OpenOffice.org 1.1.1b was released not too long ago, so FlexBeta decided to take it for a spin and see how well it competed against MS Office 2003.
An MS Office Alternative: OpenOffice.org 1.1.1b Reviewed
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
sort of OK review, even though there was some glaring screw ups… like MS Excel being the Office presentation program, hmmm not in any copy I have tried.
This feals like an anti OO.org mega super troll!
First the author said some good things about OO.org, just to tell the reader how much better MS Office is afterwards, thrue the whole review. The only good thing I belive he said about OO.org it’s a better buy for a normal family instead of spending 450 bucks at MS Office.
He constantly complained about bugs, but why did he review a beta release then?! He should have sent bugreports to the OO.org development team instead of writing a review!
Please don’t take me for a OO.org fan because I don’t even got it installed at my MacOS X computer, but MS Office X which is a great but little unstable product.
If you need only basic word processing stuff, then OOo Writer is OK and even excellent for the $0 price tag. MS Word format compatibility is not a major issue nowadays — it’s good enough for most uses.
But for more advanced work I find it lacking feature-wise:
– Tables are implemented poorly. Popup menu with table commands is a mess from usability point of view (I’ve heard that in 2.0 they will have Table item in the menu bar). You still cannot have a table that is several pages long — even in online layout mode! While trying to make a table with cell borders of different thicknesses I’ve found out that for some strange reason there are two kinds of borders: one inside of the cells and one between the cells. This is extremely inconvenient.
– Comments (or are they called notes in OOo?) are virtually useless. You cannot comment a range of text, the name of the reviewer is not saved in the comment automatically, comments are hard to see.
– StarBasic is largely undocumented. No, SDK is not a real documentation. Code from macro recorder is uncomprehensible. It does work, but you can hardly customize it, since it’s impossible to understand.
– Hotkey assigning possibilities are limited compared to Word. You have a fixed set of hotkey combinations. You cannot directly assign a key to a style — gotta record a macro for that.
Still, I see potential with this product.
Here we have yet another person whining about OpenOffice.org. Its a free friggin piece of software! if they want to have a moan, do a StarOffice 7 vs. Office 2003. Also, when actually REVIEWING, justify to the reader WHY people should pay $400 plus for Microsoft Office.
Don’t just come out with blanket statements, back them up with cold hard facts and draw a conclusion. If Office is better when you compare price vs. features vs. usability vs. productivity, then state that, using the facts.
Emotive clap-trap whining about things ISN’T a comparision, it is the equivilant of a soap box rant by a child not getting what they want or simply liking something because of the [company name] factor.
Its never going to have as many features as Office 2003. The question you should ask is “Does it have the features I need?” How many of those features in Office 2003 are even used? Its overkill for 95% of customers. Even Microsoft has said that OpenOffice.org 1.1 is comparable to Office 97. I’ve never heard anyone complain about lack of features in Office 97.
Actually there is another silent contender, EIOffice 2004 . This product incredibly powerfull, and seems very similar to MS Office. it is also a lesson to people who thinks java is not proper for desktop applications. Plus, it is cross platform. really check it out. it’s price is $99. i think OSNews ahould make a review about it.
http://www.evermoresw.com/weben/product/eio_overview.jsp
Well, i have installed both because the rest of the family prefers MS Office. Personally I use OOo and find it sufficent for most Home users – actually, it would fit most corporate users as well.
I am looking forward to OOo 2.0. BTW, when will it be released?
..and distributed in English libraries:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0%2C3605%2C1145674~*…
Since using Fedora, this was my first experience with Openoffice. This is a very good alternative to Msoffice and I use it daily now instead.
I’m not sure why it is giving you problems. I checked and the page looks the same for me in IE6, Mozilla 1.3 for Windows, Mozilla 1.6 for Linux, and Firefox 0.8.
I will say that the top of the page looks misproportioned in any browser, including IE6, if not viewed at, or near full-screen.
Is anybody getting sick of seeing all these reviews. And none of them seem to put a non-biased view towords any of the products.
I mean come on we all know that OpenOffice is out there and we definitally all know that MS Office is out there. If you can afford MS Office and you are on Windows you are most likely going to buy it, because no matter how good OpenOffice gets MS Office is always 3 steps ahead in most things. However if you are like me and can’t afford MS Office then you are going to go with OpenOffice, because you can’t beat the price.
