8 ms·

Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat

83 points by monkeygrinder 16y ago

rodh257 16y ago
The video is pretty cringeworthy, but everything in it is true from my experience. Open Office as it is just isn't viable in a corporate environment. Staff members will despise it, poorly formatted documents from others won't display properly, training costs go up, it's a mess. Sure, most of it may be Microsofts fault for their .doc format or whatever, but fact remains, Microsoft Office is king in the corporate world. Not sure that this video was really necessary, but I guess it could be good for I.T. guys to show to their boss when he decides they should swap to Open Office.
- nodata 16y ago
  One by one: > Staff members will despise it, This isn't a point on its own. > poorly formatted documents from others won't display properly What is a "poorly formatted document"? > training costs go up Training costs only go up if you compare it against people already trained with Microsoft Office. > it's a mess. How? None of your points really said how, apart from the one below talking about .doc
  - ErrantX 16y ago
    I use OO on Mint Linux here at work where everyone else uses Word '07 + Win 7. So here is my experience: > What is a "poorly formatted document"? Had an issue with this today in a word document with tables, OO has serious trouble displaying full page tables properly. There are lots of other subtle things, but I can't reliably produce documents in OO and send them to, say, a client as a word document without checking them directly in Word. > Training costs only go up if you compare it against people already trained with Microsoft Office. This is a non-trivial issue. And the same reason Linux is struggling to reach the corporate desktop. Re-training is, for an organisation, a quite complex business. Because of pay, contracts, organisation, finding the expertise, ticking all the legal/legislative boxes. Another way to consider this is that a lot of people now are doing computer literacy certificates (I think some are even internationally recognised qualifications now). Employers can accept these as saying "this person can use Word fine" which saves them the cost of training and support etc. If they switch to OO this goes away (at least for a while). >> it's a mess. >How? None of your points really said how, apart from the one below talking about .doc This was some MS brilliance at work; because while the Ribbon bar was initially hated you will generally find that within a corporate environment employees find it quite productive and usable (at least in my experience). The look is so radically difference OO feels awkward (or so I am told by someone who tried it). Generally speaking, looks, GUI and layout are the things that "turn users on" the most. a) they are familiar with the Word way of doing things and b) it has a really fancy looking GUI. This stacks up against OO. >> Staff members will despise it, >This isn't a point on its own. And yet, it is probably the main reason most organisations won't bother. Even if it takes just a few months for your staff to stop grumbling it probably doesn't feel worth it. And don't forget that the people signing off on such a swap (management) are "staff members" in this context - they will irrationally dislike it too. I like using OO, and find it a competitive piece of software. I even convinced my parents to use, and like, it! But I don't think it will break the corporate barrier for a while yet :)
    - Create 16y ago
      > Had an issue with this today in a word document with tables Please be kind and file an issue and provide the test-case. thank you.
      - ErrantX 16y ago
        It has been open for a while: http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=7911 http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=7911 (but looks like it may be fixed soon) EDIT: there seems no need to download Create (at this point he is on 0), it was a fair point!
        polynomial 16y ago
        Fix my software without me having to tell you what's wrong, darn it!
  - jasonlotito 16y ago
    > What is a "poorly formatted document"? I just wanted to touch on this from another angle. I use OO here at work on my Linux machine. My main issue with OO is it's styles support is incomplete, to the point where it's impossible for me to keep my documents style appropriately. It seems like a small thing, but I'd much rather handle styling via style sheets then have to manually edit the items. Here's the basic thing I discovered: OO gives you 80% of what you need from Office, but you still need that final 20%, and that's what Office gives you.
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      Care to list the missing 20%? OOo developers may find the list useful.
      - jasonlotito 16y ago
        Obviously the 80/20 numbers are pulled out of my rear, but I feel it's an accurate description. That 20% is different for each person, too. For example, the last feature missing from OOo that I needed (and it's been reported, too) is styling for tables. Working with Internal API Docs, we use tables for parameter listings, and trying to make the tables readable and easier to use is difficult when you have to style each table individually.
        rbanffy 16y ago
        Is that the Table/Autoformat thing?
        jasonlotito 16y ago
        No. When I first saw it, I thought "Yes, I found styling for tables!" but no, it's not. Basically, you are still setting each table an individual style. And if you are dealing with a lot of tables, this can be a lot of updates. Here is the open bug report: http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=11121 http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=11121
  - eitally 16y ago
