3 ms·

The quality and compatibility of Open Office has improved a lot since it's inception. So what you're advocating is a sliding scale of value which is reasonable.

by delano 14y ago

The quality and compatibility of Open Office has improved a lot since it's inception. So what you're advocating is a sliding scale of value which is reasonable. What you have not included is the TCO for MS Office which includes a lot of the same things like UI issues, work lost due to crashes, compatibility with other services (including Google docs), etc. Open source often lags behind, but it gets better over time and also often exceeds closed-source equivalents.

gecko 14y ago
I'm no MS fanboy. I have eight computers in my apartment. Exactly one runs a Microsoft OS, and it has an XBOX logo on its DVD drive. OpenOffice and LibreOffice come absolutely nowhere close to Microsoft Office in functionality, speed, UI, interoperability, customizability, or anything else. Since there's a pile of posts on the front page right now about how Excel is supposed to stink for business apps, let's turn to the logical alternative for trivial-to-create internal applications: Access. To which the Libre/OpenOffice alternative would be...okay, I guess Base? But is this thing a front-end to existing database systems, or is it its own database system? HSQL seems like the default; can I email this around? Why are the functions with this different than with the one Greg made that isn't on HSQL? And how do I script this, exactly? I'm used to VBA; can I use Python? Looks like maybe I can from my Ubuntu laptop, but then the guy down the hall on the Windows box can't? I could've pulled up similar examples from the word processor or the spreadsheet. LibreOffice Pivot Tables (formerly called something like Data Navigator or Data Pilot) are slower, vastly harder to use, and horribly underfeatured compared to Excel's Pivot Tables. The layout quality of LibreOffice's word processor compared to Word's is almost as bad as Word's to TeX's, which unfortunately also translates to the presentation module, making it easy for me to see from a mile away whether someone used Keynote, PowerPoint, a custom HTML/CSS solution, or LibreOffice. Open source improves, but ultimately, non-commercially-backed open-source improves in ways that make the developers' lives more interesting. You're looking at something that people work on in their spare time. If it's not scratching an itch, then why bother? And a lot of the user niceties that come in Microsoft Office are not things people want to work on in their spare time, because you or I, faced with a pivot table problem, will instead write a Python script, skipping the office suite entirely in the first place. If you don't need MS Office, great. More power to you. And there are many people who do not, so you've got good company. If you do need MS Office, then LibreOffice is a horrid substitute.

by delano 14y ago

gecko 14y ago

I'm no MS fanboy. I have eight computers in my apartment. Exactly one runs a Microsoft OS, and it has an XBOX logo on its DVD drive. OpenOffice and LibreOffice come absolutely nowhere close to Microsoft Office in functionality, speed, UI, interoperability, customizability, or anything else. Since there's a pile of posts on the front page right now about how Excel is supposed to stink for business apps, let's turn to the logical alternative for trivial-to-create internal applications: Access. To which the Libre/OpenOffice alternative would be...okay, I guess Base? But is this thing a front-end to existing database systems, or is it its own database system? HSQL seems like the default; can I email this around? Why are the functions with this different than with the one Greg made that isn't on HSQL? And how do I script this, exactly? I'm used to VBA; can I use Python? Looks like maybe I can from my Ubuntu laptop, but then the guy down the hall on the Windows box can't? I could've pulled up similar examples from the word processor or the spreadsheet. LibreOffice Pivot Tables (formerly called something like Data Navigator or Data Pilot) are slower, vastly harder to use, and horribly underfeatured compared to Excel's Pivot Tables. The layout quality of LibreOffice's word processor compared to Word's is almost as bad as Word's to TeX's, which unfortunately also translates to the presentation module, making it easy for me to see from a mile away whether someone used Keynote, PowerPoint, a custom HTML/CSS solution, or LibreOffice. Open source improves, but ultimately, non-commercially-backed open-source improves in ways that make the developers' lives more interesting. You're looking at something that people work on in their spare time. If it's not scratching an itch, then why bother? And a lot of the user niceties that come in Microsoft Office are not things people want to work on in their spare time, because you or I, faced with a pivot table problem, will instead write a Python script, skipping the office suite entirely in the first place. If you don't need MS Office, great. More power to you. And there are many people who do not, so you've got good company. If you do need MS Office, then LibreOffice is a horrid substitute.