R. Kirk McPike wrote a comparison between Microsoft’s Word and OpenOffice.org Writer based on his experience writing a term paper. It’s an attempt to consider the end usability of both products, and how OpenOffice.org’s challenge should be responded to by Microsoft.
MS Word Vs OOo Writer: A Word of Difference
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Nice analysis, but would be better with two more parameters :
– the author has never used Lotus Wordpro, which is the word processor I prefer, because of its UI. It may be good to compare it with OpenOffice Writer and Word, as it may be good to add some of its best features to OOW…
– it’s easy to say that nothing will bring the user from word to OpenOffice… when you don’t consider the price. I prefer using a free software, even if its feature are a little more limitated, than a very expensive one… Or does it mean that the author is using a free version of word ? So where does it come from ? …
Did you read the article? OpenOffice.org is even less capable than Word. So what do you suggest as an alternative? Everyone should use LaTex? There is no superior product that is usable by the masses.
I enjoyed the article. It seemed to me a fair and balanced comparison. I pretty much feel the same way about the two, though not quite so extensively as he does. Been messing with StarOffice, and I like it alot. You cannot beat free though, especially when the other choice is several hundred dollars for something only a bit more functional.
I wanted to use OOo for a very long time but in the end I allways get back to MSO for a couple of reasons…
1. Design of documents (don’t know what OOo missed here, but both Impress and Writer has some serious trouble with formatting docs)
2. Lack of functionality… please right click on a doc in PPT and one from Impress… then you wouldn’t call OOo functionaly any more, you’d call it crippled
3. HORRIBLE interface compared to MSO… for instance OOo offers cool options with what format you want your doc in, the landscape/portrait stuff…. but no one ever finds it so your bound to use portrait.
I hope OOo would adress these issues and hopefully I can make a switch some day, but right now it’s just not possible due to lack of features..
“Well known german computer magazine CT tested wordprocessors and found Word to be still incapable of handling long documents, like a thesis etc.”
Word gave me a fatal error regarding footnotes when I was finishing up my 80 page MSc thesis. My document contained lots of formulas and figures, but this is bad news for Word. My document was unrecoverable other than to save it as a plain text file to remove all meta-data.
I’ve been using LaTeX ever since: plain text files and no meta-data nonsense in my document. Rock solid formulas, figures, labeling, referencing, indexing, toc or what have you. It is *impossible* to have an unstable LaTeX document
Any serious writing should be done in LaTeX, period.
Yes, page formatting options are so hard to find in OOo, in Format -> Page, just bellow Character and Paragraph.
Where is it again in Word? in File (like File your page?), or is it Edit (Edit your page settings?). Talk about logic…
> Any serious writing should be done in LaTeX, period.
Agreed. At least any writing which requires decent figure/table layouting.
OO-Writer handles large documents with a lot of pictures etc. much better than MS Word.MSW becomes absolutely unstable after 60-70 pages with a lot of tables and pictures.
M.
People should start reading *colophons* of other books. You can learn from that, at least, I do. For example:
* The Art of Computer Programming: typeset using TeX (of course)
* The “Dragon” Book (about compilers, Aho, Sethi, Ullman): typeset using troff, pic, make and other typical Unix utilities.
* Mastering Regular Expressions (o’reilly – Friedl): typeset using a mixture of postscript and author-specific markup. Pics where created/enhanced with Freehand.
* Programming Microsoft .NET (Prosise): Word – Framemaker or Pagemaker? – SGML.
* Manuals for the OpenWatcom compiler: I think a modified gtroff markup. See http://www.openwatcom.org.
* FreeBSD handbook: XML – docbook?
* An Introduction to Support Vector Machines: TeX
Maybe it’s better to just hand over your texts to someone who has experience in typesetting instead of trying to do it yourself.
Available from http://www.abisource.com in popular Linux and Microsoft flavours.
Open Source and Word compatible!
How do you use LaTex? Is there a guide for it online or does it come with one with the program.
Is it easy to create Table of Contents/Figures/Tables with Latex. I find it difficult to do with OO.org and MSWord.
I have a document a teacher gave me once with all this set up and I use it as a template for new documents. Any guides for this on the web? Can anyone help me out.
Available from http://www.abisource.com in popular Linux and Microsoft flavours.
I think you miss the point here… there is a bunch of semiadequate software for wordprocessing… howabout 602 software for instance…. the problem is that NONE is as evolved as MS Office is…
Besides, for simple stuff you can use Wordpad aye…
I’ve used Word, OOo, TeX/LaTeX and FrameMaker (a couple of years each) for technical documentation.
For writing a thesis, TeX was the only available choise at the time, and it was a good choice. Easy cross referencing, easy math and acceptable figure handling. Otherwise, FrameMaker is the clear winner when it comes to productivity, though typing math with the mouse is a pain (which goes for Word as well). To bad it’s too pricey for home use and there is no Linux version anyway. OOo allows fast math typing but gets in the way much to often.
When it comes to the quality of the page and font layout, there is no alternative to TeX.
/jarek
Someone really needs to fix the word count UI. It’s bug 4568.
If I was a manager at Sun, I’d assign someone to fix that tomorrow. “I don’t care if it’s a crappy fix, I just want word count moved to a prominent menu position and I want something done by the end of the day. We’ll patch it up later.”