    Those actually are valid points, but he could have clarified it a bit. If people despise it and either A) start publicly berating the IT organization or escalating to the C-suite or B) stop being productive because they can't stand the software, it's a problem. Formatting is a problem, especially when collaborating on complex Word or PowerPoint documents. Excel & Calc are the most interoperable. Also interestingly, OO.o (I'm basing this post on the OO.o v3.3 beta) is more compatible with MS Office 2007 than MS Office 2003 is, so your mileage may vary depending on the status quo. Training is a problem, period. A lot of the menus -- and menu icons -- in OO.o are not logical, and it is extremely obvious that Microsoft invested mountains of cash in UX research. Not that MS Office is perfect, but since most people have been using it for a decade or more the incremental changes across versions make it much easier for them to familiarize themselves with subsequent updates. In a lot of ways, I'd compare the UX of the two like this: OO.o:MS Office::GIMP:Photoshop. The GIMP works great but is missing some functionality that a small subset of users find critical, and the multi-window UI is confusing. I could go on....
    - brudgers 16y ago
      > and it is extremely obvious that Microsoft invested mountains of cash in UX research Story of the Ribbon. http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX08/UX09 http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX08/UX09
    - dhimes 16y ago
      extremely obvious that Microsoft invested mountains of cash in UX research Maybe, but they also benefitted from being there first. When organizations made the switch, they realized they were going to have to train everybody (I was with a huge organization in the '90s when all of this went down). They were only going to train on one system. In our case, we picked MS Office. Thus, good UX or bad UX, that's the UX that everybody learned. Organizations were dumping huge resources just into training, and all of that went into learning how to use MS Office. They had a huge head start.
- arethuza 16y ago
  I think that should be Excel is king - I suspect you could probably replace Word and PowerPoint for most users and they wouldn't notice that much.
  - matwood 16y ago
    I'm going to agree with you 100%. Word and PPT do not matter if the format changes a bit or whatnot (this already happens between different versions of Office). If you need to create a document that keeps perfect formatting, then you need to output in something like PDF. Excel is a completely different beast that has so many features it's very hard to cover them all for all users. A big one we use is using Excel as the front end to MSAS. Normally we would have had to design some user/reporting interface, but instead we were able to use Excel pivot tables to access the data directly on the server. Since all of the analysts are already familiar with Excel and its pivot table interface I just had to show them how to to point it to our MSAS instance.
  - pasbesoin 16y ago
    What I've found interesting recently is working a bit with a very non-technical user, and finding that after a bit of introduction, Google Docs word processor is actually easier for them to use than Word. They don't need a ton of options and mostly just get confused by them. They just need some basic controls and good looking results, and Google Docs is beginning to realize this surprisingly well. Plus, they never "lose their file".
  - Sherlock 16y ago
    Warning: user perspective ahead: I have to agree with this. I work as an analyst in an investment bank, and my tools include MsWord, Excel, PP and rarely a python script. MSWord and PP are completely interchangeable with they OO or google docs equivalents, but Excel is just another story, and its not just the learning curve, the software has a lot of features and capabilities that their competitors simply don't have (even for my less technically versed coworkers)
- thwarted 16y ago
  poorly formatted documents from others won't display properly What is the proper method to display a document that has been poorly formatted? A poorly formatted document looks like crap no matter how you display it. (I've found a correlation between the quality of the formatting the author did and the meaningfulness of the filename).
eitally 16y ago
I almost completely disagree with rodh257. A large percentage of corporate workers don't create complex content and rarely interact with complex files created by their colleagues. It is completely reasonable for a CIO to engage his staff on a research study to determine how feasible it would be to migrate a significant swath from MS Office to OpenOffice.org (or LibreOffice). I have personal experience with this.
- ryanwaggoner 16y ago
  There's a reply button below each comment so you can disagree in context.
ErrantX 16y ago
Hmmm. I don't think the comparison with GNU/Linux is 100% clear cut. At that time Linux was making huge inroads into the server market and anyone not recognising that was going to be laughed at. Microsoft doing so was probably not the biggest driving force in subsequent growth. The modern equivalent would be not recognising how much of a "threat" Google Chrome is to the other browsers with its brand and growth. Now, Open Office. I am not convinced that it is a viable threat to Microsofts corporate sales. I know personally of very few (big) corps who could reliably switch to OO - for all manner of reasons. It is a competitor, sure, and certainly making inroads into the home market. But a serious corporate threat? Not yet.
nhebb 16y ago
The OpenOffice site has a list of major deployments [1], and considering how long it's been available as an MS Office alternative, the list isn't that impressive. Several years ago the local school district switched to OpenOffice. I happened to notice it during a teacher conference, so I asked the teacher how she liked it. I was pretty surprised by how much she hated it (I mean, she really hated it.). Of course, that's just an anecdote, but what's more telling is that the school district is back to using MS Office. [1] http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.org_Deployments http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.or...
