Open Office - What's the Downside?

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?

Simple

It's Microsoft Office compatability isn't perfect, and the other companies I work with send documents created with MS Office.

Re:Simple

The Java runtime has to load also, which makes a _significant_ difference in startup time.

As much as I don't like M$, when you click a .doc file and open it with Word, usually it's up within 3-5 seconds.
Oo.o takes upwards of 30 cuz it has to load the Java libraries, etc, displaying the splash screen of doom in the meantime.

Re:Simple

Older versions of office did do that; they were always have a "quick launcher" run, but the last three versions (Office XP, Office 2003, and Office 2007) do not do that.

Actually, APK

You're wrong again, and I'm right.

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.

Re:Simple

It is posible to disable the loading of Java libraries. If you don't need advanced stuff (90% of users), disabling loading of Java speeds up the load time of OpenOffice.org

Also, modifying OpenOffice.org's memory settings also help. A quick search at google turns out:

* http://element14.wordpress.com/2006/11/01/speed-up -start-time-for-openofficeorg/ [wordpress.com]
* http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-9925.h tml [ubuntuforums.org]

You can easily go from 30 to 8 seconds of load time.

Peace!

Re:Simple

Well that is the point if you are happy with your current office suite why swap. However once you are forced to swap when you don't want too, whether it be by a data compatibility forced upgrade or you need additional licences due to expansion.

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?

macros

Microsoft macro support in Open office is far from optimal. However, there are a whole slew of Open Office-centric macros to choose from [ooomacros.org] which could meet your needs.

Use NeoOffice

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:

• Word OpenXML document import and export
• Excel VBA macro compatibility
• Microsoft Works file import/export
• linear programming extensions for Calc

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

A few items..

First, and probably foremost, is simply rendering differences between Writer and Word. I've got a parent handbook I just made in Word, and when opened in Writer (all fonts are available) the pagination is totally off. So I'm resigned to printing only from a machine with Word, or goof around with formatting (which will probably then break layout in Word).

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

Re:A few items..

Like most so-called Linux evangelists, you're not listening. He wants to use clip art and templates. He wants to do exactly what he does with Word. He wants to use Open Office. If Linux wants to convert people to their OS, then FIX IT!

Re:A few items..

I have never met anyone who didn't know how to use MS Word (or admitted it, at the very least).

I have met many people who claimed they knew how to use MS word, but when I saw their documents...

• 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.

TODAY, Microsoft office is probably the best office suite.

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.

Bloated

Open Office is SLOW. Starting up, opening document, typing, saving, etc., it's all SLOW. Yes, even compared to MS Office, OO is a resource hog. If you don't have more than 512MB of RAM or so, you are asking for trouble.

formatting on complex documents

I agree with many of the other posters -- formatting simply isn't spot on perfect when you open a document started in Word (or excel or powerpoint) with more complicated layouts. OO.org 2.1 is the best version yet as far as that goes, but I still open some documents, and have the formatting be off. I haven't tried any database work, so I can't comment on that.

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.

spreadsheets

Openoffice writer is mostly good, and works at least as well as word, if a bit slower.

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.

Nothing bad I can think of

i made the switch over 2 years ago and i have to say... i have not found a single drawback. the java thing as a dependency is about the only thing i can think. i made the switch to linux permanently on the desktop (kubuntu) from winxp and i noticed that ooo wasn't that slow on windows (on a relatively older pc [2004]) and i've found that it is MEGA fast on linux. it loads up way faster than m$ office on windows or even, as i said before, ooo on windows. i have only once or twice ran into m$ --> ooo incompatibility afa formatting is concerned. i'm not trying to sound like an ooo fanboy, but i can't think of anything negative in regards to ooo.