I would also assign someone to look for geek speek and remove it. This is the kind of thing that is easy to fix but easier to let slide. Probably there isn’t enough of this being reported in issuezilla. It would be a month long project for someone.
There is also the issue of the general appearance. As a Sun manager I would know how long creating new icon set is and how expensive it is. If I didn’t know I would have someone make me some estimates. Probably the look should be updated once a year. It depends on how much work it is.
The rest of the issues from the article are just a matter of dealing with Bugzilla. The OpenOffice.org project needs dedicated developers. Most weekend hackers don’t have time to understand the source so they can’t get involved.
I would contact the governments of China, Japan, S Korea, Israel, India and Russia. All of these countries need special handling for their alphabets. I would ask them to contribute financially to the OOo project. There are some governments that would prefer to hire their own programmers and contribute code to the OOo project. I’d try figure out ways that the OOo could really take advantage of these dedicated coders and integrate them into the team.
Also I would decree that July 17 was Blue Cheese Day while I’m at it.
I don’t think that everyone will ever prefer OOo to Word. It’s a vi vs emacs thing for many people. At the same, I think all the issues from the article will be addressed given time.
There are lots of online tutorials etc. Check out http://www.tug.org/begin.html , especially “The not so Short Introduction to LaTeX2e”, which is pretty decent.
A lot of people say about Word not being able to cope with long documents. I have to say that, whilst I’m not a fan of MS (their software or their business practices), I wrote my PhD thesis using Word (due to EndNote compatibility). At 239 pages with plenty of diagrams, pictures and scans, Word XP was pretty well behaved.
Dave
There is also the LyX graphical frontend to LaTex:
http://www.lyx.org
St.
Latex does a lot of formatting ‘automatically’, like tables of contents, placing figures and captions, references and bibilographies. It saves hours of work once you understand it, and almost always looks better than a Word doc (IMHO).
But ‘automatically’ means you have to know the mark-up commands eg. egin{figure} insertgraphics etc.
If you use Linux, I’d recommend trying Kile, which can let you choose the commands from menus while you’re learning.
Thanks.
Working as a technical author for the last five years, I have to say that for documentation projects Word can not be taken seriously. We sometimes had to use it as some of our clients demanded it and it was usually hell getting everything right. We spent more time in getting the layout sorted then the actual writing, especially with larger projects (ok – slight exaggeration). OOo we did not use unfortunately. But Word from my experience is al right for letters, maybe small reports and that’s about it. For any serious work use Framemaker+SGML, LaTex or Epic.
We spent more time in getting the layout sorted then the actual writing, especially with larger projects (ok – slight exaggeration).
Happens to me too.
http://kile.sourceforge.net/images/screenshots/kile_screen.png
Is that screenshot the way it looks when typing up a document? Or can you make it look the way it will be printed while you type?
“OpenOffice.org is even less capable than Word. So what do you suggest as an alternative?”
I suggest using a plain word processor with no graphics for the _word processing_ and a proper layout/design program such as Quark XPress or Pagestream or InDesign for the layout. If you place an item at a particular coordinate on a particular page in a layout program, it stays there. Not so with “graphical word processors”.
In commercial work, writing and layout are not done by the same person. These are two different tasks and it is foolish to mix them up.
The problem with TeX/LaTex in my opinion is that every document comes out looking the same – there seem to be no design options. OK for a thesis, not for publication.
LaTeX work this way, you write your LaTeX document, compile it with the macrocompiler (I prefer pdflatex as it will output a pdf file) – If you want a WYSIWYG-type interface to LaTeX you can use lyx(http://www.lyx.org) or fork up the money for “scientific word” (http://www.sciword.demon.co.uk).
It is strange that somebody who claims to be a “writer” should make a basic blunder in English in his first paragraph. (“Obtuse” instead of “obscure”.)
I will grant you that Word is almost incapable of sensibly handling anything over 100 pages, especially if it has lots of equations, tables of contents, and various crossreferences. LaTeX is wonderful for equations and crossreferences. However, don’t think that LaTeX is always the answer. I have used TeX/LaTeX for typesetting some tech documents and have concluded that:
1. Very complex tables can only be done using low-level TeX commands (think line noise)
2. Color handling is braindead
3. As far as I can tell, there is no good way to draw complex commutative diagrams (diagonal labeled arrows?)
4. TeX macro syntax is the closest mankind has ever come to a write-only language. If you ever need to create or modify a macro file or a stylesheet, good luck.
5. On the subject of macros, everything is macros. There are no functions or namespaces. As a result, you get name conflicts and things will break for no obvious reason if you are using enough styles, and packages, and environments simultaneously.
6. If a language (LaTeX) were designed properly, it would not feature the concept of a fragile command.
Basically, my feeling is that Word is fine for short letters, LaTeX is fine for comp sci graduate theses, but both are limited outside their areas of concentration.
Word XP keeps fucking up when I embed a chart and delete the original file, takes ages to display embedded pictures, fucks up all the autoshape drawings I did in Word 2000… I have to use it because they won’t install anything else at college. Well by the end of the month I will be done (phew)!
I have yet to see a good word processor (read: one that doesn’t try to be a page layout program). LocoScript was good for my 386 days. I just want to logically divide up the text so that I can link to that bit of text in that file in a seperate program for page design, or automatically generate a printable document from a stylesheet. TeX and the like are far too complicated and messy for my liking.
The Internet is bloody crawling today!
From the authors point of view it is a good article. Word is a good “user’s” WP.