- dhimes 16y ago
  That's too bad. Schools are the one place that definitely should switch. The basic skills of writing, revising, presentation, and spreadsheet usage can all be taught just fine with OO. I switched to it (nearly) full time about a year ago and haven't had any problem. The idea that teachers make students pay for MS Office, simply because they can't be bothered to change, angers me. I don't know too many teachers who can actually use the finer functionality of MS office. A reluctance to switch must have another origin. The one place where I've had trouble with OO occurs when I sometimes teach using prepared presentations. I can modify them in OO, but if they have a bunch of A/V goodies baked in I'll use ppt player to present so that everything works easily. I usually run a show like that out of Windows, too.
  - phr 16y ago
    Typical grade school teachers spend their days on their feet, rushing from one crisis to another, trying to help mainstreamed kids with serious disabilities, kids with chaotic home-lives and resulting learning and behavior problems, political mandates to teach to a standardized test regardless of what they think the kids really need, and so on. They don't feel they have time to figure out simple user interface problems like where did all these IE windows and tabs come from, let alone learn a new software suite.
    - dhimes 16y ago
      I understand, but what they need to "relearn" isn't that hard. The skills are quite easily transferred, especially the skills that they would use an office suite for in grade school. And especially the skills that the grade school students would use an office suite for. Like any population, some of the teachers are actually quite tech-savvy, and some will whine about anything. This is an area, however, where if I was superintendent I would make the switch and take a day or two of their "planning time" for training. It would be a good place for a "peer teaching" lesson plan. When we first got computers, we had to teach the teachers what it meant to "save," how to insert and eject the disk, and so on. Transferring to OO would be much easier than that initial training.
jacquesm 16y ago
Open Office is after many years of hard work still not up to snuff when compared with Microsofts suit. In part that's still due to the document formats not being really open (so there will always be implementation issues, some of the docs literally say 'do this like word 3 did it' or something to that effect). Another part is that it is simply a huge undertaking. The biggest advantage MS has over OO is Excel vs the Open Office spreadsheet, it's not even close. In spite of all that I don't use Microsoft stuff any more. The amount of features that I use in these packages is small enough that I can get by with a lesser program and not being locked in is an advantage as well, what sealed the deal is that microsoft does not sell a version for linux ;) Personally I think that the microsoft office suite has more to fear from things like Google Docs than from Open Office in the longer term.
- kierank 16y ago
  I know of a very well known company that runs complex visualisation software on Linux workstations because it performs better but dual boots Windows only for Microsoft Office (and nothing else)
  - deleted 16y ago
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- billybob 16y ago
  I'm with you: I use OO, and I also think it's not great. I use it because the document format is open (I've lost documents in the past to format extinction), and because the software is free. I think it's not great because of tons of little bugs in the spreadsheet and presentation software. Like it doesn't remember my formatting for new cells in a column, even though I highlighted the whole column and applied it. Like I can't reliably move images around on a presentation screen. Those kinds of frustrations really add up. If I had advice for the OO team, it would be "don't add features. Grind away at bug fixes and usability testing until everything behaves as expected." If people said "OO doesn't have all the features of MS Office, but it works great for what it does," that would be a great milestone and would drive a lot of adoption, I think.
mwilcox 16y ago
I went to a Microsoft Roadshow recently where they were demoing Office Web Apps - he specifically said it was being targetted towards home users, because "people don't buy Microsoft Office for home use. They use Open Office or they pirate Microsoft Office." If they're saying that in a promotional event, then it really shows the threat MS see from OO. They own the corporate market, but they have trouble capturing the home market, especially with Google Docs
- arethuza 16y ago
  Microsoft Enterprise Agreements often give users the right to have a copy of Office at home.
  - ZeroGravitas 16y ago
    Often only for "business" use. Everyone of course ignores this since it's ridiculous and unenforceable, but that'll probably be what it says.
jlgosse 16y ago
As someone who tried to switch, I can tell you that this is not the case. I remember doing a resume in OO.org, and then when I sent it to my friend with Word to print it off, it TOTALLY wrecked everything. Not cool.
- drinian 16y ago
  To be fair, my understanding is that different versions of Word will display the same .doc file differently. Also, you should really do that sort of thing as PDF. Quite easy, considering that OO has PDF export built in.
  - blasdel 16y ago
    To be really fair, OO does the same thing, and forget about there being any kind of ODF interoperability between different FOSS packages. Hell, OO won't even save and reopen the same document unmodified on the same computer consistently.