That is all that you have to say, you don’t need in-depth biased reviews of the two products.
I would have to agree… I haven’t used Office for almost two years now but those I work with extensively collaborate on a lot of documents as well as use a lot of nifty and useful features that I’m quite certain aren’t in OpenOffice.
It’s not a must-have for me though, and same goes for my family so I don’t have to use MS Office at work and at home. I think there are quite a few out there like me… thankful we don’t have to shell out big bucks (er, I don’t really, I have a company provided CD sitting idly inside my drawer).
Thing is, my preferences match my situational needs at this point in time. OpenOffice is a great, and it’s what I use, but personal preferences aside, MS Office is just the best out there right now.
EIOffice 2004 looks nice, but it doesn’t seem to be MS Office compatible. This kills it.
Besides that:
Price $ 99 USD (12 month lease)
Does not look like cheap for a lease.
What? I just made a 3-page table the other day, in OOo 1.1. It was easy and looks great, it even repeated the column headings on each page.
Maybe you were trying an older version?
No such thing as an unbiased review. Your bias is that you can’t afford MS Office. Other people have other conditions. The best you can dot is hide your bias (I.e. Lie), or else be upfront with your bias and let the audience to decide.
OO.org uses 9 MB of RAM by defalut. Just change that to 32 or something higher and see how it flies. You can do that somewhere in the ‘options’ menu.
I think they are being too conservative on the RAM usage. May be they should change that to 32 by defalut, considering the number of people complaining about OO.org being slow.
Not really. Just try copy a web page that contain a cell greater than a single page and past it in Writer, for example.
In MS Office/Word Perfect that cell will be displayed at next page but in OO you will get a beep and it will not be displayed at next page.
This must be fixed.
BTW, I liked the look of EIOffice 2004. I will try it and write a review. 🙂
OpenOffice from a usability standpoint.
When a window starts to have more icons/toolbars/menus than Mozilla, I generally consider it too complex and non-intuitive. But still OO is the best productivity suite you can get for free (sadly, though).
The remaining question is — when will 1.1 run on Mac OS?
Last month I tried an unofficial build and fonts looked all mangled and it crashed after two minutes…
Shouldn’t a Unix/X11 app recompile and just work on Mac OS?
This is just a review of 1.1.1b, a bug fix release to 1.1. If you want to see the new features and abillities get the snapshot build of the OpenOffice development branch. Download it from.
http://download.openoffice.org/680/index.html
Its unstable (because its pre-alpha), but you can report errors if it crashes and there are some new features in there. Just dont use it on any important documents just yet. Make a backup of the ones that you do test. The best bit is that its extremely fast. Starts up in less than 2 seconds on my machine. So give it a try today. I am downloading the newly released m26 build right now!
9MB? You’re joking, right? If you’re under Windows, open Task Manager and see how much RAM its guzzling.
It’s easy to compare ooo to office and focus on things office does and openoffice doesn’t
It’s just as easy to compare office to ooo and show areas where office is lacking.
I hate prejudged “reviews”
He notes in the review that he tried to do this or tried to do that and the program froze. It is still a beta, is it not?
But even worse than that, he completely ignores the fact that OpenOffice includes flat-file database capabilities, which doesn’t require a database to be installed!
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/garryknight/linux/oodbase.html
I’m not a fan of OOo and not using m$ office so much, but this comment looks to me like a childish one:
“OpenOffice.org Writer does lack in looks when it is compared to MS Word. MS Word features nicely shaped and colored icons. Writer’s icons are very plain and simple looking, and the whole look of Writer gives the impression of being weaker than its counterpart. But I guess you can’t ask too much when getting something for free.”
As colored buttons do much than simple/plain ones. It seems candy buttons do the job for m$ office
Thanks for the tip about the memory usage. It does seem a bit snappier now. I guess I should take a peek at some of the other options to see what I can tweak (in other words, break).
I was inspired by this review to go grab build 680 of the 2.0 codeline. Holy crap. It loaded in 1-2 seconds. I don’t notice much else (I’m sure that will change). No native widget framework yet or anything. The speed, though, wow. It’s is staggering. Try it out. Surprisely stable for pre-pre-pre-alpha, too.