But one point missed is cost vs performance. I run my own business and can’t afford a billion licenses for the software I use. I have used Word since it’s early days and I still think it is one of M$ best products. But now I am on GNY/Linux using OpenOffice. I only do occasional worprocessing. My partner uses it occasionaly. We both write and maintain cv’s, write various documents occasionally for our work, etc. I havn’t looked at recent versions of WOrd but one function I am finding handy is the export to PDF option.
Having a combination of GNU/Linux and OpenOffice (and the rest) has saved me a lot of money and lisense worries.
If my business flourishes then I shall give what I can back to the opensource community as I do feel guilty for using all this great software at no cost.
If my business flourishes then I shall give what I can back to the opensource community as I do feel guilty for using all this great software at no cost.
Same here, I’ll only give restriction free money though so OOo which runs under LGPL isn’t my choice, in fact there is no BSD /MIT / PD licensed office suite to give money too… I guess I’ll just pour it to OBSD or OBOS
Hey, LaTeX dudes: This is about word processors, not typesetting engines.
But I’ve seen that often enough before. Whenever some alternative to Microsoft product is criticized in any way, the critic either should have used Y instead of X, has no idea what he’s talking about, or should have tried harder.
Who of you “free” advocates has considered going to openoffice.org and fixing one of the shortcomings the author has addressed?
@ Anonymous:
> I’ll only give restriction free money though so OOo
> which runs under LGPL isn’t my choice, in fact there
> is no BSD / MIT / PD licensed office suite to give
> money to…
The only restriction-free license is PD. All others restrict what you can do with the code.
A fine and interesting article. And, Don Cox, “obtuse” fits perfectly and does make sense.
I have a problem with all word processors and what is called documents processors (LyX). I believe that most users, like me, knows what they want when they begin to type something. They may not know exactly what they’ll write, or how they want it to look, but they know they are typing a thesis, an essay, a novel, an article, a letter, whatever. They know the words they just typed are a title, or a quote, or a new paragraph.
So there you are, typing some document. You have 2 choices: you can type all your document, then tell your application what are the titles, the quotes, etc, by selecting them and applying styles (that’s why I believe they invented multi-selections), or you can type the title and mark it as title (before or after the typing), and so on… Generally you’ll have to do this with your mouse.
This is stupid. Why don’t these application have a command mode? I’m not speaking of some command line (could be interesting for the most geeky of us), but a real command mode, à la VI or Emacs. The application should by default be in command mode and you’d pass a command, for example “T” to go into insert mode for a title, or “Q” for a quote, everything being automatically formatted as you type. You would be much more productive, no?
Just my opinion.
(Latest version)
This morning, I had a look at this thread and was about to say something positive about OOo, because I was typing like 12 pages with it yesterday evening and quite enjoyed it.
Not any more. I opened the document this very moment and it looks like a mess. This is a plain text document, nothing earth shattering in there. There are about 30-40 lines which I moved in one step with TAB. Today, all these TAB-ed in lines are completely messed up. If OOo can’t even handle this basic stuff properly on a document that is as easy as 1-2-3, then good-bye OOo.
“And, Don Cox, “obtuse” fits perfectly and does make sense.”
It doesn’t. An experience can’t be obtuse; only a person or an angle can be obtuse. It means blunt, slow-witted, or not good at understanding things.
Obscure means dark (as in “Camera obscura”), shadowy, or hard to understand. This applies to events or experiences, including computer interfaces.
Everything appears obscure to an obtuse person.
No, it’s not off-topic: we are talking about word processing. 😉
I think the word he was looking for was “abstruse.” Now can we get past this?
I think it’s a great article, and better informed than most articles that compare just features. I would’ve liked to see a comment about Word’s forced upgrade path and file incompatibility — that’s one area where OO.o shines. I use Linux so it’s basically OO.o or Textmaker for me, and I like OO.o better. But even if the Word interface is better (and I think in general, it is), I won’t go back to it because of its file format. Files go in but they don’t come out. So it’s OO.o for me.
Even so, kudos to this guy for being a good writer with a knack for the tech side of things, and taking the time to do a review this thorough. We’re better off because of it. Let’s hope WordPerfect for Linux gets put back on the production line and fixed up a bit. Their current “proof of concept” is not good enough, and the demand for WP Linux would be huge, I hope.
> I would contact the governments of China, Japan, S Korea,
> Israel, India and Russia. All of these countries need
> special handling for their alphabets.
I’ll be a little nitpicky here
Actually, there’s nothing really different between handling western european umlauts and handling cyrillic. And OOo doesn’t have any problems with that already, AFAIK.
We just changed our 600 users from MSWord do OOo Writer… with litlle training (3 half-work-days per user) and *ABSOLUTELY NO COMPLAINTS*. It just works.
People should start reading *colophons* of other books. You can learn from that, at least, I do. For example:
Going by what’s on my desk at the moment:
* Programming Windows with C# (MS Press – Petzold): prepared and galleyed using MS Word 2000. Composed by MS Press using PageMaker 6.52 for Windows. (over 1250 pages without the index, I would hope it was written as a number of doc files rather than one large file, note the use of PageMaker, though)
* Inside MS .Net IL Assembler (MS Press – Lidin): prepared and galleyed using MS Word. Composed by MS Press using FrameMaker+SGML for Windows. (again, Word to write the book, though this one’s much shorter at 450+ pages + index, then FrameMaker+SGML in this case to prepare it for print)
* Linux in a Nutshell (3rd edition; O’Reilly – Siever, Spainhour, Figgins, & Hekman): print version created by translating the SGML source into a set of gtroff macros using a filter developed at O’Reilly & Associates by Norman Walsh… The GNU groff text formatter version 1.09 was used to generate PostScript output.