    - ZeroGravitas 16y ago
      Saying OO does the same thing as MS Office, after someone says that Office does the same thing as OO is a bit redundant. So just to be extra redundant, let me repeat that saving and opening Word documents in Word doesn't guarantee it looking the same (e.g. if you un/plug a printer, it can change the margins and hence the paging of your document) so it's hardly a damning indictment of OO. If you want to enforce how something looks, you use PDF. That's what it's for. Word's .doc and ODF aren't designed for that, they're more like HTML in that people are terrified of trying to get some simple formatted text to display in two versions of the same Microsoft product, never mind some crazy free software with a silly sounding name. Meanwhile people are somehow managing to send Hi-Def video round the globe and watching it on hardware with the cheapest Chinese chips possible and generally not batting an eyelid because it's based on some kind of standard that's actually worthy of the name.
      - deleted 16y ago
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xentronium 16y ago
I don't think OpenOffice is a threat, especially considering what Oracle does (virtually everything to kill it).
- AndyKelley 16y ago
  I've noticed exactly 3 things since Ubuntu's Open Office updated to Oracle's version: * It's about half as fast as it used to be. * "Oracle" logo on the splash screen (which remains on the screen for twice as long) * A message box that says "General error" any time I open a document. I kid you not: http://www.superjoesoftware.com/temp/general-error.png http://www.superjoesoftware.com/temp/general-error.png. Note that after I hit OK the document opens fine.
Maro 16y ago
OpenOffice is a horrible piece of software. When I switched to Mac, I tried MS Office 2008, and it was buggy as hell, so I've been using OpenOffice, which sucked too, but slightly less (on Macs). Now MS Office 2011 is coming out, bugs fixed, looks great, UI/UX is great, so I started converting all docs back to MS format and will ditch OpenOffice in a couple of weeks.
- mattparcher 16y ago
  I agree that Office for Mac 2011 is a large improvement, but it still doesn’t feel quite right to me. Have you seen Apple’s iWork suite? http://www.apple.com/iwork/ http://www.apple.com/iwork/ It provides the most commonly used functionality from Word, Excel, and Powerpoint in a simpler interface that I find much easier and pleasant to use (certainly much more Mac-like), at half the price of Microsoft’s Home/Student edition (a 30 day trial is available).
  - Maro 16y ago
    I like Keynote a lot and use it all the time for presentations, I think it's better than Powerpoint. Also, compatibility isn't that much of an issue here because I just present from my Macbook all the time. But I prefer Word & Excel over the Apple/OpenOffice counterparts. Here compatibility also matters, as I routinely send Word & Excel files to lawyes, investors, etc. You don't want your files looking like crap with those guys =)
bld 16y ago
I wonder if the the biggest aid to OO adoption will be the new interface in Office 2007? OO basically clones the old Office menu-driven interface for everything, which I find easier to navigate by drilling down in context to find things. Switching to OO avoids the need to relearn how to use an office suite.
- zokier 16y ago
  I think that's a double edged sword thing. OOo while similar, is still somewhat different than 'old' Offices. You might think you know it well because it feels similar, but the little differences makes your work inefficient, as you try to use it like old Office. On the other hand, new Offices forces you to relearn some things, and because of the visual dissimilarity you (hopefully) don't try to apply your old knowledge to it. Note: I don't have anything to back this theory of mine up, so take it with a grain of salt.
- akho 16y ago
  My calendar says it’s 2010 now, so it’s a bit late for that (and the ribbon was awesome from the start).
tocomment 16y ago
You know what I hate about google spreadsheets. When you open a long spreadsheet it won't open at the last row. You have to scroll all the way down. Excel seems to handle this issue fine.
forgottenpaswrd 16y ago
OO is a committee designed bloatware mammoth. Office was created in low level coding, with the minimum possible dependencies (e.g excel reinvents the wheel so it does not include so many external libs). OO is a sluggish and high level clone with minimum attention for detail. Consumes too much memory and too much processor, like Netscape Navigator became, but hopefully(thanks to the license) it could be transformed into firefox. It will be very expensive to replicate the hard work that went into Office, only starting from scratch you could do it like Koffice, abiword or gnumeric did. You can't outperform Office in their strengths, but you can outperform it on things Microsoft is not an specialist, like multiplatform coding, cloud writing, and new interfaces(multitouch and voice). I don't use windows, and honestly I don't care about Office any more. There are very good alternatives, but not OO.
bpodgursky 16y ago
Open office is a threat only to those who use it.
stretchwithme 16y ago
I've used OO.o and worked with its code and when it came time to choose between it and Office, I had to choose Office. I needed the ability to manage sections of a document, move them around, open and close them. Only Office has that feature. I spoke to someone from Sun about that feature at their booth at a convention and they had no plans to implement it. Its bloatware, but it has everything. And it works.
braveheart 16y ago
Welcome to India. Most of the Government offices here are using openoffice (Indian railways,Electricity boards,Government schools,Post offices, etc). OpenOffice is a real threat to Microsoft here in developing nations.

