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?"

Lack of Customer Support=No

[r_jensen11]

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.

Re:Of course....

[Creepy Crawler]

Well, at first it seems Im wrong, but how to you run scripted Excel worksheets?

We're talking about financials and receiving... Is there a VBA emulator for Open Office, or any open source editing engine? I mean, that actually works properly.

Try opening Office 2007

[wild_quinine]

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:Yes, but No.

[kosmosik]

> 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.

A Thousand Times, No!

[eklitzke]

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.

Re:Of course....

[MrHanky]

Yeah, yeah, whatever. Most people don't know how to use Microsoft Office properly. It's an app that encourages bad usage, like using a plethora of different fonts and font sizes instead of simple and reconfigurable styles. OpenOffice.org is slightly, but not much, better in that respect.

Two years now...

[Anonymous Coward]

We've been using OpenOffice exclusively at my company for about two years now, since the 2.0beta days. We've had some minor bumps along the way, and have discovered a few minor annoyances, but overall, we haven't really missed MSOffice.

This is in a small office with about 40 users; however, we do a lot of document exchange with our clients via Word, Excel and PDF formats. OpenOffice has given us very, very little trouble in this regard. For the occasional word or word->rtf document that just won't open correctly, we can use WordViewer, a free utility from MS.

This move was initiated after a "friendly audit request" by the BSA after an anonymous employee tip. After thinking a great deal about the BSA's tactics and methods, we decided to go with open source applications any place we could.

We still use Windows (2000, XP) on the desktops for the simple reason that it works well, and it's what people are used to. As time goes on, however, Ubuntu is starting to sound better. I wouldn't even *think* of running windows on our servers.

Re:What Office 2007 delivers...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Likewise, if you aren't yet on sharepoint, you probably shouldn't get Sharepoint until it allows for better interoperability or unless you think that what it brings outweigh the great costs of a locked-in monoculture.

Re:Of course....

[Columcille]

To me this is one thing that makes Office 2007 great. With Word all the tools are right there easy to see in front of me. I didn't use a lot of stuff in previous versions because I never took the time to go digging for them. My fault, yes, but Office 2007 has removed my need to dig and makes it easy for me to access tools that I'm now finding to be pretty useful.

Visio Competition Sadly Lacking

[justanyone]

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:What Office 2007 delivers...

[binford2k]

I don't know jack about sharepoint, but you contradict yourself pretty good there. First you claim that sharepoint users must stick with office, and then you claim that sharepoint is compatible with everything under the sun.

Which is it?

Re:Of course....

[glsunder]

Well, I do use Open Office in the workplace for about 60 users. They're factory users using terminals connecting to MS server 2003 terminal servers. Installing OOo was the cheapest way for the supervisors who needed to modify a couple of excel and word docs to legally do so. We had one file that wouldn't print correctly, so we installed excel viewer so the user could print that file. Other than that it's worked pretty well. The only app that gives us problems is acrobat reader, and that's always on one user's account. People working in the offices still have MS office installed, and that's not likely to change anytime soon.

BTW, I have many users still using Lotus 123 because of macros. I've given up trying to get people to convert to one app.

Short answer?

[anethema]

No.

Long answer?

Nooooooooooooooooooo.

Open office will ,unfortunately, take over in the mainstream just about the time Linux does. The main reason being corporations are wary of adopting software with no promise of support.

And people just aren't going to use one prog at work, one at home, etc. Just causes a hassle.

Still, I'm rooting for you OO!

Re:Excel has much better charting

[flynt]

If you're a programmer, and even if you're not, use R [r-project.org] to plot from spreadsheet programs, databases, and flat files! I highly recommend the book "R Graphics" by Paul Murrell if you're interested in not being constrained to what Excel and others limit you to! Murrell's grid package for R can have you building publication quality plots from scratch, it's very powerful.

is support really an issue?

[darkuncle]

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 ...

Re:is support really an issue?

[colinbrash]

The important thing is not whether anyone will ever call support, it's whether anyone can ever call support. It may not be an argument that holds water, but since when did a boss's argument ever have to hold water?

Re:Of course....

[pallmall1]

...use extensive billing VBA forms set up within Excel and Word, and then large factory setups with the head accountant with a weird setup of many interconnecting tools.