Every MS Press book on my desk went from Word to one or another of Adobe’s products before hitting a printed page. The O’Reilly books vary by author, many being written in a markup language, but some being produced directly in one of Adobe’s products. O’Reilly’s pocket references (which I tend to keep around in almost equal numbers to the Nutshell books) don’t have colophons, unfortunately (at least not the ones I have here). Interestingly (at least to me), MS Press and O’Reilly account for the entire collection of books that sits in my cubicle. The MS books far outnumber the O’Reilly books, but most of the MS books haven’t been opened in quite some time (and should probably be retired to a bookshelf at home or storage since they’re Visual Studio 6 references largely replicating the information available online or on CD/DVD).
Maybe it’s better to just hand over your texts to someone who has experience in typesetting instead of trying to do it yourself.
This appears to be the case for all of these books. Still, I’d be more interested in what hoops Charles Petzold had to jump through to get his monster book written in Word 2000 than in the process required to format it for printing. After helping in the editing process for a book my aunt wrote, and helping her with things like preventing information loss (breaking the book up into multiple files by chapter or story) and getting the book into the format the publisher wanted, I lost any delusions I may have had that Word might actually be used in document publishing outside of the original writing process (and realized quite quickly that most writers would probably adapt to whatever was easiest to get into the publisher’s format).
Of course that large documents are not easy to be handled.
It is a “programming” fault though, not so much in coding but managing the opened documents. Some programs process the whole document at once, while it’s only needed to process what’s on screen.
But there’s a very simple and easy solution to that problem. Split the documents.
Make a new document for each chapter.
If your thesis is 140 pages big, and you have for example 7 chapters, then create 7 documents of roughly 20 pages each.
Comparing programs is something personal.
It has no meaning for me, except to see the view of another person about a particular program.
I use the tools I feel comfortable with and that can do the job I want to do. To write text I use a simple text editor like wordpad, or kwrite. For DTP, I use something like QuarkXPress. In my opinion, office wordprocessing packages want to combine both worlds in one, and fail to keep the productivity of seperate but dedicated programs.
What I want to say is, when you use a text editor, you’re busy with the text, the actual content. If you’re using a DTP program, you’re busy with the layout.
When you’re using Word or any other office word program, you’re doing both simultaniously, which is counter productive, well, at least for me.
@ cdh:
> Actually, there’s nothing really different between
> handling western european umlauts and handling cyrillic.
Yes there is.
ISO-Latin-1, and the Euro-sign-added ISO-Latin-15, have long been considered a “default” of some sort for 8-bit ASCII. Hey, AmigaOS handled ISO-Latin-1 fine from day one (since it was the “system” charset).
The other ISO-Latin permutations, let alone the asian / indian charsets, are more seldom, less well supported, and AFAIK sometimes require some special handling of keystrokes, too.
Obtuse : lacking of insight or discernment
functionality is rarely to never worth the hassle of an obtuse user experience.
functionality is rarely to never worth the hassle of a lacking of discernment user experience.
I don’t see any problem there. That said, English is my third language, so I’ll follow your advice. Thanks.
Here’s another one, from A New Kind Of Science by Stephen Wolfram (http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/page-1264-text):
“The original source for this book was created in FrameMaker, processed using an automated build system based on Mathematica, and output as PDF. (See also page 852.) The diagrams in the book were created using Mathematica, and the text for programs was automatically formatted by Mathematica, with both being imported as Encapsulated PostScript. Photographs were enhanced and processed using Photoshop and Mathematica. Index manipulation was done using Mathematica and IXgen.
The fonts in the book are Trump Mediaeval, Palatino, Univers 45 and Gill Sans, with additional elements in Mathematica, Mathematica-Sans, Optima, Meridien and Janson.
The book was printed on 50-pound Finch VHF paper on a sheet-fed press. It was imaged directly to plates at 2400 dpi, with halftones rendered using a 175-line screen with round dots angled at 45°. The binding was Smythe sewn.
Book data: 1280 pages; 583,313 words (main text: 227,580, notes: 283,751); 2,799,438 characters; 973 illustrations; 1350 notes; 796 Mathematica programs; 14,967 index entries.”
At the risk of getting involved in someone else’s flamewar – if the author meant the user was obtuse he was right, if he meant the experience was obtuse he was wrong. To put it another way:
the experience of an obtuse user = ok
a user’s obtuse experience = wrong
Now please stop it – it wasn’t very interesting in the first place.
At one point the article’s author brings up how dumb OOo is to request that a distance setting be in inches (or metric, I suppose) instead of points.
I know what points are. I even hand typeset my own college graduation invitations. I would never want any computer application asking me for a value in points.
Joe Average computer user has absolutely no clue as to what “points” are, mean, or how big they might be. They won’t listen to how Guttenberg and Ben Franklin defined points. Joe probably thinks Gates or Jobs dreamed up “points” rather than adapted the measurement from older technology.
Young users don’t know Pica from Elite. Older users never heard of points before they got a computer. Give the user a chance to use values they understand, or the UI, GUI, or whatever is flat User Unfriendly(tm).
