dismissive glance.
For those having trouble with slow loading/translation of .xls files, try allocating more memory to OpenOffice via tools -> Options -> Memory.
It can make a huge difference.
“Back to competition, I still see Office dominating the market for the next 15 years, especially in the Enterprise, where collaboration has become so vital.”
Where the HECK did you pull that one from? Nobody can predict what’s going to happen next year, much less 15 years. That’s being really silly. No one likes a know-it-all.
“Another thing is, Microsoft has a lot of advantage, they can cut the price of Office, add more applications to main editions of the suite, Software Assurance.”
They can cut their prices to compete with free? Can’t OO.o add more applications too? I fail to see the advantages that Microsoft has here. You should have said that Microsoft has enough money to pay the decision makers off to force others to purchase MS Office. You would have been more believable then.
“Niche markets will also become dominant in the near future”
In 15 years and 4 months, or 15 years and 5 months? You’re not a Vulcan. Calculating odds of future outcomes is not that easy.
Please, anyone who has tried OO 1.x.x and not 2.x.x, go and try the latest 2.x.x build, it really is light years ahead of the 1.x.x versions (I agree they were crap).
I now use OO 2.x.x over MS Office 2003, simply because it does what I need perfectly and has a really handly export to PDF function
OO is going to be on everyone’s computer… like Acrobat Reader. It’s free it works fantastic, and we can easily share the results of our “work” with each other. That is today. The future for OO is awfully bright.
My wife is an anthropologist and has just completed a large project. She did all her research notes, and writing in Word and Excel. I assisted at times, and did all my work on her documents in NeoOfficeJ. Folks, we didn’t have a problem.
Cross platform (Windows and OS X) and cross program (Microsoft Word and NeoOffice/OpenOffice)… she met the deadline.
I was really pleased, and for her, truly the wow factor.
We ran a pilot testing on my job using 1.0 and was a terrible disaster, but to my surprise 1.1.1-4 were doing increasingly well on each new release, over a couple of years we have been setting about 10-15 users with OO and they do not miss Ms Office at all, two of them are running the betas of v2 now and it looks like we won’t be buying any more Ms Office licences any time soon.
Our case may not be she same of everybody, our users require word/excel functionality mainly and we were standarized on Office2k.
My only complain about OO is that it still takes a lot of time to load, but that also has been improved lately.
OO v1.1.x/v2 may not be a 1:1 replica of MS Office, but within a couple of years, many people will not have any reason to buy MS Office.
Have a beta installed on an athlon 1500 with 1.3 gigs of ram and 2 x 120 gb hdd so it is a really good machine. Even with the preload feature OOo 2.x.x is still slow to load. That is my only gripe. But I really dig the way it looks. Integrated into Xp. Nice job overall.
Hi folks!
First some introduction: I’m using StarDivision products since 1995 and I’m quite familiar with OpenOffice. I used some other office suites like Lotus SmartSuite or Microsoft Office. A few weeks ago I finished my thesis without any problems (technically ones, *g*) in OOo Writer. In the university I have to use Microsoft Office and I have to say it is a complete desaster.
The people who like office seem to use only one or two programs in the suite. But the whole office system is highly inconsistent, e.g. the color management. 1) Excel can handle 256 colors that can be customized. You can import them from other excel sheets. 2) In word you can select nearly every color directly. 3) Powerpoint tries to complete the master page concept with 8 (or so) colors that can be customized. If you change that color you change it in the whole document. But you have other colors you can choose. BUT WHY THAT? OpenOffice: One color palette as default. Own colors can be added (or other color palettes can be opened). It is used in every program!
Other thing: Copy and paste. Why the hell wants Excel pressing ENTER after I did CTRL-C? I don’t know. If I want to COPY cell contents I can drag the little cross and fill other cells. If I want to make a list (1 … 5) in cells I have to press CTRL. WHY? CTRL and mouse actions are used to copy things everywhere in Windows! Inconsistent.
Next: Printing dialogs are extremely different in every program. In word you can save space and print more than one page on one sheet of paper. In Powerpoint you can print Handouts there and Visio? Completely different.
One funny thing is that if you use more complex functions you get to see some dialogs that were made for Word 6.0. They are completely different from today’s “Design guides” from Microsoft. Flashy funky graphics design stop (that is visible if you start newer MS Offices for the first time) if you use the functions 90% of the people don’t use all the day. Welcome back to Windows 3.1-Design.
This inconsistency is the problem that the people stick with their program because they just don’t know how to use the aquired knowledge in other programs. So some people will writer their letters in Excel.