How many of these forms and tools will work with MS Office 2007?

Re:What Office 2007 delivers...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is so true. I work for the State of California, and my department is pushing towards the next release of Office only because of Sharepoint. We do web development, and Sharepoint is the Microsoft platform. End of story.
I used OpenOffice at home, and it's fine for what I do. But at work, we're a Microsoft shop, and the Sharepoint is what will drive us to the next upgrade of Office.

My Experience and Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

I attempted a roll-out of OpenOffice.org. Upper management eventually decided to keep MS for a couple more years and try again because a few managers complained loudly and expressed concerns about compatibility with customers and learning something new. I was able to refute these concerns but because of other circumstances (mainly time constraints -- this is a relatively new branch I'm at and they needed something right now) I decided to give in on it for now.

I do honestly believe OpenOffice is ready for prime-time although you will undoubtedly run into issues.

The main issue my office had is that documents created in Word looked slightly different when opened in OOo and vice-versa. This was a major issue because the documents had to look precisely as they did in MS Office -- they all had to be modified. Also MS Office docs opened in word were set to A4 paper size for some reason and this office does not use that size -- every document had to be changed to the right format so it would print properly.

Some things I recommend doing if you are considering migrating to OpenOffice or any other office suite:
- Test it thoroughly. Have some "power-users" test it after you have done so. Try everything you can possibly think of that the users would try.
- Get the support of your management -- it will never be a success without that. You may have to "campaign" for OpenOffice and put together a proposal or presentation of sorts to get them comfortable with the suite.
- Do the roll out in a short time-frame so you won't have some people using the old suite and some on the new suite.
- Set the default document format as .doc, .xls, .ppt, etc. so files are saved in a format compatible to MS Office by default.

Hopefully all this (and the other postings) helps sysadmins considering such a move. After all, the more organizations that convert, the more issues will be resolved and migrating (and using) to OpenOffice will be easier, thus even more organizations are likely to go for it.

At present, the company I work for is mostly open source on the desktops (and about half on the servers. all future servers will be Linux unless it is absolutely not possible). We use 7zip, PDFCreator, Thunderbird, GnuPG with WinPT, Firefox, Dia, and certainly a few others I can't think of right now so in a couple years, I think it is likely we will finally migrate to OpenOffice.

Mike

Re:Adequate but not great

[finiteSet]

However, the reason I love OO.o is the formula part. It really makes my papers look great when the formulas are all typed in and display correctly, greek characters and everything. I am totally hooked on that.

I started typesetting mathematical formulae with OOMath and absolutely loved it - until I tried LaTeX. For my needs, I've found LaTeX to be more powerful and versatile - the typeset formulae are nothing short of beautiful. Perhaps you've tried both and find OOMath to better suit your needs, but if you haven't tried LaTeX, I highly recommend it.

Re:Of course....

[azuretek]

I always send my resume as PDF format. If the company can't read my resume and my cover letter (email body) can't convince them to install a pdf viewer then I don't want to work for them, I'm not jumping through any hoops to get a job. I am valuable to many companies and if one isn't going to take the time to read my resume how I wanted it to be seen then who cares?

I've done pretty well for myself and I've just recently started a job that doesn't pay as well as previous jobs I've had but it's definitely a great environment and they treat me well, unlike those faceless corporations that I've tried so hard to distance myself from.

Not only that but if they can't see why I'm right and they're wrong (lol) then they're too thick headed for me to work with.

750+100=?

[nikolag]

I have written a book with over 750 pages and some 150 illustrations. Initially I tried to type it in Word, but I gave up after page 45. Damn MS Word could not hold page number still no meter what. After page 50, Word2000 decided to count it "american way" - each page=100 page numbers and growing like mad. And illustrations were so alive... I could not "catch" them, they constantly played hide&seek with me.

Then I switched to OpenOffice 1.3. At the end I just pressed "convert to PDF", and send the file to press. They did not had any objections.

Anyway, my instituion uses some 100+ computers, all of them with OpenOffice 2.x They do have three MSOffices, but only for conversion of files when explicitly needed by customers.

Re: Right Times

[TaoPhoenix]

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.

Tried and failed

[pvera]

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.