Is it Time for Open Office?

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?"

Everthing 'cept Outlook

Yes, I concur.

When I am onsite for service calls I always load up OOo for new installs. Most of my customers have peer-to-peer networks or are running Small Business Server. Outlook is a great program and if you have a SBS controlled domain every client gets their own copy of Outlook automatically. I do try to save them money on software so I can charge more for service calls:)

Lack of Customer Support=No

Star Office would be a more appropriate replacement because the PHB's would see that they could call up a company and have some support rather than posting something on a mailing list should the shit hit the fan. I use the latest version of Star Office and have no complaints other than it doesn't print presentation slides as nice as PowerPoint does. But then again, I'm a student, so I don't need the most powerful software out there. I know that once I'm out of the university and in the work force I'm going to have to rely on the intricacies of Excel to get any work done, so I'd also chalk that up for another "No" reason.

is support really an issue?

I'm a sysadmin, and "where's the support contract?" is a common mantra among management. However ... when was the last time _anybody_ called Microsoft for support with MS Office? Can anybody even name a single instance of this? I know I can't (granted, I haven't been in desktop support for ages, but I don't think most companies even bother to purchase a "support contract" for MS Office - they just buy the software and move on).

Anybody out there know of an instance of someone actually utilizing an MS Office (or any office software, for that matter) support contract? This argument strikes me as one that just doesn't hold water ...

In your case - not.

Face it - OpenOffice.org is not compatible with MSO (neither are different versions of MSO either). You cannot really mix them. What you need is to choose one.

Re:Not happening

The main reason is that many people are scared to move to a new product, while others don't want to have to learn something new (Even if it's minimal). Comfort zone is everything.

Yes but that's the OP's point. Office 2007 is in many ways more different from previous versions than OO.org is, making it the perfect time to make the switch.

Try opening Office 2007

From a purely word processing standpoint, this is both the right and the wrong time for OpenOffice.org to challenge the MS crown. It's the right time because, hell, Word 2007 looks more different to Word 2003 than Writer does, on the surface of it. It's the wrong time because, finally, there is a worthy version of Word on the market. It has been ten years since the Office team released anything this decent and free of bloat. But for all those OSS nuts out there, yes, really, now is the time to push Open Office. A bit of serious market share for OSS is always a good thing.

Re: Right Times

I disagree. Businesses operate in contexts, and the same object/product/service has a different overall presence when placed in its context. The original Napster was a devastating innovation that opened up the world of online songs to the mass market awareness.

Given that the RIAA *has* won several cases now, despite their subsequent silliness, means anyone *now* starting a pure clone of Classic Napster better have a legal trick up their sleeve.

There was a heady day of Microsoft - 95-2001. They delivered the famous series of OS's, established (however sneakily) the Blue E, and completely cemented the corporate world.

Then Microsoft effectively went into Semi-Limbo for 5 years. No new major OS. No new major browser update. Lots of problems hit public awareness.

Here comes 2007, with Microsoft's "Bet the Bank" coordinated suite. Vista, aka Windows '07, Office '07, and related items. And we get ...

Vista, starting to draw uncertain looks from DRM critics, and information freedom observers. Office completely annihilates the sacred Microsoft Guidelines that MS forced upon all vendors for a decade or more. I find both Word and Excel *completely unusable*. Vista looks "usable", but it just feels sneaky as hell. IT generates the kind unease normally seen in Faustian contracts. MS IE7 looks like the improvement that should have been released 4 years ago, and barely matches the status quo set by FireFox.

Things are different than 2001, the year I think Microsoft "jumped the shark". FireFox was successful first. People noticed. It's on the map. Given the jaw dropping re-work of the Office Interface, I think this *is* the chance Open Office needs. It just came out of Beta, and is now at the solid 2.1 mark.

Value is based on perception. Microsoft's Deadly Trilogy used to be Browser, Office, OS. In that order. I think there could be real value squeezing MS from the outside in. I just realized that my KillerApp is a thin client to a remote system, which might have a Linux version either ready/in the works.

My workplace can't be the only one that "just builds documents and makes phone calls" to do work. These kinds of businesses might actually be the first to survive without MS.

Open Office is already on our MultiUser server because when put to the test, Management didn't REALLY want to pay a $5000 license fee for all the user instances of Office.

I changed my Sig recently. I think I want to take my whack at building a Linux replacement for the MS monopoly. This is SlashDot's Mission, right? So bear with me on the NervousNewbie questions.

Re:Yes, but No.

> Sure, you'll be fine with OpenOffice... BUT, once some dorks
> update to 2007, you will be "old", "incompatible" and "cheapskate".
> Just as strongholders of Office 97 were.