On the other hand the programs just don’t work. The implementation of “keep header of table on every page” is a mess. It shows the header on every page but, hey, I don’t want a header if there is no space left for content. And why do I have to sort my text with on of the table functions (A-Z)? Why do I adjust page margins in menu file (we have a format menu…)
Short… Friends of mine talked about their thesis in Word: “Not more than one chapter in one file. Don’t create your index automatically. Don’t…” PS: I’ve helped about three people to convert their crippled thesises to StarOffice. Then you can concentrate on the content, not the program. It’s highly consistent.
At last MS Office is EXPENSIVE. There is a long way to go to make it USABLE and RELIABLE!
One (of more *g*) things left: Tell your mother to write a text document. Of couse she has to click on the blue “W” (???) or to select new “Word Document” (???). Yes, you write Word-Documents, not text.
Every time I want to give MS Office a try I am highly disappointed. Really.
Bye,
Christoph
I have to say that Open Office (at least in this thread) seems to be getting the same sort of attention as Linux do. Overhyped crap. The fact is that no matter how much I like Open Office or rather how much I’d like Open Office to be successful it is not playing in the same league as MSO. Actually it’s hard to say they’re even competing. It’s more like OOo compete with MS Works.
There are a whole bunch of things which makes OOo not competitive, and most have their own reasons. The thing is, the example of “Most only write a few texts every now and then and don’t care about anything else” is a typical MS Works customer. It seems Open Office is aiming for that type of competition.
Let’s start naming a few things where MS Office (2k3) is just amazing in comparison to OOo.
1. Outlook. There is not yet to date something even remotely similar in the Open Office suite. Not as tightly integrated, not with the same functionality and flexibility. Ximian is even light years away from Outlook 2k3. For instance, Live Queries or the customizable adressbook are 2 great things (Which many use).
2. Powerpoint vs Impress. This is a presentation software, made to do presentations. Presentations often consists of charts and is an issue of design in order to make it attractive. Now Impress lacks charts and those charts it supports simply has VERY few options. In terms of design it can’t remotely compete with MSO.
3. Word processing.
Open Office Writer just look awful!!! This might sound odd and non important to technical users, but to many of us who want things to look good this is a no brainer. When you open Word in 2k3 and then you open Open Office next to it, you have this design from the 80’s which look just pathetic to be honest. I’m not sure what is wrong with Open Office but design is hardly something where time is spent…
This is just to name a few issues. Don’t get me wrong, I do hope that OOo will be competitive one day, but as long as all zealots keep talking about “just typing an essay” and really aim for MS Works or Wordpad or whatever, OOo will not be successful. STart looking at some of the great plugins for MSO and get inspiration, Powerplugs come to mind quite quickly here. In the meanwhile, cut the zealotry and start realizing that talking is not walking….
I have to say that Open Office (at least in this thread) seems to be getting the same sort of attention as Linux do. Overhyped crap. The fact is that no matter how much I like Open Office or rather how much I’d like Open Office to be successful it is not playing in the same league as MSO. Actually it’s hard to say they’re even competing. It’s more like OOo compete with MS Works.
I think you make the common mistake of comparing the feature set of MS-Office to that of OOo rather than comparing the needs of the user to what features OOo offers.
True, MS-Office can do a lot of things that OOo can’t
but OOo also can do a lot of useful things that is not possible in MS-Office.
This means that if you are looking for an exact replacement for MS-Office you will be somewhat disappointed. On the other hand, if you are looking for a good office suit then OOo has a lot ot give.
There are a whole bunch of things which makes OOo not competitive, and most have their own reasons. The thing is, the example of “Most only write a few texts every now and then and don’t care about anything else” is a typical MS Works customer. It seems Open Office is aiming for that type of competition.
Let’s start naming a few things where MS Office (2k3) is just amazing in comparison to OOo.
1. Outlook. There is not yet to date something even remotely similar in the Open Office suite. Not as tightly integrated, not with the same functionality and flexibility. Ximian is even light years away from Outlook 2k3. For instance, Live Queries or the customizable adressbook are 2 great things (Which many use).
As you are talking about Ximian, you evidently have tried it on Linux. If you try kontact from the KDE suite I think you find a very feature complete and functional PIM application. Especially if you run it against a capable imap server like cyrus, and have ldap backing. It is very good at sharing tasks, calendar events, mail, postit notes among your co-workers.
2. Powerpoint vs Impress. This is a presentation software, made to do presentations. Presentations often consists of charts and is an issue of design in order to make it attractive. Now Impress lacks charts and those charts it supports simply has VERY few options. In terms of design it can’t remotely compete with MSO.
