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Open Office - What's the Downside?
Posted by
Cliff
on Sat Mar 24, 2007 01:23 PM
from the a-dissenting-opinion dept.
from the a-dissenting-opinion dept.
cclangi asks: "I'm a current Microsoft Office user, and I run a small business as a consultant (mining). I've read about Open Office and all the good things about it, but what about the downside? As a small business owner and semi-literate in things computer-ese (as a user, not as a developer or administrator), what support limitations are there for Open Office. I'm particularly interested in/concerned with compatibility of software for reports, spreadsheets and database apps that I might need to send to/receive from clients. As I've said, I've read the good stuff, and 'how easy it is', but what are things I need to be aware of before considering switching completely to Open Office? Comments and experiences would be welcomed." A couple of months ago, OpenOffice advocates had space to sound of on the reasons to switch to OpenOffice. Now, it only seems fair to give the dissenters a place to voice their own reasons. What are the reasons keeping you away from OpenOffice and on your current office suite?
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Is it Time for Open Office? 449 comments
lazyron asks: "I've been using Open Office a bit more lately, and got to thinking: this is much more like my current version of Microsoft Office than Office 2007 will be. Could it be time to try Open Office in the workplace, especially since there is still some time left before Office 2007 will be forced on us by the demands of the product cycle? Are there any IT admins out there thinking about trying Open Office, either with a few users or all of them?"
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Simple (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Simple (Score:5, Informative)
As much as I don't like M$, when you click a
Oo.o takes upwards of 30 cuz it has to load the Java libraries, etc, displaying the splash screen of doom in the meantime.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Simple (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Java runtime? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait, this is still true? I thought that OO.org hasn't been Java-based since before v1.1.
Actually, APK (Score:4, Informative)
http://about.openoffice.org/index.html [openoffice.org]
The source is written in C++ and delivers language-neutral and scriptable functionality, including Java(TM) APIs.
This means the application has support for including Java routines to do things, much like VBA does for MS Office. Apparently you can remove this functionality to slim the install down and get it to run faster, too, but you don't have to start the Java runtime every time you start the application. The parent poster was incorrect.
Oops! Guess you fucked up again, chuckles!
Give my regards to Osama, you fucking Commie.
Parent
Re:Simple (Score:4, Informative)
Also, modifying OpenOffice.org's memory settings also help. A quick search at google turns out:
* http://element14.wordpress.com/2006/11/01/speed-u
* http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-9925.
You can easily go from 30 to 8 seconds of load time.
Peace!
Parent
Speed Up OOo (Score:3, Informative)
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From the article you linked: "...go to Java options and disable them."
That is all it says on the matter. Where are these "Java options"? Do I have to apply them to each OO app seperately? Is there an OO settings utility? What's the deal?
This link is more helpful:
http://www.cyberciti.biz/motd-archive.php/20/how-t o-speed-up-open-office-org/ [cyberciti.biz]
And this older article is most illuminating:
http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/03
It seems a lot of features die if java is
Re:Simple (Score:4, Informative)
Then conduct a review, bearing in mind that you will be paying for the M$ version every two years whether you want to or not, and pay for retraining costs as well as data conversion costs.
So swap to open office once or keep getting forced to swap M$ office every two years at a cost of thousands of dollars a time per desktop, especially when you add in M$ free bug testing program, the program they never stops making M$'s customer pay for their ill informed decisions.
There might be bugs in open office but at least your not paying for them. The M$ anti virus program, Onecare (their profits), the only anti-virus software that guarantees not to find viruses, WTF?
Parent
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On the issue of compatibility it's also worth noting that any macros in the document will not work in OOo but generally most issues are related to formatting and will not affect content. Also bear in mind that compatibility problems exists between different versions of MS Office as well - if you really care about the formatting and having a document displayed exactly the same on an
macros (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
OpenOffice.org has UNO, which is basically the same thing, and is accessible to both the built-in macro language (a VB-like BASIC dialect) and external scripting languages. Even better, OOo can embed scripting interpreters so that you can write your macros from within OOo in any supported language.