It depends on how you relate to those dorks. We use (small company - 20 users) only OOO. We exchange documents internally and it works fine (since everybody is on OOO). With other guys (you rerfer to them as dorks) we do not exchange documents. All we send are PDF documents like offers, letters, manuals and other types of documents that we do not want them and don't expect to edit.

Now for dorks sending us MSO documents - they don't. Any interaction with clients that supply some kind of data is via web forms and their portal. So we do not need to recive MSO documents from our clients.

We do exchange documents with parties we pay for service - we pay them. So we tell them to send their stuff in format we can read.

Excel has much better charting

I am a big fan of OO and I use it even though our company has bulk license and unlimited installs. I have no problem doing good high quality presentations. I mail PDF attachments. Everything is good. Except Excel's charting and annotating is still far superior to OO. I have been meaning to download the SDK and implement the support I need myself. But after looking at my code for five days I just can do more hacking during weekends. I must be getting old. Further my forte is C++ for non graphical non user interface fast scientific code develepment. So my productivity in the new build environment would be low. Bur definitely I would encourage people to improve the charting support. Just use gnuplot as the engine and slap good UI on it. Someone. anyone.

Scientific/engineering office? Answer is no.

As much as anyone cringes, Excel is the best tool for accumulating, plotting, and exporting (to Word, e.g.) data and charts. Yes there are better tools, but they are not as easy to use and they are not as well integrated with the other tools of the trade. So, having said that, Calc in no way measures up to Excel.

For one, charting (especially X-Y scatter plots) is very, very painful to use and doesn't have all the features that are required.

Then there's the VBA macro issue, which judging by some of the comments may or may not be an issue.

Writer doesn't seem too limiting, and I haven't really used Impress too much, but without the functionality of Excel, it's a non-starter.

Excel's crap for scientific data

God the problems I had trying to handle large datasets... Where "large" is bigger than say 64k... So what I really mean by large is small. Excel is just completely useless for anything non trivial.

Yes as you mentioned, there are better tools for the job and frankly as hard as they might seem, they just work.
 

Re:Excel's crap for scientific data

Well, it really depends on what you're doing, doesn't it? If you're working with a couple dozen measurements (or even a few hundred) in a nice domain like time or temperature, it takes you a trivial amount of time to do this in Excel.

Anyone trying perform data analysis on anything more than a few thousand data points in *any* spreadsheet deserves what they get. It's all about using the right tool for the job.

A Thousand Times, No!

OpenOffice.org is, in my opinion, the weakest part of the free software desktop experience. It is huge and bloated. It takes 100 MB - 200 MB to install (depending on your operating system), which is way more than it should. It doesn't use any platform's native graphical toolkit. Fonts look like crap in it. Etc, etc.

Honestly, I think that Abiword is orders of magnitude better -- not just in the obvious areas of size and memory footprint, but also in terms of the UI. It looks great in Gnome, and runs on Windows too (and it has a grammar checker!). I'm not a KDE user, but KWord also looks better than OO.o

I don't understand the fixation that people have with Open Office. It's slow. It looks bad. It retains all the things you hated about MS Office. The only things that it has going for it is that it has the most faithful .doc import of any open source office tool, and that it has the best ODT support at the moment. But the day that OO.o dies will be a happy day in my book.

Well d'uh!

Faithful .doc import/export is the main thing I need as a translator. I get Word files and replace their contents with Finnish, English or German text. Happily, MS Word has been known to mangle documents, too, so I haven't yet been penalized for not paying the Microsoft tax: In the occasional cases when a document has its formatting messed up, the customers apparently just sigh and readjust, thinking that the translator doesn't know how to use Word properly.

You see, that's the great thing about most Microsoft's users: They have built in fault tolerance.

Adequate but not great

I put OOO on my girlfriend's Windows laptop (replacing a pirated copy of MS Office) and it's been a mixed bag for her. Writer works fine for most of what she needs to do. Impress is okay but not great -- when she looks at other people's PowerPoint presentations, they are usually at least legible, but most often the formatting is messed up in some way or another. But Calc is a source of frustration. Last night she wanted to make a simple X-Y graph and it took us a solid 15 minutes of clicking around different dialog boxes to get what she wanted -- and even then I had to modify the spreadsheet to get it to work (it doesn't really like the Y axis values to be in the column before the X axis values, for example.) The default formatting was lousy; one of the columns was nothing but whole numbers yet Calc decided to put in grid lines for fractional values and display the numbers with three trailing decimal places. And so forth. All eventually fixable -- we got the graph -- but not fun.

I just fired up Excel to compare the experience, and I had the same graph in under a minute with no after-the-fact fussing around with properties panels. Its defaults were what I wanted and it let me put my columns in any order (though the UI for specifying column ranges needs a little help IMO).