The chart abilities of MSO sucks as well, so you will probably have to import your charts from elsewhere regardless of what program you are using.
3. Word processing.
Open Office Writer just look awful!!! This might sound odd and non important to technical users, but to many of us who want things to look good this is a no brainer. When you open Word in 2k3 and then you open Open Office next to it, you have this design from the 80’s which look just pathetic to be honest. I’m not sure what is wrong with Open Office but design is hardly something where time is spent…
Actually I prefer OOo and use it even if MSO is available. Why? OOo does what I tell it to do it doesn’t try to guess my intentions. The new OOo 2.0 should use nativie look and feel so it will not look more or less pathetic than any other application.
Perhaps you’ve never heard of MS Office Custom install, where you pick and choose which features you want. It even lets you not load the feature until the first use. Not surprising you FOSS guys don’t know this. Try dusting off your wallets and buying a copy of MS Office before you bash it…
This is an extremely irritating feature. If you don’t have the CD handy you are stuck. Even if you try to install everything, it asks for the CD now and again. This usually happen when lesat want it.
When you install Office if you right click in the window where you choose which applications you want installed you have an option on the menu to run from installed location. This makes it so it will never ask you to insert the CD. Why it doesn’t do this by default I don’t know, but you can stop the behavior you speak of.
You are right, it’s not as good as MS-Office. It is better.
It actually do what I tell it to do and doesn’t try to guess my intentions (that MS-Office often fails at).
Well, MS Office has some more advanced features taht many businesses need, and a level of integration with OE, etc. that OO.o doesn’t/can’t.
But…I do agree that for actual document creation OO.o is much easier to use. With certian docs in Word, something as simple as getting a uniform indent becomes difficult, because Word tries to guess your intentions, rather than simply indenting…
I have used Star Office since v5.1 (1999), but did not like it until v6 when the UI at last became bearable. Now on v7, but will probably switch to OOo v2.
What I do miss from MS Office / Word is the autoformat feature, when for whatever reason one has to do a major rework of a document. It is there in SO / OOo but does not work nearly as well. It is absent from other MS Word lookalikes e.g. Ability Office, 620 Office, Abiword.
Well, MS Office has some more advanced features taht many businesses need, and a level of integration with OE, etc. that OO.o doesn’t/can’t.
It all depends on what you are integrating with. Having a well documented XML based file format in combination with the possibility to specify your own XSLT transformations can be very useful when interacting with other applications programatically.
Not to mention that OOo files being zipped xml files takes much less diskspace, something that can be important if you have to store things on portable media, or send it over the net.
Yes it does, but it works, and that is more important.
I have recently edited a 160 pages document, with lots of embedded illustrations, lots of footnotes, header, footer, index, bibliography etc… you name it, not a single problem.
Do that with Word. I recently edited a 30 pages word document where the word processor suddenly started to do weird mistakes in the header footer linking, you had to reformat the document to the printer, every time the index and contents were renewed the whole document lost parts of its formatting etc…
I am not talking about the numerous problems once documents become bigger, I am talking about a 30 pages document here.
Who cares how good the UI of Word looks as long as the program is close to being unusable I even prefer TeX!
Sorry, I’ll take MS Word 2000 or Abiword over the minute it takes to start up OO2.0.
Sorry, I’ll take MS Word 2000 or Abiword over the minute it takes to start up OO2.0.
First of all, OOo2.0 is beta code so you could expect that it still have some debug stuff compliled in and thus being slower than the final version.
Second, what kind of hardware are you using? It takes less than 5 seconds to cold start swriter on my old 500MHz 500MB RAM, Pentium III laptop. Subsequent starts are almost instant. Perhaps you should check your hardware if you experience that kind of performance. Are you sure you are free of spyware, viruses and other malware?
Sorry, I’ll take MS Word 2000 or Abiword over the minute it takes to start up OO2.0.
I’ve got a P4 2.4, 512 megs of RAM…a decent machine, but not a supercomputer. I have no quickstart, etc. enabled and it takes 7 seconds to start up.
I’m using Linux, though.
Haha *G* .. OpenOffice opens faster or at least as fast as MS-Office 2002. It doesn’t take a minute to open OOo. Not at all. More like 5 seconds. It’s faster than MSOffice but slower than AbiWord (it’s fast – I like that).
Most companies doesn’t need most of the functionality in MSoffice or openoffice or wordperfect. At the best they’ll use approx. 10% and ordinary users like 1% … and that’s true even for perfectoffice6 (which is quite old).
Most office-suites are bloated with functionality. Besides that, OpenOffice 1.1.x looks good on linux as well as on Windows2K … pretty much like a native app.