To be fair, the developer documentation for UNO is found in the OOo SDK, and is obviously g
Slow start-up for one... (Score:2, Interesting)
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The App is great once it loads, but because I'm impatient (as well as my bosses, I have 8, did you get the memo?
The sharing features for GDocs are awesome, and it's a quick bookmark click to open up. It's not as smooth as NO once GD is running, but it's great for quick revisions and sharing to whomever else.
A few items.. (Score:5, Informative)
Next, there's just a lack of the robustness one expects with Office. Two quick examples:
A couple days ago I needed to blow out a fax cover sheet. Tried creating a New document and there weren't any templates at all preinstalled.
Nada clip art. If you're into searching, evaluating, downloading and installing as many 3rd party clip art galleries as you can find, you might be alright.
Anyway, I'm really trying to give it a shot, and for most things it is fine. However I keep stubbing my toes on stupid little things along the way, and it is starting to aggravate me.
Dan East
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It is inevitable that one software package will work slightly differently from a competing similar package. Add-ins, extras, templates will be different. What I like about OO is that you can make your own, and then share them with the world. - yes, s
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That was then and this is now.
The
Re:A few items.. (Score:5, Insightful)
- No page breaks, just a bunch of CRs to got the next page
- Not setting the headers under the appropriate header style and then just customizing that... Instead they manually change the font, make it bigger, add bold, underline and type it in caps.
- Don't let the application word-wrap, instead they hit enter when they get to the end of the line.
- Just do something with some elements todo something like tables, but when you look at the document, they some how made it a picture...
Do I think they can do the same crap on OpenOffice? Yes.Will they have a issue at first? Yes, because OOo Writer doesn't look and behave exactly like Microsoft Word.
Will they complain they don't like it? Probably, because it's different and they prefer the behavior they know.I have to acknowledge the UI and behaviour of Microsoft Office is certainly superior to other office suits.
However, that said -- I am not very impressed with the compatability Microsoft Office has with it's own documents between different computers and different versions of Office.
I also find it a little obscure that people complain so loudly about slight formatting issues and things that occur on OpenOffice with documents from Microsoft Office when Microsoft Office itself can't get it right.
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The one thing that MS did to make Word and Office quite usable (that HARDLY EVER gets implemented) is shared templates. Yes, even in the compa
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Re:A few items.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"get really tired of people who complain about pagination. If you need your pages to flow exactly in a certain way you need to put page breaks and other controls in there. Someone sometimes is doing to change the font slightly or add a few words. Neither should throw your entire document out of wack and make you redo the whole thing. Page breaks, especially odd and even breaks are there for you.."
These are the same people who randomly push the ENTER key at the right-hand margin rather than let the words
Bloated (Score:5, Informative)
formatting on complex documents (Score:4, Informative)
Also, before sending something out to a customer that I've written in OO, I check it on a machine that has Word or Excel or Powerpoint (whatever is appropriate) to ensure the formatting remains the same.
In prior versions, I noticed an issue with tracking changes, but I haven't looked at that recently, so I don't know if it still exists.
OpenOffice PDF export is a liability (Score:3, Informative)
Unfortunately, there is a rather fundamental bug [openoffice.org] in OpenOffice Writer that means that a large class of professional grade fonts don't get used properly when saving as PDF. This has been well documented for several years, but the OO team show no great interest in fixing it; they laughably classify it as a feature rather than a bug, and it's scheduled for "OOo Later". Meanwhile, the first you know about it is when your carefully crafted report/f
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
No, that's a text editor, and you get one or more free with every mainstream OS on the planet.
Word processors -- as defined by the marketing of every major brand currently in existence, from MS Word to OSS tools like AbiWord and OOo Wr
spreadsheets (Score:4, Informative)
On the other hand, openoffice calc, the spreadsheet, has serious problems. It has nowhere near the functionality of excel for doing charts. As I recall, it doesn't have the ability to select arbitrary rows for your dataset. This is a killer for me. Sure, I could use a real plotting package, but that's more work than I want to go to.