This was the first time I'd used Excel in maybe a year, and the first time I'd made a graph in Excel in... well, I can't remember the previous time. Whereas I use OOO pretty frequently. So I am no MS fanboy -- but OOO does have some catching up to do in places.

Notice, by the way, that the above example has nothing to do with file formats or proprietary languages. I'm willing to cut OOO some slack when it has trouble rendering a document that uses some obscure undocumented formatting feature of MS Word, but that wasn't the case here.

Openoffice should learn from Mozilla

The state of the Openoffice.org project reminds me of how the Mozilla Project was about four or five years ago. It has all the features imaginable (e.g. database connectivity, vector graphic support, full-featured spreadsheet), and is compatible with everything under the sun. However, non o matter how modern or fast a system, it runs like a sloth. I would suggest that it is time for a new Openoffice, much more like what Mozilla has done with Firefox and Thunderbird; spinning one huge piece of bloat into several smaller tools that do their job effectively.

Nobody used Mozilla, because it was big and slow and looked a lot like something from five years before (Netscape Communicator 4.7); people running GNU/Linux systems used it because it was all they generally had (not trying to throw flamebait). If Openoffice and its developers (mostly Sun) learned from Mozilla, we could see a great, useful, usable, and popular product come out of what Openoffice is today.

Re:Openoffice should learn from Mozilla

We have a Pango renderer in the development (2.5.x, will become 2.6.x) version, if you know Hebrew please help us test it out! http://www.abisource.com/ [abisource.com] and http://bugzilla.abisource.com/ [abisource.com]

Thanks so much!

OpenOffice 2 is not bad, but is not too compatible

If you use OpenOffice 2 Writer and nothing else, you're fine. But interchange with .doc files still doesn't work all that well. Something readable usually makes it through the conversion, but it won't look quite right.

Impress and OpenOffice Draw are OK, but, realistically, PowerPoint and Visio are better. PowerPoint has all those provided templates and graphical items which make it possible for suits to make up elaborate-looking presentations without much effort. With Impress, you start with a blank page and a few basic layouts. This is fine if you have the graphic design skills to start with a blank page, but that scares most people.

The help system for OpenOffice is still terrible. The typical help page describes how to do something, but doesn't tell you under what menu item or button to find the indicated command. The help system is a manual chopped up into bits, not a coherent help system.

OpenOffice's little star popup thing, their answer to Clippy, is just as annoying as Microsoft's, but dumber about figuring out what you're doing.

It's classic open source. The essential stuff works, and everything else is kind of half done. It's far better than OpenOffice 1.0, but it still has a ways to go.

Look at it this way

Even if you try OO in a large setting, and find it doesn't work, there's not a lot lost. Just reopen and save your stuff again in a M$ Office native format and switch back. OO may lack some of the 'features' of other office suites, but that doesn't mean said other suites can't open OOs exported files with little to no loss. And as always...pointing out the whole "it's free" thing can go a long way.

What Office 2007 delivers...

Microsoft no longer sees Office as it's cashcow.

Sharepoint is the new cashcow.

Microsft Sharepoint is an all in one company intranet, document management, CRM and internet portal system for medium to large companies that has been gaining significant market in recent years. Sharepoint entrenches a company in Microsoft technology far more than Office ever could or ever will.

Much of the killer features on offer in Office 2007 are features leveraging Sharepoint.

If your company has already invested in Sharepoint or is thinking about using it, the choice of Open Office versus Office 2007 is a no brainer. Choosing Sharepoint and then Open Office instead of Office 2007 would rate as a category 5 blunder.

If Open Office supporters want to see it thrive they better keep their eyes on the ball and not the man because MS Office has passed the ball to Sharepoint [redmondmag.com] some time back now.

Re:What Office 2007 delivers...

Sharepoint uses open standards for it's protocols and document formats. That doesn't mean it's going to be easy for a company to switch from it.

The scope of Sharepoint encapsulates not only a company's document formats but also the company's corporate filing system, the way it is managed, how people collaborate together, CRM, intranet, and internet etc etc.

When Sharepoint is implemented in a company it totally shapes the culture of the company. People live and breathe Sharepoint in a company using it.

In the past MS Office has always faced cheaper competing products that can load and save MS Office document formats. The vast majority of companies out there haven't switched because the benefits of competing products didn't warrant the effort to shift the portion of a company's culture that had reliance on MS Office to something else.

It is the culture of a company that is hard to change, not the format of it's documents.

This is why I say Sharepoint entrenches companies in MS technology, it is the penetration of the product into the corporate culture.

Could be the first time ...

... that it's worth STICKING with Office. Office 2007 is by far the easiest to use so far (in my opinion) of the Microsoft Office family, and the new interface makes old Office and OpenOffice feel downright antique.