The same goes for OOo 2 – I’m using that too, just to test it. It looks even better than 1.1.x – but is a bit slower. But not much slower though
Ooo 2 is not out yet. You mean beta version. Just to clarify to avoid confusion among readers.
He talks about the internationalization, but it even can not deal with Chinese Italic and Bold running Linux.
The patch is there since 1.0 (a nice guy “firefly” contributes them), but in 2.0 beta it still does not work.
Will we see OpenOffice 2.0 running under OS X anytime soon?
I mean, NATIVE OS X, not using X-Window.
Until then, Page, Keynote or even the very good MS-Office:Mac will have to do the work.
Seriously, MS-Office is world diffrent between Windows and Mac. Lot better on Mac.
I’ve got a P4 2.4, 512 megs of RAM…a decent machine, but not a supercomputer. I have no quickstart, etc. enabled and it takes 7 seconds to start up.
Interesting, it seams that you use much faster processors than me, but you still get about the same startup time. Could it be that the startup speed is related to disk activity rather than processor speed.
I’m using a P3 and 256 mb ram. I have never ever seen OO open in 5 seconds and you are the only person I’ve known to ever make that claim, congrats
This is an extremely irritating feature. If you don’t have the CD handy you are stuck. Even if you try to install everything, it asks for the CD now and again. This usually happen when lesat want it.
You’ll have to give me a specific example. I just don’t see that.
.msi deploys of Office via Group Policy Objects using .mst? Yeah I’ve heard of it somewhere…let me see…oh yeah I teach it. Doesn’t take away enough of the bloaty goodness.
No, it was even more obvious than that. When you install MS Office and choose Custom Install, you can choose which components you want to install. The granularity is pretty good. You can drill down and choose whether you want the feature installed completely, whether you want to install on first use, or whether you want to run from the CD. So, assuming you choose install on first use, you aren’t going to incur bloat unless, as you’d expect, you actually use that particular feature. But since disk space is cheap and most people don’t want to be bothered to dig for the install CD, most people just install everything at once. There’s the source of your bloat. Not the products, themselves.
Will we see OpenOffice 2.0 running under OS X anytime soon?
I mean, NATIVE OS X, not using X-Window.
Probably not. X may be ugly — but it’s cross-platform.
When you install Office if you right click in the window where you choose which applications you want installed you have an option on the menu to run from installed location. This makes it so it will never ask you to insert the CD. Why it doesn’t do this by default I don’t know, but you can stop the behavior you speak of.
Well, in fact, you do need to have the CD inserted — because that is the install location. I suppose the reason that that isn’t default is that MS probably doesn’t want to conflict with other apps that might want to simultaneously use the CD drive. Too much hassle, particularly if you use a CD-based reference tool (ie. MS Bookshelf, Encarta, etc) while you work on documents.
Are live queries equivalent to virtual folders?
Ok MS has been in the business how long? OOo has been around how long? That the free software can make M$ product users sit up and take notice is a great compliment in itself. Keep up the great work.
I was amazed at how fast this version loaded up a word doc; 2 – 3 seconds, it felt like. Maybe 4 at the outside.
With quickloader, it was virtually indistinguishable from MSO. Loaded that doc like it was pre-rendered (same as MSO does). One thing I’d like to see is a pre-loader option/service that DOESN’T put an icon in the startup tray, or at least gives the option to turn it off (in windows).
One of the reasons why I kill the quickstarter, is I SEE the damned thing, and can’t help but think “that’s using memory/cpu cycles” and kill it.
Same as removing the MSO components from startup. Just something that must be done.
That being said, this new version (1.979) Seems a lot better than previous versions.
Good Job OO.o. Now if I can just get all the SUN logos out of there. 🙂 No fan of them, despite the good thing they did with OO.o.
Win2K/xp2400 PC133 SDRAM/512mb MSI 6330 mobo with 2 HD’s: 1/UDMA 3 other UDMA 4. Old hardware.
I tried using Open Office as an excel replacement in a lab for technicians. While everything worked great for a while, graphing 2 Y-axis data on 1 X-axis data is a collosal pain in the ass in OpenOffice 1.1.2, yet relatively easy (though not intuitive) in MS Office 2000.
Has this been improved at all in OpenOffice 2.0?
This is my main gripe with the OOo suite, that and OOo’s MS Word formatting (tabs and bullets get screwed up a lot–makes resume writing impossible.)
What program is going to be used for MS Access in OpenOffice? When will it be available?