It’s not that fair to compare the profession version of office including Access and Outlook and a heftier price tag to OO.org. The standard version of Office compares better to what is offered with OO.org and has about half the price tag. Open Office doesn’t have an Access application, so shouldn’t be compared with the version of MS office that does. This sort of review is misleading at best.
“Maybe you were trying an older version? ”
No, it’s 1.1.0.
Sorry, I formulated it completely wrong. It’s about multi-page cells, not tables. Here’s how you can see what I mean:
1) Create an empty doc.
2) Add a table with 1 row and 2 cols.
3) Copy and paste a sufficiently large (say, a page worth) chunk of text into one of the cells.
4) Observe that the table doesn’t stretch to the following page. Instead you can do some funny things with the cursor (for example, put it in the gap between the pages).
This is old and known bug.
Are the OO icons made by Ximian going to be included in the main release? I agree with the reviewer that the icons do look pretty bland.
I have been using AbiWord for reading .doc files for some time with great success. Yes my use is limited, but as other posters have noted, don’t get hung up on a product meeting/exceeding all Office2003 features. As long as it does what you need it to do, that should be fine. Office needs to add superfluous crap with each release to get people to upgrade. I would rather not see open source software engage in such pointless coding.
This review wasn’t for people like you and me. Its for people who don’t know how to download software or compare two similar products, one costing ~$500 the other being free.
For most people there is no comparison.
Let’s see, for free I get a Microsoft Office compatible product as well as the source code to make that product fit my business operations. Or I can pay $500 per seat for each copy of the close-source MS Office product as well as each and every upgrade.
For the home user I can understanding purchasing quality software that fits their needs. But any corporation who chooses to purchase MS Office better be in the business of selling MS Word documents or Excel spreadsheets. Nothing else could possibly justify the costs.
Open Office’s soffice.exe takes about 43 MB RAM in my computer when its just sitting in system tray. I set this option because then it makes it start faster on the expense of giving 43 MB RAM to it permanently. I can afford that because my Laptop has 582 MB RAM, but not everyone would like it eating 43MB RAM all the time.
I have never seen MS Word taking so much memory, so i think its too slow. Also even with this option it takes about 7-10 seconds to open a new empty document. If i ever kill it and start it, boy it takes upto 20 seconds many time to just show the splash screen.
One nice thing it does though, that when u are typing, it automatically tends to complete words based on the frequency of same word you are typing and this is very neat, i love this feature.
For day to day use, i have installed MS Word Viewer for viewing documents, its fast, FREE and efficient. If i need to manipulate documents, then i use OOo though i try as much as i can, to not use OOo because its slowwwwwwww…
“It’s not that fair to compare the profession version of office including Access and Outlook and a heftier price tag to OO.org. The standard version of Office compares better to what is offered with OO.org and has about half the price tag. Open Office doesn’t have an Access application, so shouldn’t be compared with the version of MS office that does. This sort of review is misleading at best.”
I see it pretty much the sameway you do. Additionally, most business customers are paying an upgrade price with corporate licensing.
If you really want to COMPARE version to version:
http://www.discount-software.ws/microsoft/office-2003-basic-oem.htm…
This is a link to Office 2003 Basic. 195.99 and more than enough for those who don’t require Access. Not an upgrade, this is a full version.
Any student, teacher, parent of a student etc. can purchase the Educational Version for little more than Star Office, or this EOffice thingy.
http://www.discount-software.ws/microsoft/office-2003-student-teach…
This is a link the the Student/Teacher Version for 169.00
Not an upgrade this is a full version.
Nearly nobody pays 500 bucks for a license to MS Office, but it’s sure a handy number to use for all of these comparisons.
Here are my only complaints about OO.o, but I am sure that all except for 1 of them will change.
1. The UI appears very dated, and looks like it is 1997 all over again. To me, it is not that big of a deal, but in this age where people expect it to look good, as well as perform good, this must change. A fist step has been taken, with the intigrtation of Windows XP theme support. The only thing that needs working on in this area is the icons. Icons that are appropriate for 2004/2005 are severly needed.