There are licensing issues and business practices and so forth that everyone around here gets all in a lather about, but from a purely user-experience standpoint I think it's pretty great.

Either way, things are at a crossroads. The Open Document Format (ODF) is what OpenOffice uses, and Office 2007 uses Microsoft's own more proprietary version of this, OpenXML. Instead of things getting closer together, it's getting harder and harder (really, due to the minor differences more than the major ones) to transfer documents back and forth between OOo and Office. And since most interaction with the outside world requires Microsoft-specific file formats, I think you may as well stick with Office. Purely from a practicality standpoint -- not ethics, not right vs. wrong, just what's going to cost you the least number of hours over the long haul. I'm sure converters will start to come out, but for pure ease of use and reliable translation, Word to Word is always going to work better than OpenOffice to Word.

I run both and like them both for various things -- still, I think I'll probably be using Office 2007 more than anything else as time goes on. I don't have much call for a word processor or spreadsheet app, but what little I do with these is easier in Office. Just is.

Visio Competition Sadly Lacking

I'd love to replace Office with OpenOffice. Unfortunately, Microsoft has bundled this stuff so tightly it's difficult to displace.

Visio has no viable competition.

Yes, I've tried Dia, and frankly it's nowhere near as usable as Visio. I wish there was competition here, but there isn't.

Usually I just need the features found in the version of Visio from about 1996. Then, it was just coming out and not owned by MS yet. it worked fine. it allowed me to do the simple flowcharts and connectors that moved nicely. I mostly do

• data flow diagrams
• systems schematics, or
• database schemas

. This is pretty simple functionality but Dia doesn't do it yet. Yuck. I want arrows with different size arrowheads, lines that stay attached to objects as you move them, and the ability to make them curved / bendy or straight. That's it.

Likewise, MS Office has Outlook which has an integrated calendar function that invites me to and reminds me of meetings. If Thunderbird did that, I'd switch quite quickly. I use Tbird at home and love it.

That's the functionality I need. I'm sure I'm not the first one to mention it, but I hope that Sun or IBM or Redhat or Novell is listening. This functionality can't be that hard to develop, and they'd get much more users for their products if they did that. It can't cost more than $20 million to field a product with that minimal level of functionality - that's 20 developers for 2 years plus infrastructre, management, and QA. Put it in OpenOffice at $free instead of $400/seat MS Office and their market segment would be... HUGE (the planet).

Re:Visio Competition Sadly Lacking

Give this a try.....

Evolution for win32 [sourceforge.net]

we use it at work (I know using a early beta in an office YIKES! all our vertical apps we paid huge $$$ for are early alpha quality) and are quite happy with it.

Tried and failed

At my previous job I tried it, the problem is all 15 desktops were OS X, and all users had MS Office v.X or 2004 already installed. The users were too lazy to even consider switching to OOo, plus there was no cost advantage, those licenses would last at least the life of each individual workstation (not a hell of a lot of pressure to upgrade from v.X to 2004 or higher when available).

The sad thing is that the year I tried to do this I participated in National Novel Writing Month [nanowrimo.org] for the second time, this time I did all my work from OOo in OS X. Except some minor learning issues with the way styles are defined and applied, my experience was overwhelmingly positive. Still, it was not enough to impress my users into even trying OOo.

If you want to see a book written and typeset in OOo, you can download mine here [veraperez.com]. It is licensed under Creative Commons, feel free to pass it around.

Now with NeoOffice we don't even have to keep X11 running, and eventually the main OOo branch will be offering a X11-free version for OS X.

One thing I know for sure: it's going to be one cold day in hell before I purchase another MSO:mac license for any of my personal macs. There is no reason for a home user to be shelling out for MSO:mac just to write letters and make spreadsheets when both OOo and NeoOffice are completely capable, easy to use and completely free.

Re:Of course....

Parent is very wrong. I'm one of a couple of devs in my office using Ubuntu as my desktop. I use Open Office and can open all docs that people send to me: Powerpoint, Excel, Word docs. They all work fine. Plus I can export as PDF's and a variety of other formats. The only time I have run into a problem is when people are saving in a very old format like Word97. But then, even Microsoft Office users have the same problem and do the same thing I do... ask the user to resend in a more recent format.

Re:Of course....

I'll call your anecdote with one of my own.

At work we have several word-based forms that are filled out and passed around via email. Open Office corrupts these forms. They are unusable by Word 2003 after being modified and saved by OOo.

Re:Of course....

Why would you send your resume as a Word doc instead of a pdf? Show off your skills and knowledge of portable formats by saving the doc as a pdf, then send it. Then you know exactly how it's going to look to your potential employer.

Re:Of course....

Because asshat HR departments r