83 points by monkeygrinder 16y ago

The video is pretty cringeworthy, but everything in it is true from my experience. Open Office as it is just isn't viable in a corporate environment. Staff members will despise it, poorly formatted documents from others won't display properly, training costs go up, it's a mess. Sure, most of it may be Microsofts fault for their .doc format or whatever, but fact remains, Microsoft Office is king in the corporate world. Not sure that this video was really necessary, but I guess it could be good for I.T. guys to show to their boss when he decides they should swap to Open Office.

nodata 16y ago
One by one: > Staff members will despise it, This isn't a point on its own. > poorly formatted documents from others won't display properly What is a "poorly formatted document"? > training costs go up Training costs only go up if you compare it against people already trained with Microsoft Office. > it's a mess. How? None of your points really said how, apart from the one below talking about .doc
- ErrantX 16y ago
  I use OO on Mint Linux here at work where everyone else uses Word '07 + Win 7. So here is my experience: > What is a "poorly formatted document"? Had an issue with this today in a word document with tables, OO has serious trouble displaying full page tables properly. There are lots of other subtle things, but I can't reliably produce documents in OO and send them to, say, a client as a word document without checking them directly in Word. > Training costs only go up if you compare it against people already trained with Microsoft Office. This is a non-trivial issue. And the same reason Linux is struggling to reach the corporate desktop. Re-training is, for an organisation, a quite complex business. Because of pay, contracts, organisation, finding the expertise, ticking all the legal/legislative boxes. Another way to consider this is that a lot of people now are doing computer literacy certificates (I think some are even internationally recognised qualifications now). Employers can accept these as saying "this person can use Word fine" which saves them the cost of training and support etc. If they switch to OO this goes away (at least for a while). >> it's a mess. >How? None of your points really said how, apart from the one below talking about .doc This was some MS brilliance at work; because while the Ribbon bar was initially hated you will generally find that within a corporate environment employees find it quite productive and usable (at least in my experience). The look is so radically difference OO feels awkward (or so I am told by someone who tried it). Generally speaking, looks, GUI and layout are the things that "turn users on" the most. a) they are familiar with the Word way of doing things and b) it has a really fancy looking GUI. This stacks up against OO. >> Staff members will despise it, >This isn't a point on its own. And yet, it is probably the main reason most organisations won't bother. Even if it takes just a few months for your staff to stop grumbling it probably doesn't feel worth it. And don't forget that the people signing off on such a swap (management) are "staff members" in this context - they will irrationally dislike it too. I like using OO, and find it a competitive piece of software. I even convinced my parents to use, and like, it! But I don't think it will break the corporate barrier for a while yet :)
  - Create 16y ago
    > Had an issue with this today in a word document with tables Please be kind and file an issue and provide the test-case. thank you.
    - ErrantX 16y ago
      It has been open for a while: http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=7911 http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=7911 (but looks like it may be fixed soon) EDIT: there seems no need to download Create (at this point he is on 0), it was a fair point!
      - polynomial 16y ago
        Fix my software without me having to tell you what's wrong, darn it!
- jasonlotito 16y ago
  > What is a "poorly formatted document"? I just wanted to touch on this from another angle. I use OO here at work on my Linux machine. My main issue with OO is it's styles support is incomplete, to the point where it's impossible for me to keep my documents style appropriately. It seems like a small thing, but I'd much rather handle styling via style sheets then have to manually edit the items. Here's the basic thing I discovered: OO gives you 80% of what you need from Office, but you still need that final 20%, and that's what Office gives you.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    Care to list the missing 20%? OOo developers may find the list useful.
    - jasonlotito 16y ago
      Obviously the 80/20 numbers are pulled out of my rear, but I feel it's an accurate description. That 20% is different for each person, too. For example, the last feature missing from OOo that I needed (and it's been reported, too) is styling for tables. Working with Internal API Docs, we use tables for parameter listings, and trying to make the tables readable and easier to use is difficult when you have to style each table individually.
      - rbanffy 16y ago
        Is that the Table/Autoformat thing?
        jasonlotito 16y ago
        No. When I first saw it, I thought "Yes, I found styling for tables!" but no, it's not. Basically, you are still setting each table an individual style. And if you are dealing with a lot of tables, this can be a lot of updates. Here is the open bug report: http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=11121 http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=11121
- eitally 16y ago
  Those actually are valid points, but he could have clarified it a bit. If people despise it and either A) start publicly berating the IT organization or escalating to the C-suite or B) stop being productive because they can't stand the software, it's a problem. Formatting is a problem, especially when collaborating on complex Word or PowerPoint documents. Excel & Calc are the most interoperable. Also interestingly, OO.o (I'm basing this post on the OO.o v3.3 beta) is more compatible with MS Office 2007 than MS Office 2003 is, so your mileage may vary depending on the status quo. Training is a problem, period. A lot of the menus -- and menu icons -- in OO.o are not logical, and it is extremely obvious that Microsoft invested mountains of cash in UX research. Not that MS Office is perfect, but since most people have been using it for a decade or more the incremental changes across versions make it much easier for them to familiarize themselves with subsequent updates. In a lot of ways, I'd compare the UX of the two like this: OO.o:MS Office::GIMP:Photoshop. The GIMP works great but is missing some functionality that a small subset of users find critical, and the multi-window UI is confusing. I could go on....
  - brudgers 16y ago
    > and it is extremely obvious that Microsoft invested mountains of cash in UX research Story of the Ribbon. http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX08/UX09 http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX08/UX09
  - dhimes 16y ago
    extremely obvious that Microsoft invested mountains of cash in UX research Maybe, but they also benefitted from being there first. When organizations made the switch, they realized they were going to have to train everybody (I was with a huge organization in the '90s when all of this went down). They were only going to train on one system. In our case, we picked MS Office. Thus, good UX or bad UX, that's the UX that everybody learned. Organizations were dumping huge resources just into training, and all of that went into learning how to use MS Office. They had a huge head start.
arethuza 16y ago
I think that should be Excel is king - I suspect you could probably replace Word and PowerPoint for most users and they wouldn't notice that much.
- matwood 16y ago
  I'm going to agree with you 100%. Word and PPT do not matter if the format changes a bit or whatnot (this already happens between different versions of Office). If you need to create a document that keeps perfect formatting, then you need to output in something like PDF. Excel is a completely different beast that has so many features it's very hard to cover them all for all users. A big one we use is using Excel as the front end to MSAS. Normally we would have had to design some user/reporting interface, but instead we were able to use Excel pivot tables to access the data directly on the server. Since all of the analysts are already familiar with Excel and its pivot table interface I just had to show them how to to point it to our MSAS instance.
- pasbesoin 16y ago
  What I've found interesting recently is working a bit with a very non-technical user, and finding that after a bit of introduction, Google Docs word processor is actually easier for them to use than Word. They don't need a ton of options and mostly just get confused by them. They just need some basic controls and good looking results, and Google Docs is beginning to realize this surprisingly well. Plus, they never "lose their file".
- Sherlock 16y ago
  Warning: user perspective ahead: I have to agree with this. I work as an analyst in an investment bank, and my tools include MsWord, Excel, PP and rarely a python script. MSWord and PP are completely interchangeable with they OO or google docs equivalents, but Excel is just another story, and its not just the learning curve, the software has a lot of features and capabilities that their competitors simply don't have (even for my less technically versed coworkers)
thwarted 16y ago
poorly formatted documents from others won't display properly What is the proper method to display a document that has been poorly formatted? A poorly formatted document looks like crap no matter how you display it. (I've found a correlation between the quality of the formatting the author did and the meaningfulness of the filename).

