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?

macros

[Bananatree3]

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.

Re:Simple

[Fyre2012]

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.

A few items..

[Dan East]

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

Bloated

[KermodeBear]

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

[radarjd]

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

[alphamugwump]

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.

Re:A few items..

[zappepcs]

I'm not trying to belittle your opinion here, but there are those of us out here that remember those very same toe stubbing situations with MS Word itself, from version to version, and of course when there were still other word processing packages on the market.

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, sounded a bit fanboi-ish... meh

Stubbing your toes on office applications would still be a problem if MS hadn't been so successful at getting rid of it's competitors in this space. Currently, people just 'think' they don't know how to use MS Word. The real problem is that people don't know how to use office applications but they don't know there are any others besides MS. This means the don't have a chance to 'stub their toes' as it were.

Fonts, formatting, templates, and other *Standard features* of word processors give people trouble all the time, and if you stub your toes because OO isn't quite like MS Word, be happy because those things can be fixed. Finding them and reporting them is part of the process. Until Wordperfect died, people who used MS Word went through the same thing.

Re:A few items..

[Silver Sloth]

At the risk of a 'me too' posting I second everything you say. I really, really want to be an Oo user. I like the ethos and, where posible, I'm a open source fan, but, like you, I've got used to all the little extras which are missing and importing MS docs is far from 100% successful. But, in reply to the original poster, why not do as we've done, give it a try. After all, it's free, you can experiment all you like and make you're own mind up. I haven't de-installed it, and I sometimes still use it for creating original docs, but I wouldn't give up on MS anytime soon. Mind you, maybe the next time I have to fork out mega-bucks... My office 2000 is getting a little long in the tooth and I flatly refuse to pay MS prices.

Re:A few items..

[rbochan]

I would also include lack of integrated mail/calendar/scheduling software. Yes you could go to another third party for that, but it would be nice for everything to be integrated and consistent for an "office suite". I use OOo under Linux, but I supplement it with Kmail/Kontact.

Known issues

[Animats]

• 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.

Use NeoOffice

[soullessbastard]

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

Re:Simple

[GIL_Dude]

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.

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Open Office - What's the Downside?

Java.

why calc for statistics?

[belmolis]

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?

Speed Up OOo

[soloport]

Here you go. [theinquirer.net]

Re:Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

MS Office also is always running in the background, just incase you open up a document. You could do the same with just about any application. Keep it running in the background, and then poof, it starts. Of course, if you rarely used the application, you'd just be wasting memory, but hey, the app looks like it starts fast.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Especially if you disable the Microsoft Office entry in the startup folder. With said shortcut disabled, Word is still orders of magnitude faster than java OO to startup.

That said, I hate word, and despise java applications. I find notepad and Vim more than adequate for my text editing needs.

Re:Speed Up OOo

[Anonymous Coward]

That does not help much.

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 /22/204244 [newsforge.com]

It seems a lot of features die if java is disabled.

What a crock, java bites the big one.

What's Hot and What's Not

[JoeCommodore]

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?

[darkonc]

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.

Re:Simple

[rtb61]

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?

Parent is wrong

[bheer]

Office does not run in the background when you don't run it. Scanning the process list on any Windows machine will tell you that. (Unless you have Office's 'binder' installed, which hasn't been in the default install for years)

How this tripe gets modded Informative is beyond me.

Re:Simple

[trewornan]

I've got to agree with most of what you say, except the issue with crashing, I haven't found OOo particularly prone to crashing.

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 any system use a proper format designed for exchange.

As to publisher files, well christ, using doc files is bad enough but pub files are completely unreasonable.

just more limited

[jilles]

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.

Re:Simple

[opkool]

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!

Learning Curve?

[eagle52997]

I haven't seen anyone mention a learning curve yet.

I remember in grade school learning all of the keyboard shortcuts for WordPerfect (where the blue screen was good - lol)
After WP, MS Word seemed super easy to learn. The menus were relatively intuitive, and by now I know where everything is. Since I'm a chemist, there are also plugins available http://spectrum.troy.edu/~cking/ChemFormat/index.h tml [troy.edu] which make editing my kinds of documents easier. At this point, I have found no similar tools for OO.

But I digress, the menus for Open Office are layed out with slight differences compared to MS Office, and it takes time to learn where things are. I have not done enough in OO yet to feel as comfortable using it as I do MS Office. As a business owner, can you afford slower production times while you and your employees learn OO? Or, do you have the money to spend on a training class (which are probably rare) to help get a jump on the learning curve?

OpenOffice PDF export is a liability

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Why bother? Just convert it to PDF or print it to postscript.

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/flyer/whatever using high quality fonts exports as garbage instead of a PDF your print bureau can use.

Actually, APK

[StarKruzr]

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.