{/rant}
You cannot beat free though, especially when the other choice is several hundred dollars for something only a bit more functional.
Wrong. Get MS Word (at least the XP version, all you need really) with MS Works 2004 – price $100, plus the other crap you get with it too
Hey, LaTeX dudes: This is about word processors, not typesetting engines.
But I’ve seen that often enough before. Whenever some alternative to Microsoft product is criticized in any way, the critic either should have used Y instead of X, has no idea what he’s talking about, or should have tried harder.
Who of you “free” advocates has considered going to openoffice.org and fixing one of the shortcomings the author has addressed?
We, the LaTeX dudes, are saying: Dump Word and save your hard earned money. Instead, use OO.org for smaller projects and use LaTeX for complicated stuff.
“Joe Average computer user has absolutely no clue as to what “points” are, mean, or how big they might be. ”
Surely practically every program specifies the size of type in points?
Most DTP programs allow a choice of units, but these programs are aimed primarily at graphic designers, who are familiar with points. There are a great many people around who have some design training – I would guess far more than have training in computer programming.
Yes, in a rational world everything would be in millimetres, but a whole mm is rather a big jump in size, so you would be dealing in tenths of millimetres, which is rather small. Points at 72 per inch are just a nice size of unit for typography.
Likewise feet are a good unit for designing walkways and stairs.
hmmm $100 v $0
nah – I will keep OO.o thank you very much. I do not need the other crap, and besides, if I buy MS Works, I am still not getting MS Word. I am getting a cut down version instead.
I am not an author, and I do not need to write loads of reports or anything. In fact, I could probably get by with Kword if I needed to.
I understand it would be a different matter if I was to be using a word processor all day every day, but then I would want the best that was on offer, and MS Word does not do it for me.
Bring back Lotus Smartsuite and let me use Wordpro thank you very much
My preferences for software that doesn’t require financial considerations is based on how often I use them.
If I was a dedicated publisher I would probably buy QuarkXPress or Pagemaker (or whatever they use these days) If I was a graphic designer I might buy a drawing program like Illustrator, Freehand, Corel Draw (or whatever they use these days photoshop?)
As it is I’m a programmer. The only software I use regularly is a web browser (Opera which I did buy), an email client (I can’t get IncrediMail for BSD so I use a free client), ICQ (not sure you can buy icq) and a Text editor (Vim, and I guess I could send a donation).
Would I buy MS Office, Adobe CS, Macromedia Studio, QuarkXPress and whatever other software I might one day need for my much delayed publishing career?
I think pirated software has eroded people’s understanding of the cost of software. The above setup would cost thousands. For those of us that don’t need it that often having a cheap alternative like OpenOffice is invaluable.
BTW for writing I use Abiword. It’s quite usable for writing letters and resumes and stuff. It’s much simpler that most other products, even for more complicated documents like assignments and documentation. Both Writer and Word contain too many uneccessary features that I certainly wouldn’t pay extra for. However I guess I can tolerate the lack of polish in the toolbars better than some.
I personally do not understand why people care so much about perfect layout and why they still want to write books essentially the same they they were written with a typewriter. Plain old HTML 3 is more suited for a thesis or a manual or a research article.
Some of the most essential tools in word processors are collaboration tools. The author completely ignored that. OOo notes and reviewing tools are extremely crude compared to what is available in Word.
The author’s comment about inches instead of points isn’t even very relevant, for two reasons.
First, Writer has a preference for this; you can choose your preferred units between millimeter, centimer, inch, pica, point.
Second, you can always use another unit than the one currently in use by specifyin it: on my system, 0,5″ results in 1,27 cm and 12pt result in 0,42 cm (in my locale, commas are used as decimal sign).
Can you insert a live spreadsheet into either program? GoBeProductive 3.0 still has way-cool features that the others don’t Too bad it’s pretty much dead.
“We just changed our 600 users from MSWord do OOo Writer… with litlle training (3 half-work-days per user) and *ABSOLUTELY NO COMPLAINTS*. It just works.”
So, your company lost 600 * (3 * 0.5 * 8) = 7200 man hours on this switch over?
That’s unacceptible. Assuming $10/hr pay, that’s $72,000 you just lost and can never recover. Remind me to never work with whomever made that boneheaded decision.
@ DUDE:
You forgot to deduct the licensing fees from that figure…
The author took this as an opportunity to make snap judgements about open source and it’s “limitations”. I really loved how he explained that OO Writer could never live up to Word due to it’s open source limitation. This was a political statement, not a comparison.
I really didn’t expect it to draw this much feedback when I wrote it. I appreciate all of the comments. A couple of things:
obtuse vs obscure. Yes, this is a malapropism. This is what I get for writing very late at night and letting what should have been a 500 word blog post balloon into a 6,000 word article. At some point, my eyes began to bleed while trying to proofread, and that slipped past. I’ll fix it. Thanks, Don, for pointing that out.
Cost. I didn’t bring this up, because I presumed any reader would understand from the outset that price is one of the major motivating factors for interest in open source. Though not for me. I work for a university, and got Office 2003 for $7.
Collaboration Tools. I absolutely should have brought those up, and am surprised that they slipped by without mention. Particularly since I just used them a week or so ago (in Word) to send a screenplay out for comment and consideration. I’ll look into adding a mention of them when I revise the article in a few weeks (for Word 2004).