2. OO.o For Windows does not come in a single executable file such as MSI. I know that this seems like a minor request, but it kind of sucks having a 340 part install, when if just 1 of those compressed files goes bad, it is impossible to install OO.o. With an MSI file, the chances of it becoming corrupt are drasically reduced. I know that this is on the roadmap pan to 2.0, so no big deal here.
3. The JRE asked for during install is not included in the Windows version. This would be much better to have intigrated into the install procedure, because not everyone has the Sun or IBM JRE installed, and OO.o cannot make use of the MS JVM. This would be more convenient for new users to OpenOffice.org, as they would not need to download even more files. On a dialup connection, downloading anymore than nessesary is a huge pain in the ass.
4. No intigrated mail client like Outlook is with Microsoft Office. Granted, the Mozilla email application will fill this void, and is very good at it, but an intigrates solution is needed both for UI consistancy, and a better user experience. Many people are not comfortable installing different applications, (such as corporations), if they do not know how they will interact with each other. An intigrated mail client would help solve this problem. It would also be better for the general aestetic value for the application(s) package(s). Intigration would almost assure that most of the UI would be common with the rest of the OpenOffice.org installation, and would ease the learning curve. If OO.o were to intigrate Mozilla Mail with a calender such as that found on the MozDev pages with OO.o, it would be a complete MSO replacement. This would also be benificial to dialup users, as they would need to download less to get the same equivilant package as they would if they currently downloaded OO.o, and Mozilla Mail.
I know that most of these complaints will be fixed, but I have doubts on item #4. Since the pre-1.0 days, I have wanted this feature, (along with propably many other people), but it has not yet been intigrated. It would greatly help the OO.o cause. And that would have to be my biggest complaint about this office suite. Granted, it is easy to work around by installing Mozilla, but that makes if feel like an incomplete hackjob on my behalf. If I have learnt one thing from MS, it is that intigration is a very good solution to UI inconsitancies. If OO.O would fix these 4 things, I would convert over to it 100%.
I’ve heard people say that MS Office applications appear to load fast because Windows automatically pre-loads large parts of them to ram every time that Windows starts. But has anyone actually measured how much Windows uses ram before and after installing MS Office?
How’s the integration between the different apps in OO.o? Can I take a spreadsheet from Calc and embed it into a writer document, and vice versa? Also, are there any options for macros and GUI/forms? In Excel, I’ve got a form set up where you type in a few options, and it connects to an Oracle database and pulls down data into a spreadsheet using ADO .. I’m not even sure I could do that with Crossover (?)
Also, AFAIK, the Professional version of MS Office 2K3 also comes with Frontpage, Onenote and Infopath – I think the Onenote program is rather nifty
And, AFAIK, there’s nothing like it in the open source world, cept for maybe Knotes.
And for people who say we shouldn’t compare OO.o with MS Office, maybe you could then convince some of the rabid zealots to quit screaming about OpenOffice everytime anything MS Office is mentioned – that’s why we comapare the two, because they’re always yelling how good of an alternative OO.o is.
But, it seem slike OO.o is ‘good enough if you don’t need all those features’, just like most of the rest of open source desktop software.
“Nearly nobody pays 500 bucks for a license to MS Office, but it’s sure a handy number to use for all of these comparisons. ”
Glad that someone pointed this out. Heck, at my school, I can get the full version of Office 2003 Pro for $50!Anyways, the $500 per copy (you can install it on a secondary computer as well) is great for many who want yet another reason to bash MS.
MSOFFICE.EXE on my Windows XP SP2 v2055 is using 2,836KB of RAM. Not bad, considering that I have 1 GB (1048576KB)of RAM. So MSO startup is using 2836/1048576 of my RAM, or 0.2704620361328125% of my available system capacity.
“Also, AFAIK, the Professional version of MS Office 2K3 also comes with Frontpage, Onenote and Infopath – I think the Onenote program is rather nifty
And, AFAIK, there’s nothing like it in the open source world, cept for maybe Knotes.”
MS Office 2K3 does not come with Frontpage, but it does come with Publisher. Also embedding with the different apps in OO.o seems to work fairly well. I have put spreadsheets into presentations, as well as into writer documents. I have no clue on the macros and such as I never have a need to use them.
