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.
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.
I use OO as well, because of Linux, but I dislike it very much. If I did not use LaTeX I would have switched back by now. I am nearly infinite calm person in general, but OO has cured me of this. It is the only program that has ever made me angry.
I'm with you: I use OO, and I also think it's not great.
I have tried to switch multiple times, but thad did not last for long. OO severely lacks polish.
I am lucky not to have either MS Office or OO installed on my machines, my simple needs are fully met either by TextEdit or Google Docs. If I want something more fancy I have a copy of iWork—once again I am lucky I don't exchange document often.
Frankly, I have little hope for OO.
The biggest advantage MS has over OO is Excel vs the Open Office spreadsheet, it's not even close.
Hear. Hear. The OpenOffice spreadsheet is very much of a kludge.
In spite of all that I don't use Microsoft stuff any more.
And despite of what you correctly said above, that is also my experience. I have been able to run OpenOffice for years now, and since it was updated to open .docx files and similar files from the newer generation of Microsoft products, I can get my work done with OpenOffice.
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.
Yes, my collaborators and I are finding more users for Google Docs and related products from Google every day.
P.S. I expect to switch to Linux on my next personal computer, as my son the computer science major has long urged. All the younger generation in my household use various distributions of GNU/Linux.
For home users, maybe true. Though I'd imagine many home users of Excel would be better served by Google Docs.
But it's a massive number of business users. Everyone at my company relies on at least one spreadsheet that has macros or complex pivot tables. It's a bit scary how much critical data is moving through Excel in the typical business. My understanding is that Wall Street relies pretty much runs on Excel.
Speed, too. You run into some pretty hairy Excel constructs, and the Excel team's optimizations really pay off.
It's been a number of years, but I used to spend a good part of my days in Excel. It has its own quirks -- may its inaccessible underlying formatting constructs be damned [1] -- but hey, can that sucker eat spaghetti (code -- so to speak).
(BTW, it may help to understand that many financial constructions are politically driven and otherwise idiosyncratic, to the point where you will never be able to code them up in a formal, regularized, and consistent construct. The "pointy haired boss" (whichever one, on whatever day) is always having you either insert or compensate for another "x factor".)
[1] As one, but not the only, example, try formatting 999D9 as text with leading zeros, some time. You'll find an odd result you eventually realize is the value with D9 expanded as an exponent. Like Fortran (so I was eventually told while mentioning this behavior -- never used the language, myself), Excel treats not just "E" but also "D" as demarcating an exponent. (Besides, you're formatting as "text", so why is it interpreting the end as an exponent? Although I can see where the leading zeros specification may throw it into a different mode.)
The customers for Excel are accounting firms buying 50,000 seats at a time. And the CFO probably uses it personally, so it needs to keep him happy. In contrast to most "enterprise" software, which is so bad because the people making the purchasing decision never have to actually use it themselves, they just get their PA to do it.
Managers love Excel. Some of them are really good with it. It's probably the wrong tool for their job, but it is a tool they know how to use. For managers it's the lingua franca of data manipulation. They view it the same way most of us view pipes and the Unix command line tools.
If you'd stopped at "Managers love Excel", I'd agree with you. Unlike the lucky duck up above, I've never seen a manager write a spreadsheet that included a single macro, active cell or calculation.
I've only seen managers use Excel to format columnar data, and then only because "Word" does such heinous things with text in the cells.
This is so true. The other big item missing from OO for Windows is the outlook equivalent (with email but also calendar, exchange, etc.) Evolution doesn't come close even for small business usage.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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).
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 =)
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.
That could happen even if you both had Word though. Different versions of Word could do it, if you used fonts your friend didn't have would do it, and there may be other ways as well. If you want someone else to print a document for you, the only reliable way is to print it to a pdf file yourself and send over the pdf.
Yes, it could happen but the likelihood of it happening between various Word versions as it happens from OO to Word is not nearly as bad. Your point is completely valid, but the severity of the problem isn't as great between native versions of Word as it is coming from OO or another doc type.
I beg to differ, I was going to update my fathers laptop to Windows 7 but he really needs office 2003 because his employees use it and most of their documents fail in office 2010. I've been wondering why, I know it's because they do something wrong with tabs and such but as a Word newb, I can't figure out what it is. This almost doesn't occur when he wants to use open office but of course other issues arise with OO.
There are back-compat features in Word to render files using old rules, so work has been done to help preserve your visual layout across versions.
That said, there's a ton of churn between different versions of Word, so there's no guarantee a bug-fix (or sadly, a regression) won't cause your document to display differently anyway.
FWIW, Word has PDF/XPS export built in as well. (I believe Word 2010 has it in the box, and Word 2007 has some silly downloadable component to enable this).
And, of course, with the free PDFCreator virtual printer on Windows, or the PDF generation builtins on Linux and OS X, there's no reason you can't use PDF from any app...
Not to mention that PDF generation was probably added to word as a response to OO's capability.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.