I've also heard reports that calc is missing functions that are present in excel. This isn't really a big deal -- mainly because excel doesn't have all that many functions either. But I suppose for an excel "pro" it could be irritating.
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Nothing bad I can think of (Score:4, Insightful)
Apps designed around Office (Score:2)
Good enough for me but (Score:2)
Has this been fixed in the meantime?
Known issues (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
With regards to the look of OpenOffice.org Impress presentations, they do tend to look quite bad with the default templates. (Maybe including some good-looking ones would be a nice thing to do for the future.)
However, you can download PowerPoint templates from Microsoft's site [microsoft.com] or even the program itself if you have it (even templates designed for PowerPoint 2007 if you use the Microsoft Office 2007 file format converter [microsoft.com] to convert to the older format) and import them into OpenOffice.org, then save them as
I don't get why people ask stuff like this (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not like it costs anything, or you have to uninstall MS Office to install OpenOffice or some other nonsense.
Download it, keep MS Office around for awhile as a backup, and start using OpenOffice. Try using it exclusively for a week, or month, or however long until you feel comfortable that it can do all you need it to do. Them, and only then, should you give MS the boot.
It would be absolutely retarded from a business perspective to proceed any other way - based on anyones advice, no matter how much of an "expert" they claim to be. Just try for yourself - if it fits your needs, great. If it doesn't, you still have MS Office installed, so there is no risk of it hurting your business.
No one knows your business better than you do. Maybe you have special needs OpenOffice can't meet. Maybe you don't. You won't know until you try it out.
Not true and you know it (Score:3, Insightful)
You and I and everyone else knows that 99% of what a business uses office for is not time critical tasks. It is opening .doc files attached to emails, commenting on a report, viewing a chart, adding 1-2 cells to a spreadsheet. The amount of time you design some giant new report or huge Excel 10 workbook large spreadsheet is minimal - you do those things maybe once, twice a month.
why calc for statistics? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm curious why so many people are concerned with the ability of calc to do statistics. Is this just a carryover from the MS Windows world where Excel seems to be used for all sorts of things it isn't well suited for? Why not do your stats in R [r-project.org], which is much more powerful than Calc or Excel?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Statistics and spreadsheet usage are sufficiently different that even if you are familiar with Excel or Calc as spreadsheets, that in itself doesn't yield familiarity with the statistical functions. R is not that different from other programs for doing statistics and scientific graphics, so if people have any sort of background in those areas, they shouldn't need to learn a lot to use R. Are intro stat courses using Excel? I find that hard to believe given the criticism I've heard of Excel from statisticia
What's Hot and What's Not (Score:3, Informative)
Definately the drawing portionm of open office is a real hot item that MS Office certianly lacks. Ii is like what those old Apple User liked about Appleworks, a nice drawing tool, but better on OOo with snap to object lines that make charting easy. Also lines with auto measurement (you know drawing lines like || ) also nice object Transparency and stuff like that.
The database looks like it is something great too but I haven't used it (shame on me). But as it's cross-platform it puts it light years ahead of Access in my book.
Can convert a lot more then MS can
Document conversion convert over Word Perfect and other files to Word that MS Word can't read.
What's not:
The presentation program is slow (some of the whizes in games dev should go in there and work on the rendering. It is functinally good, but is dog slow when it is presenting.
Not that I use Macros, but some documents (more so spreadsheets than Word documents) contain macros that OOo can't handle. Then again, some of those very documents not even Mac Office 2004 can handle either as the embedded code relies on Active X technologies (and the next version of Mac Office won't have VBA support either).
Font management is a noticeable bottleneck (at least on the Linux version, mac seems to work transparently, probably also in Windows), OOo maintins a seperate Font library, which means if you are installing Linuxc and OOo on a bunch of computers you have to install fonts twice, once in Linux and then again into OOo. (the fonts included are really good - and largely compatible to the MS basics, but I have a lot of ones I like beyond that too).
As for anyhting else I have been very happy, I don't do obsessivley huge spreadhseets and Writer handles styles and sauch in large documents quite fine to my liking. I probably use Writer and Draw the most and those are great apps.