Thanks, again, for all the comments, both positive and negative.
I have nothing against MSWord, but I am not impressed by the article. Saying that OpenOffice.org has “too many options in Options dialog, which are of no use to a normal user” (for instance, the Graphics buffer setting) is generalizing. Someone might find is as an advantage of OOo, to allow more settings. And talking about not having an option of font replacement, maybe the author should check the Options dialog better. I can understand that he has not used OOo before and therefore has made some illogical conclusions about it (“interface looks like a Word 97 version” and such) but maybe he should look deeper. So other users will not get a bad impression of OOo because someone didn’t even bother to check all the menus.
urska
I have to use MS Office at work. It works quite well. When I lost my Office97 disks for installing on my new computer I decided to give OOo a try instead. Well, I eventually found my Office97 disks. I still use OOo. At work I also use OOo for most of my stuff now as well. It is something to take a serious look at. I agree with the author that the GUI could use some polish, but I think they are addressing that with OOo 2.0, which is due out early next year AFAIK.
The author of this article however should stick to discussing writing instead of program product management. He seems to imagine open source programming as some amorphous and undirectable hodgepodge of programmers plugging away in their own universe. On projects such as Linux, OOo and others this simply isn’t the case. There are “top down” directions that bring changes along.
Nothing beats write (the windows 3.11 version).
M$ must have “lost” the source code to provide us with a cripled version of it called “Wordpad” (that don’t even can justify the text!).
The great thing is that OpenOffice is good enough for the masses. Microsoft Office is just too darn expensive!
Training time for new OOo transition you calculate as:
600 * (3 * 0.5 * 8) * $10 = $72000
Now take the software deployment cost:
At standard list pricing the software cost for that MS Office installation is:
600 * $499 = $299,400
Add on one hour of training for each user:
600 * $499 + 600*1*$10 = $305,000
If volume pricing brings that down to the educational pricing level (it doesn’t) then you’d get:
600 * $129 + 600*1*$10 = $83400
So in year one you break even. What do you do next year when you upgrade?
MS Upgrade costs between $83400 and $305,000
OOo Upgrade costs $6000 (one hour of training)
It does for Adobe software — way below. When we moved my department away from the hell that was QuarkXPress and to Adobe InDesign last summer, the per-seat price for InDesign or Design Studio was markedly less than what it would have cost an individual to purchase the software at educational pricing levels.
I find it very surprising that this wouldn’t be true of Microsoft software.
What was your per-seat cost of InDesign? And where they machine locked or floating licenses?
I haven’t read the whole article, but this is nothing new. Everybody who ever tried to compare those two tools concluded, that MS Word is better, but OpenOffice ist good enough. Such articles are boring.
Probaly not the best title but it’s all I could think of at the time. The Article was quite accurate, though he did fail to compare pricing, which in my opinion has a lot to bare on the whole subject, OpenOffice wins hands down! And lets not forget the .doc lockin we all would like to avoid and see die a quick death.
Another point he made was about the look, icons and such. I’ve always wondered why open source apps are so, can’t think of a word, so lame, na, old looking. why can’t OSS developers push the envolope a bit and make something new and exciting? Something that people will want to give a decent try because it looks the part, instead of trying to emulate windows 95 for Christ’s sake. What makes them think that’s what everyone wants?
Seriously, nothing from the OSS community is new and exciting, it seems like they have no imagination. I’m not trying to be a troll here, I’m genuinely concered about this and think that OSS software would be embraced much more if it offered something different, provided of course that it worked well also.
I use OO and it’s a great program, does everything I need, but you have to admit, it’s pretty darn ugly, as is KDE, Gnome and anything else comming out of the OSS comunity.
That’s just my opinion of course, feel free to disagree (:
—
Till
I think the reason is quite apparent. Most open source contributers, not users, are programmers and engineers. These aren’t generally the most graphically creative people in the world. MS and other companies on the other hand have a staff of dedicated graphic artists to make their icons. I wonder if the open source community couldn’t proactively get a couple of those active in their projects. You’re right though. They OSS does often have a bad case of the fuglies.
Nothing beats write (the windows 3.11 version).
M$ must have “lost” the source code to provide us with a cripled version of it called “Wordpad” (that don’t even can justify the text!).
Format->Paragraph
There’s an alignment drop-down right at the bottom of the dialog.
The default toolbar also has the common 3 alignment buttons found in Word.
I have WordPad associated with txt and rtf files on my Windows system so I deal with it more than any other program when dealing with documents (short of doc files themselves). It’s not the best tool for intricate documents, but it does the job for 99% of the crap I deal with, certainly better than Notepad or Word most of the time.
I’m with raver, $0…..$100? If all I do is type a few papers here and there, nothing simple, I’ll take free anytime. Like I said though, I still agree with the author on most of it though. But in my case that doesn’t justify spending $100 on it.
And I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear enough, I was talking about several hundred dollars for the whole Office Suite compared to $0 for the OO.o suite. With that in mind, OO.o does look attractive to the average user now, I think.
This is stupid. Why don’t these application have a command mode? I’m not speaking of some command line (could be interesting for the most geeky of us), but a real command mode, à la VI or Emacs. The application should by default be in command mode and you’d pass a command, for example “T” to go into insert mode for a title, or “Q” for a quote, everything being automatically formatted as you type. You would be much more productive, no?
