Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat

blogs.computerworlduk.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 73 posts

Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat

#31

Post by eli »

drinian wrote: post #24
jacquesm wrote: post #13

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 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.

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.

Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat

#32

Post by [deleted] »

jacquesm wrote: post #13

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 O…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat

#33

Post by bld »

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.

Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat

#34

Post by gaius »

drinian wrote: post #24
jacquesm wrote: post #13

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 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.

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.

Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat

#35

Post by pasbesoin »

eli wrote: post #31
drinian wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.)

Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat

#36

Post by thwarted »

rodh257 wrote: post #2

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…

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).

Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat

#37

Post by pasbesoin »

arethuza wrote: post #5
rodh257 wrote: post #2

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…

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.

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".

Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat

#38

Post by danielnicollet »

jacquesm wrote: post #13

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 O…

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.

Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat

#40

Post by ZeroGravitas »

blasdel wrote: post #30
drinian wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Post reply on HN