eitally 16y ago

I almost completely disagree with rodh257. A large percentage of corporate workers don't create complex content and rarely interact with complex files created by their colleagues. It is completely reasonable for a CIO to engage his staff on a research study to determine how feasible it would be to migrate a significant swath from MS Office to OpenOffice.org (or LibreOffice). I have personal experience with this.

ryanwaggoner 16y ago
There's a reply button below each comment so you can disagree in context.

ErrantX 16y ago

Hmmm. I don't think the comparison with GNU/Linux is 100% clear cut. At that time Linux was making huge inroads into the server market and anyone not recognising that was going to be laughed at. Microsoft doing so was probably not the biggest driving force in subsequent growth. The modern equivalent would be not recognising how much of a "threat" Google Chrome is to the other browsers with its brand and growth. Now, Open Office. I am not convinced that it is a viable threat to Microsofts corporate sales. I know personally of very few (big) corps who could reliably switch to OO - for all manner of reasons. It is a competitor, sure, and certainly making inroads into the home market. But a serious corporate threat? Not yet.

nhebb 16y ago

The OpenOffice site has a list of major deployments [1], and considering how long it's been available as an MS Office alternative, the list isn't that impressive. Several years ago the local school district switched to OpenOffice. I happened to notice it during a teacher conference, so I asked the teacher how she liked it. I was pretty surprised by how much she hated it (I mean, she really hated it.). Of course, that's just an anecdote, but what's more telling is that the school district is back to using MS Office. [1] http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.org_Deployments http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.or...