Why Don't YOU Tell US? (Score:3, Informative)
For many people (maybe even for you), Open Office is more than good enough for what they do.
For others (maybe even for you), the fact that Open<->MS office translations not being perfect can ruin your day -- but whether or not that's the case, is going to be something that you're gonna have to figure out on your own.
Things that I can suggest (in no particular order):
just more limited (Score:3, Informative)
There, I am a poweruser of MS word and MS powerpoint. Don't get me wrong, these are applications with a lot of flaws but I can get my work done with them despite that. Particularly ms word has a lot of strange bugs, layout problems, etc. But on the other hand it has nice grammar checking and spelling checking features and I know how to work around its more annoying bugs (thanks to years of exposure to them). Word also has nice features for collaborative editing, change reviewing, etc. Overall, it's a very nice word processor that is pretty much unchallenged in terms of features & usability by any other product.
Important for me is the cross reference feature which allows me to refer to sections and references or list items by number. This feature is not properly supported in open office. It has a cross reference insert dialog but it has serious limitations, including the inability to actually list numbered paragraphs and insert a cross reference to one in the document. The number of things you can actually reference is very limited (outline numbered stuff and figure captions) and also the way to configure how to reference is very limited. I've filed the bug before 1.0 and verified that it wasn't fixed for 1.1, 2.0, 2.1 and is currently being considered for 3.0. Basically, the ooo developers agree with me that the current dialog is too limited and also a usability nightmare.
The lack of this feature guarantees I will never use it for any serious writing and is also the single reason I wrote my Ph. D. thesis in framemaker instead of open office (word being just to unstable for such a long, structured document). I can live with the many other limitations but not the lack of cross references. Framemaker is a very lousy wordprocessor of course but great for working with long structured documents like a Ph D thesis with hundreds of cross references to images, tables, (sub) sections, figures, pages etc. Sadly it never really recovered from being bought by Adobe and recent versions did not really improve it much over version 5.x.
I could have used latex of course but I consider the whole concept of compiling & debugging a text just wrong + interoperability with everything else just sucks big time (and no pdf is not interoperable since it is basically a read only format).
My ideal word processor has yet to be invented. It would probably be a mix of the rigid structure provided by framemaker along with its flexibility for formatting and ms word's human friendly approach to actually inputting the text. I can't really think of anything that open office does well in this context except perhaps its drawing tools.
MS Word doesn't work for me, either (Score:3, Interesting)
I have some problems with Open Office(.org) ("OOO") that appear to be the same problems that I have had with Microsoft Word. (Word 97 versus Word Perfect Version 7 and Word Perfect 8; I've never upgraded because WP8 works fine for everything I'm doing). I've gotten full (non-upgrade) copies of Word Perfect 8 - at retail, off the shelf - for as low as $15.00, and in one case I purchased a second copy for $39.00 because it was the Professional version and included the Paradox database, so it was worth trying. I think when I first bought Word Perfect 8 it was around $100; I forget what I paid for WP7. I've been a heavy user of Word Perfect for over 20 years, going back to DOS version 4.1, simply because I have yet to have a formatting feature in Word Perfect I wanted that I couldn't get it to do.
I have often had problems with both Microsoft Word and OOO to do formatting that I want to work the way I want to. I have sometimes exported files from Word Perfect using RTF (Rich Text Format) and found that Word will damage the formatting when trying to import the file. (I think I did that because it wouldn't import .WPD files correctly or something, so I think that's when I tried RTF.)
I'm not a word processing bigot, I'd use Microsoft Word - or possibly something else - if it worked as good or better than Word Perfect. In fact, one time when Word imported one of the books I'm writing, it mangled the format of the header, and I liked the way it changed it better. I could not figure out how it had done it or how to duplicate it, but I went into Word Perfect, clicked on help, and looked it up, and in about 30 seconds I duplicated the functionality that Microsoft Word gave me by accident, which if I hadn't liked it, would have been an error.
I'll give you an example of one thing I can do in Word Perfect that I can't do in Microsoft Word. Changing headers on new chapters. I have a book (actually it's the second one I'm writing), it's over 500 pages, and one of the features of the formatting is that the left (even page) header has my name and the name of the book, and the right (odd page) header has the name of the chapter. The left header stays the same, the right one changes at the beginning of the chapter.