In LyX: M-p t for title; M-p s for standard, M-p q for quote, etc.
To switch to program code mode: M-c p; to switch to Sans-Serif: M-c s. Etc.
On my Mac keyboard, that’s Opt-p then t to put it in title mode. It’s smart about the modes, too – a normal line break in Title mode switches you back to Standard.
Even better is the Insert shortcut: Cmd-Shift-i c inserts a citation; r for a cross-reference; u for a URL. And so on.
LyX gives you all the massive benefits of LaTeX (including the ability to put in your own LaTeX code), but gives you a native graphical interface with real-time Word-style editor window, tables, visual math mode, figure inserting, etc.
Write what you mean, and it produces exactly the right output. As I was reading the original article, with all the pontificating on how good styles were, but how hard they are to use, I was thinking “LyX!”.
Write your 350-page thesis easily and reliably, export it directly to PDF, HTML, Postscript, etc., and laugh at all the people trying to fix disappearing figures and writing their own Contents pages in Word.
It’s desperately tragic that so many people use Word for anything more than writing a letter.
Don’t even get me started on bibliographic tools for Word!
I have experiance some problems with large document in word, but this was using office 97 on a slow computer. Since then new versions of office with faster computers handle documents into the several hundred page range with no issue. Adding lots of pictures and such definitly slows things, but it will be fine on a decent computer. I think a lot of that problem could be fixed by people not putting 1600×1200 high res images in their docs, you don’t need that in there.
People do several hundred page thesis’s with word every day. I don’t think MS would let such a issue slide if it was a pure issue with Word.
The article was very good also, very thought out and rational.
Can anyone who has tried the ‘Proof of concept’ version tell us about it?
BTW: for whoever said the article concluded that OO Writer is less capable than Word, it didn’t say that. It said the problem was mainly with the UI, not lack of features.
Hey, LaTeX dudes: This is about word processors, not typesetting engines.
But look at what the author is discussing when he talks about “styles.” He’s talking about logical structure and formatting, both areas in which LaTeX beats the pants of any WYSIWYG editor. That is, after all, what is was designed to accomodate. So not, it’s not a silly recommendation. If you want to define a logical structure and have the document come out all pretty-like, LaTeX is better. It’s that simple.
… “There is no superior product that is usable by the masses”
Did you ever hear of Lyx?
http://www.lyx.org/
I have experiance some problems with large document in word, but this was using office 97 on a slow computer. Since then new versions of office with faster computers handle documents into the several hundred page range with no issue. Adding lots of pictures and such definitly slows things, but it will be fine on a decent computer. I think a lot of that problem could be fixed by people not putting 1600×1200 high res images in their docs, you don’t need that in there.
People do several hundred page thesis’s with word every day. I don’t think MS would let such a issue slide if it was a pure issue with Word.
In the past two years, the German C’T magazine has tested word processors for creating long documents with many images, and they found that OpenOffice and TextMaker are the best word processors for that task, and that Word, WP and Lotus are the worst.
And the authors indeed wonder why MS didn’t look at that issue over the past 11 years.
By the way, when the author of the article OSNews links to, thinks that the style handling of MS Office is good, then I wonder if he has tried to format a Table Of Contents using styles…
Off the top of my head, some nice-looking open-source software:
-anything related to enlightenment or e17 (elicit majorly rocks)
-blender
-kde plastik theme
-some gnome applications – abiword, totem, rhythmbox…
-opie (a PDA desktop environment)
The reason most open-source applications are ugly is that good guis are hard. I suspect there are far fewer people who can make a good gui than people who can write a solid backend for it.
nah – I will keep OO.o thank you very much. I do not need the other crap, and besides, if I buy MS Works, I am still not getting MS Word. I am getting a cut down version instead.
No, if you buy the WOrks Suite, you’re getting the real MS Word, no cut down version.
Along with that, you get Encarta, Money, and Streets & Trips, etc.
Of course, if you don’t want any of the other apps and don’t need anything more than what OO.o Writier providers, then you’re right … this is a waste of money. But if you (for whatever reason) need MS Word and none of the other Office products, this is probably the best way to get it, unless you’re a student
Those programs sound interesting, but I can’t seem to find any downloadable versions of them (they are GPL programs, right?). Am I just looking in the wrong places?
Those programs sound interesting, but I can’t seem to find any downloadable versions of them (they are GPL programs, right?). Am I just looking in the wrong places?
Apparently you are just looking in the wrong places. LaTeX-Project.org was the first hit on Google:
http://www.latex-project.org/ftp.html
LyX.org was the first hit on Google when typing in LyX:
http://www.lyx.org/
both pages have links and/or information about how to download the source and binaries.
Hey All
any one checked the real time of importing Msword files to OpenOffice.org 1.1.1?
it’s so awfel..if there was an option to dealy importing the whole document in one time and doit page by page like MSword ..that would be awsome…plus if they manged a full support to MSword then Screw MSword for ever…I know that OpenOffice.org Supports MSword tybes..what I mean is real support cause it doesn’t show the files like MSword does!
Mr.Q
Thanks Richard.
I haven’t used LyX in years, and I didn’t know it had these features now. I’m going to give it a try as soon as possible.
“So, your company lost 600 * (3 * 0.5 * 8) = 7200 man hours on this switch over?
That’s unacceptible. Assuming $10/hr pay, that’s $72,000 you just lost and can never recover. Remind me to never work with whomever made that boneheaded decision.”