dhimes 16y ago
That's too bad. Schools are the one place that definitely should switch. The basic skills of writing, revising, presentation, and spreadsheet usage can all be taught just fine with OO. I switched to it (nearly) full time about a year ago and haven't had any problem. The idea that teachers make students pay for MS Office, simply because they can't be bothered to change, angers me. I don't know too many teachers who can actually use the finer functionality of MS office. A reluctance to switch must have another origin. The one place where I've had trouble with OO occurs when I sometimes teach using prepared presentations. I can modify them in OO, but if they have a bunch of A/V goodies baked in I'll use ppt player to present so that everything works easily. I usually run a show like that out of Windows, too.
- phr 16y ago
  Typical grade school teachers spend their days on their feet, rushing from one crisis to another, trying to help mainstreamed kids with serious disabilities, kids with chaotic home-lives and resulting learning and behavior problems, political mandates to teach to a standardized test regardless of what they think the kids really need, and so on. They don't feel they have time to figure out simple user interface problems like where did all these IE windows and tabs come from, let alone learn a new software suite.
  - dhimes 16y ago
    I understand, but what they need to "relearn" isn't that hard. The skills are quite easily transferred, especially the skills that they would use an office suite for in grade school. And especially the skills that the grade school students would use an office suite for. Like any population, some of the teachers are actually quite tech-savvy, and some will whine about anything. This is an area, however, where if I was superintendent I would make the switch and take a day or two of their "planning time" for training. It would be a good place for a "peer teaching" lesson plan. When we first got computers, we had to teach the teachers what it meant to "save," how to insert and eject the disk, and so on. Transferring to OO would be much easier than that initial training.

jacquesm 16y ago

Open Office is after many years of hard work still not up to snuff when compared with Microsofts suit. In part that's still due to the document formats not being really open (so there will always be implementation issues, some of the docs literally say 'do this like word 3 did it' or something to that effect). Another part is that it is simply a huge undertaking. The biggest advantage MS has over OO is Excel vs the Open Office spreadsheet, it's not even close. In spite of all that I don't use Microsoft stuff any more. The amount of features that I use in these packages is small enough that I can get by with a lesser program and not being locked in is an advantage as well, what sealed the deal is that microsoft does not sell a version for linux ;) Personally I think that the microsoft office suite has more to fear from things like Google Docs than from Open Office in the longer term.

kierank 16y ago
I know of a very well known company that runs complex visualisation software on Linux workstations because it performs better but dual boots Windows only for Microsoft Office (and nothing else)
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billybob 16y ago
I'm with you: I use OO, and I also think it's not great. I use it because the document format is open (I've lost documents in the past to format extinction), and because the software is free. I think it's not great because of tons of little bugs in the spreadsheet and presentation software. Like it doesn't remember my formatting for new cells in a column, even though I highlighted the whole column and applied it. Like I can't reliably move images around on a presentation screen. Those kinds of frustrations really add up. If I had advice for the OO team, it would be "don't add features. Grind away at bug fixes and usability testing until everything behaves as expected." If people said "OO doesn't have all the features of MS Office, but it works great for what it does," that would be a great milestone and would drive a lot of adoption, I think.

mwilcox 16y ago

I went to a Microsoft Roadshow recently where they were demoing Office Web Apps - he specifically said it was being targetted towards home users, because "people don't buy Microsoft Office for home use. They use Open Office or they pirate Microsoft Office." If they're saying that in a promotional event, then it really shows the threat MS see from OO. They own the corporate market, but they have trouble capturing the home market, especially with Google Docs

arethuza 16y ago
Microsoft Enterprise Agreements often give users the right to have a copy of Office at home.
- ZeroGravitas 16y ago
  Often only for "business" use. Everyone of course ignores this since it's ridiculous and unenforceable, but that'll probably be what it says.

jlgosse 16y ago

As someone who tried to switch, I can tell you that this is not the case. I remember doing a resume in OO.org, and then when I sent it to my friend with Word to print it off, it TOTALLY wrecked everything. Not cool.

drinian 16y ago
To be fair, my understanding is that different versions of Word will display the same .doc file differently. Also, you should really do that sort of thing as PDF. Quite easy, considering that OO has PDF export built in.
- blasdel 16y ago
  To be really fair, OO does the same thing, and forget about there being any kind of ODF interoperability between different FOSS packages. Hell, OO won't even save and reopen the same document unmodified on the same computer consistently.
  - ZeroGravitas 16y ago
    Saying OO does the same thing as MS Office, after someone says that Office does the same thing as OO is a bit redundant. So just to be extra redundant, let me repeat that saving and opening Word documents in Word doesn't guarantee it looking the same (e.g. if you un/plug a printer, it can change the margins and hence the paging of your document) so it's hardly a damning indictment of OO. If you want to enforce how something looks, you use PDF. That's what it's for. Word's .doc and ODF aren't designed for that, they're more like HTML in that people are terrified of trying to get some simple formatted text to display in two versions of the same Microsoft product, never mind some crazy free software with a silly sounding name. Meanwhile people are somehow managing to send Hi-Def video round the globe and watching it on hardware with the cheapest Chinese chips possible and generally not batting an eyelid because it's based on some kind of standard that's actually worthy of the name.
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xentronium 16y ago

I don't think OpenOffice is a threat, especially considering what Oracle does (virtually everything to kill it).

