I don't think OpenOffice is a threat, especially considering what Oracle does (virtually everything to kill it).
Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat
21–30 of 73 posts
Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat
#22Open 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 O…
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.
Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat
#23As 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.
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.
Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat
#24Open 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 O…
How many people use the features in Excel that are missing from OO? Surely it's a small percentage of the total number of Office licenses out there.
Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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, O…
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.
Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat
#26As 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.
Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat
#27The 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…
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.
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.
Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat
#28OpenOffice 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.
Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat
#29Open 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 O…
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. Lik…
I'm with you: I use OO, and I also think it's not great.
Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat
#30As 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.
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.
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.