In my opinion, Word Perfect is still the best word processor out there! Many secretaries where I work, still use a pirated copy of Word Perfect to do labels since MS Word does NOT do a good job with that out of the box. After having said that, additional good Open Office templates would help close the gap for non-technical people. Especially labels.
I agree. There’s no features in any other word processor that can match the Reveal Codes (for seeing *exactly* how the formatting is applied to your document) and Make It Fit (for specifying an exact number of pages to fit the document into).
You also cannot match WordPerfect’s document format compatibility. It’s forward and backward compatible. Version 7 through 12 all use the same document format. You can create a document in 12 and still open it, edit it, save it in 7. Try that with MS Office.
QuattroPro is also a much nicer spreadsheet app than Excel. Especially if you have to do anything with large sheets (Excel had a horrible limit to the number of columns and rows until recently – QP has always had the same limit: until you run out of RAM).
Haven’t used the other apps in the suite too much, so don’t know how they compare.
WordPerfect is also a lot cheaper than Office ($200 for the latest version of the suite). Not as cheap as OO.org, but definitely better than Office.
Often enough, I get a user who can’t open some .doc that word made and have to use OOo to open it instead and they didn’t even turn their computer off. Occasionally its a .rtf but recent versions of OOo never suffer this problem, I hope recent Microsoft products have also achieved this basic level of reliability. The latest versions of OOo work so well I do text substitutions on them instead of the .txt editor Kedit.
I have written some spreadsheet scripts in StarBASIC. They work well and were fairly easy to write despite skimpy documentation. But let me tell you, StarBASIC redefines slow. There is slow, bloody slow, mortally slow, and then there is StarBASIC. It is like GWBASIC-slow. I wrote a StarBASIC script which I would start, go to bed, and it would be finished when I got up. I rewrote this script in VBA (Excel) and it runs like super-greased-lightning. What used to take hours and hours to run now takes minutes. This kind of performance improvement frankly justifies the cost of Excel for me.
I tried using Open Office as an excel replacement in a lab for technicians. While everything worked great for a while, graphing 2 Y-axis data on 1 X-axis data is a collosal pain in the ass in OpenOffice 1.1.2, yet relatively easy (though not intuitive) in MS Office 2000.
Has this been improved at all in OpenOffice 2.0?
I’m not really sure what you mean, You wan’t two Y axes for the same data? In that case I think you are out of luck, but on the other hand I have no idea on how to do that in Excel either. To me plotting of scientific data succs in both programs.
This is my main gripe with the OOo suite, that and OOo’s MS Word formatting (tabs and bullets get screwed up a lot–makes resume writing impossible.)
Why don’t you export your resume as pdf, as long as you stay in OOo bullets are OK regardless of what version of OOo you use. However this is one of the areas that is supposed to have improved in 2.0, but I havn’t tested it yet.
What program is going to be used for MS Access in OpenOffice? When will it be available?
There is a program called Base that will fill the function of Access in 2.0, but from what I understand it will not be able to open old Access file or save in access format.
In the beta Base is buggy beyond belief but don’t let you be fooled by that. It is based on HSQL that is a very fast free dabase written in java. So I would be very surprised if they don’t get it to work in the final release.
In its untouched version it supports both triggers and stored procedures. However I can’t see any signs that OOo will support this in the GUI.
Looking at the Base file format I suspect that databases with such features can be created programatically.
For more info on HSQL see:
http://hsqldb.sourceforge.net/
Haven’t used WordPerfect, but for sheer elegance, Lotus WordPro was far and away the best. Using palettes for all formatting, allowing for instant application of changes was a sheer delight. Approach, SmartSuite’s database, was a far more intuitive applciation than Access and required almost zero training.
I have been trying to convicne the Abi and GNOME programmers to take onboard some of the design principles behind Lotus and they are just beginning to take some interest now, so perhaps some others amongst you would like to lobby for this as well.
basically all I wanted to do was, for a range of x-axis data, plotted on the bottom of a chart,
I wanted Y1 data plotted on the left hand side, and Y2 data plotted on the right hand side.
I had 3 columns of data.
Fairly easy to do in excel, but can’t figure it out in OOo, tried posting on the forums, but no one seemed to know.
basically all I wanted to do was, for a range of x-axis data, plotted on the bottom of a chart,
I wanted Y1 data plotted on the left hand side, and Y2 data plotted on the right hand side.
I had 3 columns of data.
Fairly easy to do in excel, but can’t figure it out in OOo, tried posting on the forums, but no one seemed to know.
OK, You do it like this in OOo 2.0. Select all your three columns. Select “Chart…” from the “Insert” menu, then check “First column” as labels box, press next in the wizzard to select what type of diagram you want. Finnish the wizzard.