Now, in some rare cases there is a chapter that is only one page long, and is on a left page, so that's not an issue. It's when a chapter is at least two pages, the chapter header should change to the name of the new chapter. When I view the file after it's been converted to Microsoft Word / RTF format, sometimes the chapter header doesn't change or it changes in strange ways. And this misbehavior seems to resurface in OOO, too.
Come to think of it, I have a resume I do in Word Perfect that also gets mangled because of header or footer problems in Word/OOO
Also, I don't see - or I'm not sure - how to 'view codes' in Microsoft Word (or OOO) which I can see the internal formatting of a document and know what the program is doing (and even delete some codes, such as if I have an area that is incorrectly italic or bold).
Maybe I'll try copying the file over again and see how it looks, or I could try examining OOO's XML output and see what I get. One thing I do like with OOO is the PDF output feature, I'd like to be able to use it. Plus OOO's scripting is in Basic rather than the relatively esoteric Perfect Script, which the only other program I've seen that uses it is Novell's Groupwise e-mail program.
Another poster here mentioned submitting a bug report, and I think I'll do that (I hadn't thought of it). Of course, it might be that the behavior is wrong in Word, in which case it might not be considered a bug!
My Blog [paul-robinson.us]The worst downside: OOo has no future. (Score:3, Interesting)
If we encourage migration to an office suite, we cannot get away from lock-in. It should be the sort of thing we will not be switching away from in four years when it's clearly not the best office suite. And nobody who's looked at the issue can seriously think that OOo is going to make any dramatic progress in the next four years. It's a mess of spaghetti code, and the whole monstrosity is held together with duct tape and bailing wire. It may work OK now, but modernizing it for the needs of even the near future is not something that anyone can do.
Consider even the issue of startup times: Even Microsoft streamlined the code for fast startup in Office 97. For OOo this would be hopeless. It is hopeless. And it will remain hopeless. This is not the sort of ship we should board.
We'd be much wiser to jump onto something with a future, even if in the present, it is missing one or two features we might like. I personally am rooting for the KDE4 version of KOffice, since it will be so damn portable, progress is incredibly fast (even with a small staff of coders), and the code and plugin system is incredibly clean and future-proof.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Use NeoOffice (Score:5, Informative)
Disclaimer: I am a founder of NeoOffice.org
Due to politics, OpenOffice.org has exorcised all reference that a perfectly functional, native, and Aqua port of OpenOffice.org exists for the Macintosh. It is called NeoOffice [neooffice.org]. If you want to use only software named "OpenOffice" on your Mac, yes, you have few options, but if you like GPL software go check out the real deal.
NeoOffice 2.1 is scheduled for release on March 27th. Not only do we continue to push forward with being the only truly native fully released Aqua-enabled office application suite for Mac OS X, there are several features included that aren't even in OOo on Linux, including:
NeoOffice is a GPL project and incorporates the best everyone has to offer to create the best product we can for our users.
OpenOffice.org is a political machine and to meet its own political goals is willing to restrict its users from compatibility requirements like OpenXML and VBA compatibility, not to mention failing to let users know other open source projects exist and are ready now, unlike their Macintosh vaporware. Their own users are hurt by their own desires for personal and political gain.
NeoOffice is free from all corporate influence, is truly GPL free software, and will always be so. If the lack of Mac support is your only reason preventing you from deploying OOo or its derivatives, it's sad that you didn't take the simple time to run a google search and just assumed the information the OOo website was all the larger OOo community has to offer.
ed
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The other reason that I am not crazy about Neooffice is that every time the discuss
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The easy solution is to not do what you're talking about doing. There isn't a good reason to ha
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Unfortunately, now I have to get by with a copy of ThinkFree Office and use it's crummy Excel clone. At least it's cheap.
Re:How about OOo bugs? (Score:4, Insightful)
I must admit I have taken a liking to Microsoft Office's ribbon UI.Which costs 269.99 USD more.
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