I have been using Open Office for about 8 months now for my word processing needs. In a nutshell I am satisfied. Last week the version 2.0 was released, I downloaded it as soon as it was made available, on first view, even though the key functionality in version 2.0 Beta remains largely intact, it promises dozens, possibly hundreds, of changes.
I would rather call this an opinion and not a review. The author gives his own vision about things in the beta. (example: the ‘bad’ switch from page tabs to page panes in Impress).
Furthermore, I have been using the beta for quite some time now and I am very positive about it as a regular home user. For a more ‘corporate user’-view, I can’t tell much.
I would rather call this an opinion and not a review.
A review is an opinional matter
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I dont know…
I expect anything called a “review” to be more of a “this is what i see, this is what it does, this is what it includes”, very objective non-judgemental sort of thing. If he called it a “personal review” or a “experience” or something that was a bit more related to a users view then I wouldnt have any problems with it…
Parts of this article were “a review” but parts of it reeked of “java hate” and “imitation is bad” stuff. But the biggest thing that screamed is that it isnt really much of a review If I was going to title it for OSJournal I would probably title it “short review of some new features of OO.org” and cut the personal statements out of it. But since OSnews just links to the story and cannot edit it then I would think OSnews would title the thread something similar like
“short personal review of some new features of OO.org”…
then again, i could just shut up
oh and OO2 is too much of a hog and a clone for me… and I also do not care for java…
…my first impression was that OO2 is much slower than OO1. Unacceptably slow in my opinion. I assume that the beta has quite a few debugging flags enabled and we will see a performance improvement in the final release. The maybe that is just a Fedora issue.
On Windows, it seems faster than the previous release. The fact that Calc now supports over 65000 rows like in MS Excel finally makes it a viable replacement for MS Office for me.
As the reviewer points out, Open Office is trying to become a home for Microsoft Office refugees. Unfortunately, it’s doing this by imitating some of the deep flaws of Microsoft Word.
For example, it has hidden characters. This concept was introduced by Word*Star in CP/M days to get round the problems of having only 32K of memory for everything: application, operating system, and document. Unfortunately, it meant that editing one bit of text might cause random changes to formatting elsewhere in the document. This was acceptable in CP/M days, because it meant you could actually edit a document properly, but now, in these days of 1G+ of RAM, it’s an exercise in deep stupidity. The fact that in a serious Word Processing product, deleting a chunk of text causes random text formatting changes elsewhere, especially on different pages, is stark raving design incompetence.
But that’s not the worst error in the design of Word which has been copied by Open Office. Open Office steals Words greatest mistake, the flaw that means it is completely useless for people interested in words (not typesetting), that first order bodge to prevent clever document utilisation, that appalling design error, the section. Sections give no benefit to the user, but prevent them from getting things done. That a Word Processor with sections has come to dominate the market is clear evidence of monopoly.
I personally wonder if the decision of the Open Office team to copy these fundemantal mistakes in the design of Word leaves them open for a legal suite from Microsoft. There is no way any good software design would use these features, thus they have introduced them to imitate Microsoft’s product.
The consequence is that Open Office 1, & Open Office 2, are both as unusable as Word for serious work involving words. I’ll happily use it for the short stuff, but I’m forced to stick with the propriety and aging Word Perfect for serious work.
well i didnt think it was THAT bad….
Havent tried WP in quite a while… is it ALL THAT!?!
Instead of trying to ape every quirk of MS Office these talented developers should concentrate on turning OpenOffice into a full fledged webplication.
That way a company can install it on a central server and have 10,000 employees create documents and spreadsheets on it just with a web browser. This is one move that will blow a huge hole in Microsoft’s monopoly on office software and formats.
In fact this should be the direction of every major open source GUI based application. The web is one entity that Microsoft has not been able to abuse or kill and as long as we keep following Microsoft they will keep calling the shots.
Instead of trying to ape every quirk of MS Office these talented developers should concentrate on turning OpenOffice into a full fledged webplication.
NX X11 compression technology, from nomachine.com and http://developer.berlios.de/projects/freenx/, makes delivering standard X apps over the internet relatively trivial without requiring that they be re-engineered to use an html or java gui.
I agree with what Harris wrote above — WordPerfect is so much more convenient to use than Word, and he describes many of the frustrations I have with Word as well. I avoid it whenever possible.
That said, any business that deals with documents from the outside world simply has to be compatible with Word. There is no option — this is a requirement. Complain all you want, point out Word’s weaknesses and better options, but any practical word processor these days simply must read Word flawlessly.
Some simple tests that I have done still show that the 2.0 beta is still not good enough to read complex Word documents. Too bad, actually…
DrJ
Opinion vs. review? does it really matter?
Its good to read about important OSS projects like Open Office.
I use OOo 1.1.4 & it is a satisfactory office suite. However, it does seem quite slow to open & just feels….slow.
Abiword, another open source word processor is rather quicker.
Hard to imagine OOo 2.0 is slower than 1.1.4!
The only way to find out is to give it a go I suppose!
i thought OO1 was fine, need to tweak the memory settings a bit and kill off that splashscreen but besides that it takes a second to open but thats about it…..
i just implied that for a REVIEW it was shockingly short and limited in scope along with some bias in there….