What is OneNote? Is it a seperate application, or just part of all the other Office apps? Curious as I have not seen it, and I have the full MS Office 2K3 installed, and by that I mean with all features installed to hard disk.
Regards
From page 1:
“Because Writer’s GUI looks lighter in color and shape, one would think that it would respond faster than the heavier looking MS Word.”
Color has nothing to do with speed. You can’t repaint your car and expect it to go faster; it’s the same thing with applications.
The version of Office 2k3 I have at work came on 5 CDs … first CD Office (Word, Excel, Outlook, Access, InfoPath), the other three CDS (IRIC) were Frontpage, Publisher, and Onenote.
As for what Onenote is, I don’t know if I have the words to properly explain it, but check it out on http://www.microsoft.com/office
No, that’s not accurate. You probably have no documents open or something. With a one page document open (only text), Word is taking close to 20 MB on my system.
That 2 MB memory footprint is probably the Office Launcher.
I would have to agree with a previous statment about coping table webpages. I tried to do this the other day and it wouldn’t go past one page. It didn’t beep or anything it just didn’t get the conversion over well. I personaly say that if they can fix that I would never have a need for word again.
I do alot of word processing but many of the features in Office03 are features I don’t even use. For most things OOo does just fine for the 0$ price tag.
I do wonder though what Star Office offers over OOo considering OOo is SO’s test bed? Or is it just a support thing
“I do wonder though what Star Office offers over OOo considering OOo is SO’s test bed? Or is it just a support thing”
Support, then that database thing with some strange name I can’t remember, and also fonts. Nothing substantial, from my point of view.
Evermore Integrated Office sounds a lot like GOBE Productive, which I have used both with BeOS and Windows98. The integration is nice, but like Productive, you can’t share files because of the proprietary file format. Also the files are huge because they contain everything. I think it would be better to have a “project” file for the integrated documents, but individual txt, jpg, xl etc files for the components of the project. Then you could share the component files with collaborators who don’t have the integrated suite. Also, you wouldn’t be locked into the proprietary format except for the finished project, which could be printed to paper or pdf or even xml.
Let’s see, for free I get a Microsoft Office compatible product as well as the source code to make that product fit my business operations. Or I can pay $500 per seat for each copy of the close-source MS Office product as well as each and every upgrade.
ok….for simple stuff OO is compatible…..for complex stuff…..GET REAL. OO is slow, doesn’t have nearly the feature of Office…and yes a lot of people use then in a business environment.
If your cheap or poor go with OO…..if your smart and have some cash buy Office..
And the people complaining about the usless feature in Office, you have to remember how many different types of users use Office…..granted some people will not use 90% of the stuff….but then again many will.
Hi
“If your cheap or poor go with OO…..if your smart and have some cash buy Office.. ”
I dont need the features of office and oo is sufficient for me.i love the word completion feature. who the hell are you to call me cheap eh?
Jess
“If you’re poor go with OO.o. If you have some cash go with OO.o and in addition donate money to OO.o”
That’s the truth. It is OUR WAY!!11
Seriously. There’s a lot of options. The above model is based on solely choice. “Pay afterwards if you’re satisfied”. The reasoning the person who said..
“If your cheap or poor go with OO…..if your smart and have some cash buy Office.. ”
..is just that. Myopic.
I, for one, would rather support a Free project. Because i know my money will be used to make that Free project better from which a lot people benefit, if they wish.
..is just that. Myopic.
no actually I said it because most of what I do in Office cannot be done in OO….plus OO is very slow and has lots of bugs when opening complex .doc files.
“That 2 MB memory footprint is probably the Office Launcher.”
You would be correct. That is what MSOFFICE.EXE is, the loader that starts with the machine. WINWORD.EXE (Microsoft Word), takes 17500KB to run just a blank document. Yes, it is somewhat memory demanding if you only had a limited amount of RAM.
For home users, OpenOffice is probably perfectly sufficient. Of course, I would be a little worried about creating a Resume with it, saving it in Word Format and emailing it to a recruiter. I mean it would probably look just like it did in OpenOffice when you created it, but it might look all screwed up in Word.