Well, on the bright side for that many people the $72K is cheaper then the $100K per year for the MS Licensing for Office Professional, also money they would never recover. So was it really that boneheaded of a decision since they saved the company $28K for this year alone?
I had prefered a comparison of the new WordPerfect and OpenOffice.
Maybe the Author considers to add this software to the comparison.
I must say I use and abuse the stylist on OpenOffice, after when I understood its full advantage.
It is annoying that, unless you create a template, the style always change to default on a new document.
OpenOffice is more than enough for me, and to 98 % of word processors users !! (Say what you like but this is a fact).
I have one BIG peeve with MS Word, and it has existed in Word 97/2000 & XP (I don’t know about 2003 because I haven’t used it). Embedded bullets — I hate fighting with them in Word. Word tries to auto format my embedded bullets, and I hate it. I’ve been able disable most of the autoformat options via the Tools menu, but I have not been able to do this for bullets. Come on MS, any application should understand that if I ‘undo’ the autoformatting 5 times in a row then it just might mean that I don’t want it!
This issue was my breaking point for Word. It was this issue that made me search for an alternative Word Processor.
OO.o does not do this, and I thank the team for it!
“To learn the word count for a document in Writer, one must go the properties window in the File menu, and then to the statistics tab in that window, a totally unacceptable and obscured place to put such an important document metric.”
Tools–>Word Count
Profit!!!
is interoprability of file formats. When I use ms office, i am guaranteed to be able to open, edit, print my resumes and reports anywhere on university campus, since all machines are windows and they have word installed. I wish i can say that for ooo. In fact, that is the only reason i still have microsoft windows and office installed on my computer.
Ray
Well, to me, it’s a cumbersome task in MS Word. I often have to use Word 2000 & XP and I do find the lack of an equivalent to OOo’s Navigator extremely irritating.
Seriously, how do Winword users navigate through large documents?
Part of the reason is that Sun would prefer that people buy StarOffice instead of using OOo, so they don’t invest as much time into it. I hear the Ximian version of OOo is really really pretty as well, but they tie that to their other stuff.
Personally I think this is a great approach. Personally, I would download the free stuff and I don’t care how it looks so long as I can get the source.
I basically run all beta software on my home system. None of it is supported. It’s all Free as in Freedom and free as in beer. Occasionally stuff breaks on my system and I can’t connect to the net because my browser is dead etc. It takes a bunch of hacking to fix things up.
If I payed for software, I’d explect more polish and I’d expect support.
Another popular misconception is to confuse “UI quality” with “looks”.
I’ll admit I don’t much use styles, but I do write a lot of 2 column stuff with lots of pictures, and actually kword is darn good too. I find OO is also good, so I use either of these for such documents. All other longer text without pictures latex using Kile.
I have no crashes or print failures to talk about.
With Word, I can crash it at will with such documents.
John Blink,
Investigate Kile! that will give you exactly what you want and it makes it VERY easy to learn how to create .tex documents.
http://kile.sourceforge.net/
I started with this a few months back, and I really think it is fantastic. I did my cv, with photo and so forth, no problem. You can do virtually anything with this.
Ray,
What you say is not strictly true, unless, your campus has everywhere the same version of word.
I’ve used WordPerfect for Windows since version 4.2, MS Office since version 97, and occaisonally fire up OpenOffice (1.0 and 1.1). I’ve briefly tried out a zillion other wordprocessors/editors.
A couple of years ago we tried to convert our book to MS Word. We couldn’t do it, since we had passed the maximum number of subdocuments and pages that MS Word could handle (we’ve been writing this book since the mid ’80’s). We once tried Lotus WordPro, but that was an early version of WordPro and too buggy to be usable. Once IBM purchased it, I never bothered to check it out again.
I am forced to use MS Office exclusively at work. It sucks for anything over a page or two or that requires any kind of stylesheet, graphics, or collaboration. Unfortunately the couple of times I’ve dabbled with OpenOffice it seems like a junior version of MS Office.
WordPerfect has some limitations, so I’m keeping a keen eye on the WP subproject for OpenOffice.org. Check out the library and conversion utility at http://libwpd.sourceforge.net/ . Hopefully some programmer types can start soon on the reveal codes project. Unfortunately MS screwed up in their implementation of it. Please, please don’t copy Microsoft’s way of doing it.
My experience (and mine only!): WordPerfect for Windows rules, MS drools, OpenOffice um, well maybe it will get there some day… if it does I will be completely switched to Linux. But for now, all serious writing is done on WordPerfect for Windows.
Who knows? I haven’t tried Latex yet. If I find the time I should.
is interoprability of file formats. When I use ms office, i am guaranteed to be able to open, edit, print my resumes and reports anywhere on university campus, since all machines are windows and they have word installed. I wish i can say that for ooo. In fact, that is the only reason i still have microsoft windows and office installed on my computer.
Just export your work to PDF (OO can do that).
Victor.
I had a Word document at work (about 20-30 pages) and maybe a dozen of those pages were imbeded linked Visio files. One day I opened the file and all the imbeded Visio files are now static images. So word made me rebuild the file. I’m not sure anyone would be any better, though, because Visio is also an MS product. If anyone can suggest a better way I’d like to hear about it.
Also, Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird both have no issues with looking dorky. I suspect it’s more a matter of Sun not wanting to waste to much time polishing their free version of their paid-for product.