Known issues

• Microsoft Word import is still iffy. Some documents import fine, some import badly, and some don't import at all. It's better than it was in older versions of OpenOffice, but if formatting matters, you still can't freely interchange documents between OpenOffice and Word. I know, this really is a problem with Microsoft's obscure format. It's the biggest obstacle to widespread OpenOffice adoption, though.
• The help system is terrible. Each help box needs to stand alone. Instead, help text often assumes context from previous help text. For example, search help for "print envelope" and you get "Letter Wizard, Page 3", which isn't helpful. In general, finding answers with the help system is hard, and when you've found them, there's a good chance they will be out of context. A bad help system is a significant barrier to adoption.
• OpenOffice's answer to Clippy, the diamond-shaped popup thing, is even less useful than Microsoft's version.
• Auto-completion of words is badly designed. In Word, if you don't accept what it's doing, auto-completion doesn't try again for a while. In Open Office, it gets in your face and keeps trying. This is obnoxious. In typical open-source style, there's some obscure configuration parameter you can change to fix this. Wrong answer.
• "Draw" is reasonably good, better than what Microsoft Office used to have. But then Microsoft bought Visio and integrated it into Office, and Visio is better than Draw.
• "Calc" is about as good as everybody else's spreadsheet.
• "Impress" is OK for producing dumb presentations, but PowerPoint presentations tend to look better.

I don't get why people ask stuff like this

If you're worried if OpenOffice can fit yoru needs then just DOWNLOAD the thing and try it for awhile.

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.

why calc for statistics?

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?

What's Hot and What's Not

What's hot:

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?

Open Office is free. Why not just download a copy and see how it works for your specific workload?

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):

• If you mostly generate and use documents internally then OO is likely to be just fine for you.
• If you have a boatload of specialized (VB) macros that are critical to your workload, you might have to have to (at the least) hire someone for a bit to do the translation for you. This may also be a reason to use the Novell extensions.
• If you have really precise needs for formatting and spacing, and do your document formatting in the 'dumb' way (hard-code line ends, and page ends, and use spaces where you should be using tab stops, etc., etc., etc., then moving to OO might hurt your brain.
• If your documents are done relatively sanely, and you're not going to have a fit if one page has 3 words that spill over to the next page in OO where it didn't in MSO then OO is probably a great fit for you.
• Convincing your normal correspondents to install a copy of OO, rather than always bouncing back and forth between OO and MSO formats will make your life easier.
• For the previous point, you might want to burn yourself a handful (or a crate full, depending on the size of your business) of OO install CDs.
  ... While you're at it, you might also want to includes copies of things like Gimp [gimp.org] and Firefox [getfirefox.com], and any other Free software you'd like to see other people use.
• Given that OO is more OS agnostic than it's MS alternate, and it's easier to get mission critical fixes done (i.e. you can hire someone to do them for you) you might find that OO is your better choice in the long term, even if you determine that you could have some short-term problems with it.

just more limited

The downside is simply that openoffice is a lot more limited than MS office in many respects. For many people that is not an issue because all they do is write 2 page memos. At home I have it installed because it is cheap (free) and does a reasonable job of opening the occasional simple word file I need to read. I don't actually do much else with it at home since I do all of my office work at the office.

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

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.

I'm posting this too far down the thread, and I'm surprised it hasn't been said earlier:

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:How about OOo bugs?

How about those wonderful OOo bugs that cause it to totally screw your formatting?

Never experienced it.

Randomly deleting document files?

That's probably a document deleting virus on your computer. OOo doesn't just randomly seek out documents and deletes them. I've certainly never experienced it.

Missing pasted images?

I had this when opening a few documents some people made in Microsoft Word (which I rarely ever do). But do images disappear in OOo when you paste them into it? I certainly haven't experienced it.

Everyone assumes the real problem is just "We need MSOffice people to convert!"

I don't see why? They seem happy paying for Office. Additionally they don't seem to have a interest in software freedoms etc. They just want something that they feel works for them.

when it should be "We should actually get our shit working first before we make other people eat it".

I don't really have any issues with OOo, if I did, I'd try todo something about it.

I must admit I have taken a liking to Microsoft Office's ribbon UI.

If I wanted crap like that I'd use Wordperfect.

Which costs 269.99 USD more.