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?"

Re:Of course....

[Foofoobar]

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.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

OO

[JoshJ]

If you don't use Word macros, yes. If you do use Word macros (or certain Excel functions that are designed for the european market), probably not.
If all you need is a standard word processing program, spreadsheet, and presentation maker (which is true of almost everyone that uses Office) then OO is the way to go.

Depends on the size of your shop

[WillAffleckUW]

And the policies therein.

We mostly use open source software in our shop, but a number of us have Windows boxen - or dual boot Linux/Win boxen - so that we can use Microsoft Office.

At home, a lot of us use Open Office - even on our Windows PCs.

It really depends on how your work is organized. For a small shop, changing over is fine, if you're mostly just using DOC and XLS formats, but not coding for Access (MDB) or doing add-ons for Word and Excel. But if your DBMS is something like MySQL, and you just need to be able to read and write to the DOC and XLS formats, then you should be fine. But this is something that some people regard as highly volatile, so you'd need to have the backing of both your shop and your boss in particular.

Scientific/engineering office? Answer is no.

[Merlynnus]

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

[Colin Smith]

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:A Thousand Times, No!

[YttriumOxide]

It doesn't use any platform's native graphical toolkit

NeoOffice (OpenOffice port for MacOS X) uses Aqua and looks great - no need for X like the main OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org itself will be supporting Aqua in the not too distant future as well.
You're right about OpenOffice looking a bit "off" due to the toolkit if you're looking at Windows though - I'd like to see this improved in future versions somehow.

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.

The main problem with AbiWord is that it IS a very lightweight program and as such doesn't have too many features. As has been discussed elsewhere, this generally isn't a problem, but when it rears its head, it rears it pretty badly. This will happen a LOT more often with AbiWord than OpenOffice.org.

This science/engineering office says no to Excel!

[Anonymous Coward]

We have machines with Gnumeric, Excel, and OO.o Calc & let people choose what to use. They typically use Gnumeric, mostly as it is DEAD EASY to get data into and out of. For example, Gnumeric is the only one that just works with copied/pasted plain text tables. It is fast and accurate.

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

Excel can do quick and dirty charts. The prior is an asset. The latter is BAD & worsened because it is VERY hard to take an Excel chart into another program to IMPROVE it.

Charting in ALL the programs suck. OO.o's current module is probably the worst (but their new chart module that you can beta test shows a lot of improvement).

But you can't make publication quality plots in ANY of them. So, we don't bother. The free/open source advocates use Grace. The others tend to use Origin.

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

This could still be an issue for legacy spreadsheets. When people find stuff better than Excel VBA (Python kicks butt!), they tend to stop using it for new sheets.

but without the functionality of Excel, it's a non-starter.

Why not pick and choose good tools from all available options? You don't have to use an app just because it is part of a suite that has other programs you like.

Re:OO

[Trelane]

How did this crap get modded "insightful"?! You can code macros in python, StarBASIC, BeanShell, and several others. Seriously, where did parent get this jewel of mis-information?

Better, but not GOOD

[Anonymous Coward]

Excel can do quick and dirty charts. The prior is an asset. The latter is BAD & worsened because it is VERY hard to take an Excel chart into another program to IMPROVE it.

Charting in ALL the programs suck. OO.o's current module is probably the worst (but their new chart module that you can beta test shows a lot of improvement).

But you can't make publication quality plots in ANY of them. So, we don't bother. The free/open source advocates use Grace. The others tend to use Origin.

Re:Of course....

[mabinogi]

there's an entire class of fallacies dedicated to the flaws in your post.

Person A is a Developer using Linux.
Person A can use OpenOffice.
it does not follow that you must be a linux using developer to be able to use OpenOffice.

Incidentally, to add one more anecdote to the pile - I'm right this minute using MS Word 2003 to look at a document created by someone else using MS Word. For them it looks fine, for me, it's horribly wrong - in OpenOffice it also looks horribly wrong, but equally as horribly wrong as Word 2003, but once I've managed to correct the wrongness (people that use a word processor as a page layout tool need to be stabbed repeatedly until they stop it), I'll at least be able to export it to PDF from OpenOffice writer.

Re:Of course....

[sumdumass]

I have a simular issue when cloning a hardrive that was failing. I had to reactivate office for some reason. It wasn't the phone call that anoyed me, it was the having to dig up the specific cd andlicense key for that comuter then call, waid thru the auto system to get a love person then be tranfered to times to a person who decided to place me on hold while they finished a conversation with someone else in the room. The hold button didn't mute their end, I heard everything and part of it was asking someone else if they thought i was using the software on too many computers. Evidently they have some ways of checking.

In all, it took longer to activate office again then it did to clone the drive and replace it. This may be a one time issue but i pass it off onto someone else when it comes up again. And also, the strange thing is that office doesn't need reactivated on every clone. sometimes windows needs activated and sometimes other MS software. Sometimes nothing needs activated. There doesn't seem to be to much of a pattern to it.

Re:Visio Competition Sadly Lacking

[Lumpy]

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.

Re:Of course....

[yoasif]

If you want to be sneaky and still avoid using the doc format, you can always create a document in whatever your favorite word processor is, save it as rtf, and change the file extension. Works perfectly, and no one is the wiser. I've been doing it for ages with no problems whatsoever.

Re:Openoffice should learn from Mozilla

[megabyte405]

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!

Re:Of course....