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“Some simple tests that I have done still show that the 2.0 beta is still not good enough to read complex Word documents. Too bad, actually…”
could you show us these tests and so forth? I have found OO to be spot on in most circumstances and acceptable in all circumstances. My wife uses spreadsheets for scheduling and coverage as well as other things and I create them in openoffice and she uses them at work in msoffice and they work just fine and are exact of course they arent overly complex or anything… But I would love to see the tests or some samples…
Some files in which I’m interested are the boilerplate that goes into National Institutes of Health grant proposals. They are available only as Word files or fillable PDF forms. You can compare OO.o with the PDFs — on Word 2000 they are almost identical. Here’s a link:
http://grants1.nih.gov/grants/funding/phs398/phs398.html
You can choose the face page to keep the transfer size down. While the rendering is not horrible, it is not right either. Please note that you need to have the right fonts installed in OO.o for the comparison to work at all. You should also try filling the forms out with OO.o — it is not particularly convenient.
I also have Excel spreadsheets that come from real-time data acquisition from lab experiments where the graphics do not come over properly in OO.o. Sorry, I can’t share those.
I’ve not tried the reverse: creating in OO.o and moving to Office. I’m more interested in import.
DrJ
This review is “beta.” It’s really short for a review.
In that spirit, here is my review: OOo2 brings welcome new features such as the database application, XForms, and better installers.
OOo could use more committed developers. You can see that in several areas, such as the MacOS X port (no Aqua) and the fact that OOo 2 was originally due April/May.
I read on a blog that the OOo developers are still working on performance issues, so it’s still early to do benchmarks.
Meanwhile, the Abiword 2.3 development series has introduced grammar checking! Hopefully OOo will follow.
My wife is perfectly happy with the Linux desktop which we now have at home, except for the fact that so many people insist on using MS Word closed format problematic documents. I’d love to see the world write their documents in TeX and convert to PDF or PS at the time of printing but that’s not going to happen for a few years yet.
…my first impression was that OO2 is much slower than OO1. Unacceptably slow in my opinion. I assume that the beta has quite a few debugging flags enabled and we will see a performance improvement in the final release. The maybe that is just a Fedora issue.
Perhaps it has something to do with the implementation of gcj in OO2 for Fedora Core 4. I don’t know why OO2 is slow on your system as I have the opposite experience.
Last week the version 2.0 was released, I downloaded it as soon as it was made available, on first view, even though the key functionality in version 2.0 Beta remains largely intact, it promises dozens, possibly hundreds, of changes.
I think the beta version of OOo2.0 came out in February. The build number at the time was around 1.9.79 or 1.9.80. I’m now running 1.9.112 (hard to find, but available). There’ve been real changes in performance, especially, since the beta. I wish the reviewer had tried a more current build.
You find a better revieew here:
http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/06/14/2137222
There is absolutely no need to pay for MS-Office anymore, I actually prefer OOo over MS-Office after typing a while with the autocompleate feature on you really don’t want to go back to MS-Office. The compatibility with MS-Office file formats are even better than before, and it was not bad in 1.1, far from it.
> Microsoft Word is better, we can all move on now.
Not just dumb comment… Unthoughtful at best.
Ever had problem reading other people’s ‘MS’ word document with ‘MS’ word?
All those document portability has been nightmare, one even says, it’s like that for sake, so people buy their new products.
But OpenOffice tends to keep portability a better function, be it on Windows, Mac, Linux, you can make document, let anyone else using the same application read it anywhere. Sounds really basic, but it hasn’t been done so in the past by MS.
Java is no longer required for OOo2 (dated yesterday):
http://www.bytebot.net/blog/archives/2005/06/28/wind-me-up-let-me-g…
Here is notes about ongoing performance improvements (dated yesterday):
http://www.gnome.org/~michael/activity.html#2005-06-28
If you like to stay up to date on OOo development, this is a good place to go:
http://ooo.ximian.com/planet/
I’ve been using OOo2 for the last six months (and before that, WordStar, WordPerfect 4.x-5.x, Word 6.x-2003) and while it is quite good and could almost be considered a replacement for Word, it has two serious flaws: revisions and annotations (notes). For those working with text files in an enterprise environment where multiple users need to review and annotate files, those two features are critical. Unfortunately they are poorly implemented in OOo2 compared to MS Word. Revisions basically works except that navigation/accept-reject is clumsy. Without getting into all the specific bugs, annotations (notes) is HORRIBLY implemented compared to Word. Bugs have been filed with the OOo team but they don’t seem to be going anywhere. Instead, the focus seems to be on handling of graphics within OOo2 Writer (as if anyone who is going to do any serious graphical layout will use a word-processor? MS Word, and OOo2 have got to be the worst programs for graphical layout. Stick to word processing and leave the page layout to Adobe, please!) Until the focus changes to WORD PROCESSING and not all these unrelated frills, I’m afraid OOo2 Writer will not live up to its potential. (OOo2 Calc, on the other hand, is very good.)