AndyKelley 16y ago
I've noticed exactly 3 things since Ubuntu's Open Office updated to Oracle's version: * It's about half as fast as it used to be. * "Oracle" logo on the splash screen (which remains on the screen for twice as long) * A message box that says "General error" any time I open a document. I kid you not: http://www.superjoesoftware.com/temp/general-error.png http://www.superjoesoftware.com/temp/general-error.png. Note that after I hit OK the document opens fine.

Maro 16y ago

OpenOffice is a horrible piece of software. When I switched to Mac, I tried MS Office 2008, and it was buggy as hell, so I've been using OpenOffice, which sucked too, but slightly less (on Macs). Now MS Office 2011 is coming out, bugs fixed, looks great, UI/UX is great, so I started converting all docs back to MS format and will ditch OpenOffice in a couple of weeks.

mattparcher 16y ago
I agree that Office for Mac 2011 is a large improvement, but it still doesn’t feel quite right to me. Have you seen Apple’s iWork suite? http://www.apple.com/iwork/ http://www.apple.com/iwork/ It provides the most commonly used functionality from Word, Excel, and Powerpoint in a simpler interface that I find much easier and pleasant to use (certainly much more Mac-like), at half the price of Microsoft’s Home/Student edition (a 30 day trial is available).
- Maro 16y ago
  I like Keynote a lot and use it all the time for presentations, I think it's better than Powerpoint. Also, compatibility isn't that much of an issue here because I just present from my Macbook all the time. But I prefer Word & Excel over the Apple/OpenOffice counterparts. Here compatibility also matters, as I routinely send Word & Excel files to lawyes, investors, etc. You don't want your files looking like crap with those guys =)

bld 16y ago

I wonder if the the biggest aid to OO adoption will be the new interface in Office 2007? OO basically clones the old Office menu-driven interface for everything, which I find easier to navigate by drilling down in context to find things. Switching to OO avoids the need to relearn how to use an office suite.

zokier 16y ago
I think that's a double edged sword thing. OOo while similar, is still somewhat different than 'old' Offices. You might think you know it well because it feels similar, but the little differences makes your work inefficient, as you try to use it like old Office. On the other hand, new Offices forces you to relearn some things, and because of the visual dissimilarity you (hopefully) don't try to apply your old knowledge to it. Note: I don't have anything to back this theory of mine up, so take it with a grain of salt.
akho 16y ago
My calendar says it’s 2010 now, so it’s a bit late for that (and the ribbon was awesome from the start).

tocomment 16y ago

You know what I hate about google spreadsheets. When you open a long spreadsheet it won't open at the last row. You have to scroll all the way down. Excel seems to handle this issue fine.

forgottenpaswrd 16y ago

OO is a committee designed bloatware mammoth. Office was created in low level coding, with the minimum possible dependencies (e.g excel reinvents the wheel so it does not include so many external libs). OO is a sluggish and high level clone with minimum attention for detail. Consumes too much memory and too much processor, like Netscape Navigator became, but hopefully(thanks to the license) it could be transformed into firefox. It will be very expensive to replicate the hard work that went into Office, only starting from scratch you could do it like Koffice, abiword or gnumeric did. You can't outperform Office in their strengths, but you can outperform it on things Microsoft is not an specialist, like multiplatform coding, cloud writing, and new interfaces(multitouch and voice). I don't use windows, and honestly I don't care about Office any more. There are very good alternatives, but not OO.

bpodgursky 16y ago

Open office is a threat only to those who use it.

stretchwithme 16y ago

I've used OO.o and worked with its code and when it came time to choose between it and Office, I had to choose Office. I needed the ability to manage sections of a document, move them around, open and close them. Only Office has that feature. I spoke to someone from Sun about that feature at their booth at a convention and they had no plans to implement it. Its bloatware, but it has everything. And it works.

braveheart 16y ago

Welcome to India. Most of the Government offices here are using openoffice (Indian railways,Electricity boards,Government schools,Post offices, etc). OpenOffice is a real threat to Microsoft here in developing nations.