[darkonc]

That's just a case of OO trying to be bug-compatible with MS-Office.

Personally, I'd prefer if they'd figure out which features don't save well in .DOC (or whatever) and only complain when those features are being used in the file that's being saved.

Excel :Adequate but not great

[twitter]

It's funny, but just this afternoon I tried to help someone make a simple graph with Excel and can say most of the things you did about Open Office. The graph defaults sucked and while I remembered every one of the tweaks to fix it, it was irksome to have to. Calc is not that much better but Gnumeric is. It requires substantially less modification to have something that looks good. The long and short of it is that everything takes time to learn, you might as well learn the one that's free and improving.

Re:is support really an issue?

[pluther]

Anybody out there know of an instance of someone actually utilizing an MS Office (or any office software, for that matter) support contract?

I did, a couple of times at my last job, for strange problems we couldn't figure out.

Of course, it didn't help. Even after 3rd-tier escalation, one problem we eventually figured out ourselves, and another one I got a solution to a couple of weeks later from a ClearCase mailing list...

It's about plugins in OO, stupid! EndNote! RefMan!

[DandyRandy]

Well, a lot of people in scientific/medical commmunity might move to OO, but the main problem is lack of support for EndNote and/or ReferenceManager. Scientists and students working in biomedical and related fields usually have the draft version of their current paper(s) on their computer, so we are constantly changing the draft, figures, and bibliography. This means that we use Word processor (no problem with OO), we use PowerPoint (also no problem with OO), we definitely prefer to use Adobe CS for vector grafics and images (well, I can substitute for Gimp and Inkscape, somehow), we are running a lot of special software for such a things as routine DNA sequence analysis (Windows, Ma, some Linux versions) or FACS analysis (Mac versions available only). So, is there space for OpenOffice? - No!!! Because OpenOffice is NOT supported neither by EndNote nor by ReferenceManager! And before this will change, all biomedical scientific community will stick with M$O. During the last years I have contacted Thomson ResearchSoft several times asking about the Linux version - seems to be no way.

Re:Better, but not GOOD

[dhg]

I've long thought that the charts in OOo Calc were the only reason to have to use Excel. I spend 99 percent of my computing time using Linux though, so I got on the OOo bandwagon long ago and I found it relatively easy to overcome the charting deficit. My work involves a lot of modeling using Fortran and I use Grace to plot my results. I use Bash scripts to setup my calculations, sort the data, and then setup and run Grace in batch mode. Grace will output .jpg files which I insert into OOo Writer to produce my documentation. For me, it all works great, and the Grace plots are way beyond anything you could hope to produce with Excel. Prior to running my calculations, I use OOo Calc to generate my initial values and that involves a lot of matrix manipulation which Calc handles very nicely. I have written papers using OOo that I just couldn't get the formatting right using Word, and OOo also offers the luxury of exporting the finished product directly to PDF. I have recently begun to learn Tex, however, because word processors just aren't up to the task of producing a really well formatted paper. The fact of the matter is, for my needs, OOo does not lack anything, and I can get the job done. Being a Linux user, I had to adapt my methodology along the way to utilize the tools that were available to me, but I certainly do not feel I am at any disadvantage compared to windows users who have Office at their disposal. I encourage my students to use OOo, and my kids use OOo running under windows at home. Bottom line: OOo and Office offer similar capabilities, if you can use Office then you can use OOo, and, perhaps most importantly, OOo runs under Linux.

New Chart module in OOo 2.3

[MrvFD]

There's an improved version of Chart coming to OOo finally in the version 2.3, which should be released in September of this year. It should be good enough for most purposes it's currently not. It's been development for a long time, since the Chart module basically hasn't changed much since OOo 1.0.

Hopefully they'll revamp the equation editor at some point too. It has good potential, but clearly it's another module that hasn't been touched for a long, long time.

Re: Easy to Implement?

[TaoPhoenix]

I don't believe any part of MS handing the specs over for either the format or .docx formats over to open source guys. They just got slammed for not providing docs asked for in 2002 by investigators.

I think at least one of the benefits they will get is the forced incompatibility of the new formats.

Re:Excel has much better charting

[athena_wiles]

Hmmm, yes, I agree - I'm a college student and would LOVE to be able to use OO rather than MSO, but the charting capabilities and ability to export/import charts from one document to another is really what's holding me back. I'm a science student, and for the purposes of lab reports and the like, I need to be able to easily create readable charts/graphs and share them across documents. I also need to be able to integrate spreadsheets into text documents, etc.

While MSO's implementation of some of this stuff isn't great, I found when I switched to OO that I was often not able to get OO to do this for me at all. As such, I've switched back to MSO. I'll get back on the OO bandwagon if/when this stuff is improved.

Re:In your case - not.

[indigest]

I don't agree with you. At my business, I use Windows and Linux for different tasks. So I will open up my in-progress spreadsheets/presentations with either MS Office or OpenOffice, update them, and save them in xls or ppt. I have not had any issues at all with incompatibility or formatting differences. Whenever I email a spreadsheet/presentation to somebody, the recipient does not even know that OpenOffice has been used at some point and will just assume I used MSO for everything.

I can't think of a more "mixed" approach, and it is working great for me.

Re:is support really an issue?

[coredog64]

Our company has used the MS Office support contract. We were seeing awful performance with some XML functionality in Excel and wanted
some satisfaction. We eventually got a response from an engineer on the Excel team.