Anyway, the big advantage for Microsoft Office for business customers is the developer tools from Microsoft. Take Outlook for example; coupled with Exchange you have a complete groupware/database package. We developed a Contact/Workflow management system with Outlook/IE on the front-end, and Exchange on the backend and it just flat out kicks ass compared to any similar canned app out there. With Outlook you have VBScript behind Custom Forms, VBA for simple Client Side Tasks, Folder Home Pages, and COM addins, on the server side we have Event Sinks written in VB. It’s easy to do compared to writing everything from scratch and there are tons of books out there for reference. The time saved alone and the productivity increases more than pay for the licensing fees. I mean you can easily Automate just about anything you want in MS Office. I will also say that if you properly configure and secure Outlook, viruses are pretty much a non-issue. We have not had an email virus in at least 3 years.
I might add that while OpenOffice is free, you can get an OEM Copy of Microsoft Basic Edition (Word, Outlook, and Excel) for an extra $150 when bundled with a new computer, or for that matter when you buy a new motherboard or HD. There are lots of reasons to complain about Microsoft and its business practices, but where it kills the competition is with its developer tools and development support / documentation for just about every Application that has their name on it.
guys really open office is so slow and eats up so much RAM and with its limited features, i don’t think its useful for any efficient work.
Yeah its ok for home, but for business i don’t think there is anything better than MS Office in the market right now. Office is one of the best product from Microsoft and i lub it.
I only dislike Microsoft for their development tools. They are designed like their OS itself. To explain myself better, a programmer is not a novice user, a programmer needs control, ability to do what he wants. A programmer needs to type a lot and perform lots of text manipulation file handling and MICROSOFT DOESN’T EVEN HAVE A GOOD SHELL.
It has no utilities to help programmers. It doesn’t even have a good makefile infrastructure.
I hate when i have to program on widnows
( it suck
“- Tables are implemented poorly. Popup menu with table commands is a mess from usability point of view (I’ve heard that in 2.0 they will have Table item in the menu bar). You still cannot have a table that is several pages long — even in online layout mode! While trying to make a table with cell borders of different thicknesses I’ve found out that for some strange reason there are two kinds of borders: one inside of the cells and one between the cells. This is extremely inconvenient.”
What version are you running. I have no problem having tables span severa pages, in OOo1.1. It even does the headings right. And you do have menubar options for tables.
“- StarBasic is largely undocumented. No, SDK is not a real documentation. Code from macro recorder is uncomprehensible. It does work, but you can hardly customize it, since it’s impossible to understand.”
Sun have some quite extensive pdf documents for how to use the SDK. Look at documentation for StarOffice it has the same basic dialect. After reading them you will have little problem modyfying the generated code.
Even though there is no database other than a flat file database included in OOo, there is still a quite advanced GUI for handling database access and to create queries. As there are plenty of free databases that are better than MS-Acces that you can combine with OpenOffice I don’t think it was that wrong to compare with MS-Office Professional.
“Of course, I would be a little worried about creating a Resume with it, saving it in Word Format and emailing it to a recruiter.”
send them PDF
OO.o has “save as PDF” feature.
Having some experiece from OOo.
One very handy feature is the ability directly save documents as PDF!
Just! a click of an icon.
Another feature is the seamless interoperavity with html and text document.
The reason not to use OOo would be the not so complete macro language compatibility with MSO.
Still OOo even keeps and saves MSO macros unchanged but you can’t run them on OOo.
My experience is if you don’t use VBA you don’t need MSO.
With OOo you can open even files in not so common formats if you happen to get such by email or from some of your old diskettes. And it can’t run macro virus.
Of course there is no free lunch. There are some little differencies in menus etc. that you have to get used to. Thats the price you pay for what you get. That you have to validate by your self. Think!
“If your cheap or poor go with OO…..if your smart and have some cash buy Office.. ”
… and if you’re smart & poor use LaTeX 🙂
I only dislike Microsoft for their development tools. They are designed like their OS itself. To explain myself better, a programmer is not a novice user, a programmer needs control, ability to do what he wants. A programmer needs to type a lot and perform lots of text manipulation file handling and MICROSOFT DOESN’T EVEN HAVE A GOOD SHELL.
I would disgree….you really think most VB developers are not novice programmers? lol….thats funny.