Just downloaded it. I cannot understand why anyone would buy MS products when this is free.
--
Dirk
http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.onetribe.me.uk/wordpress/?cat=5 - Our podcasts on weird stuff
Well, a number of governments think different. And the way I heard it, it is MS who has been forced into compatibility with ODF
--
Dirk
http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.onetribe.me.uk/wordpress/?cat=5 - Our podcasts on weird stuff
We've been using a mix of OOo (mostly the version at the moment) and MS Office at my company since OOo was still Star Office. There are still a few machines that have MS Office, which is useful for the odd difficult document (sometimes there are layout issues when importing MS documents with complex tables or numbering, and word documents with embedded excel spreadsheets don't work). But it's been a good while since we bought any new MS Office licenses. We choose OOo for a number of reasons:
It's a standard, and it uses standard document formats.
It's better than newer MS Office for working with older MS Office documents.
It works on any machine, any OS, any Windows version, any service pack.
We can upgrade when as and when *we* want, not when some other company dictates. And the upgrade is independent of everything else on the system.
We don't have to install "security updates", or worry about macro viruses (the only viruses we've had at our company were macro viruses).
We don't have to suffer a f***ed up software update system that can lock up a PC for hours during automatic MS Office updates even though updates were explicitly turned off.
We can work together with our customers and partners that use OOo as well as those that use MS Office.
We can freely mix and match languages for the interface and for dictionaries.
We can export to pdf directly from OOo, giving much better pdf's than you can get from MS Office + Acrobat Distiller, much faster.
Employees can install OOo freely, legally, safely, and easily on their home machines.
Oh, and it's free.
Even if OOo and MS Office were the same price, I'd still prefer OOo. I have a number of licenses for MS Office (or at least MS Word) that came "free" with PCs over the years - I've never bothered installing them.
You might have a typo there, but it's true that MS Office has poor compatibility with older MS Office versions!
MS certainly don't *care* about compatibility with anything non-MS. But they *do* care about large markets. ODF is an ISO standard, and is the mandated standard for steadily more governments and official bodies around the world. OOXML is a flop - MS are aware of how badly they messed it up, and what a PR failure it was. The continuing process of ISO ratification serves only to destroy ISO's reputation - it will not make OOXML a real standard. Added to this, the OOXML quasi-standard at ISO is not the same as the OOXML used by the latest MS Office versions. In fact, MS sees it as easier to implement ODF support than to support ISO-OOXML (perhaps because the former is a proper specified and documented format). MS has made a tactical withdrawal on formats, and wants people to standardise on ODF using MS Office (once they've got the next version out, of course).
I maintain that they do care. They try to make it so that the new version can open the files of the old version but the old version messes up on the files from the new version. This way when one copy of the new version is brought on site, nearly every copy needs to be XXgraded to the new version.
At this point I have written a fair amount of code in the OO basic. I really hope they never decide to change it massively.
1) Familiarity. If you have 10 friends and only 1 use OO and the other 9 use MSO, if you're not a particularly "software adventurous" type yourself, you'll figure that -- regardless of how good OO is -- certainly MSO must be pretty decent, so why not go with the "tried and true" that's far more well-known/easier to find support for/etc.?
2) Outlook and Access. OO doesn't really compete in these areas yet. (There is no bundled e-mail client, and which OO Base is a perfectly good database, it has nowhere near the app design tools that Access does... although over time I expect it'll become a more and more viable alternative.)
3) Cost of change. For individual use, OO can make a very strong vase. For commercial usage, you're looking at spending (potentially a lot of) time re-training and changing over. When you're paying people for their time, these costs can easily exceed the cost of annual maintenance on MSO. (Long-term, OO would be cheaper, but few businesses these days look more than a year or two into the future!) Perhaps ironically, the more sophisticated the business, the more expensive it can be to change: Companies that use the most sophisticated features of MSO (tightly integrated databases, lot of Visual BASIC code behind the scenes, SharePoint integration, etc.) will require the most effort to switch. Of course, this particular issue isn't specific to OO vs. MSO -- it's the same reason a lot of companies still use kitsch like ORCAD Capture when there are far better, cheaper alternatives available.
4) Preference. OO is certainly a good package, but so is MSO -- some people will just prefer MSO's interface (especially in MSO 2007, where the "ribbon" toolbar idea has really caught on -- I fully expect that OO will copy this in another version or two!). MSO in the "student" version is something like $120, and Office Professional with the educational discount is $199. For many people, that's not a huge amount of money to exercise your personal preference.
I'm very much a proponent of OO, but I can understand why people wouldn't want to bother switching away from MSO if that's what they're familiar with. What I would like to see is schools and colleges promoting the use of OO -- when you start multiplying $120 by the number of students out there who buy a copy of MSO every year, you're starting to talk some real money... and some of it is going to be taxpayer's money! While some people argue that MSO should be used in schools people that's what employers use, I'd argue back that relatively few students come out of college with more than a cursory knowledge of MSO. That is, of everyone coming out of college, I'd wager that well under
1% ever wrote a macro or some VBA code for MSO. As such, in almost all cases, they're "lost" no more than perhaps a week's worth of time if they need to "play around" with MSO after coming from an OO background. Furthermore, if employers see that students are suddenly starting to list OO experience on their resumes, they'll be much more likely to start adopting it in-house as well.
For all the hoo-hah we make in this country about "expressing your individuality" and "creative freedom," in actuality most people are rathr risk adverse and prefer the well-trodden path, even when the "risk" in no more than killing some time trying out new software.
I don't know about David, but I'd admit that -- complicated MSO documents generally require some "tweaking" when imported into OO, which is pretty much par for the course when any package imports another package's complex documents. (OO proponents will point out here the OO, however, sometimes does a better job of importing older MSO documents than newer versions of MSO itself!)
Can you eleaborate on this? I've only used Calc for relatively simple documents, but I've yet to see it flounder. (I'm not talking about importing MSO spreadsheets, though -- I've always started from scratch in OO Calc.)
I think David has a valid point that, as an integrated feature within OO, PDF quality tends to come out a little higher than using a generic PDF printer.
And OOo is smart enough to preserve a hyperlink when the document goes to PDF -- a PDF printer can't do that.
--
Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com
Do you need to implement control loops in software?
"Applied Control Theory for Embedded Systems" gives you just what it says.
See details at http://www.wescottdesign.com/actfes/actfes.html
Amen. With the economy imploding, corps also will be watching every penny.
This ignores M$'s new "Ribbon" default interface which will have to be adapted to by old users "upgrading". The question becomes: If someone has to learn a new interface anyway, why would he PAY for the imposition?
The ribbon isn't difficult to use -- and long term may even be a win --, although it certainly causes some amount of lost time initially as each user ploddingly figures out where their feature menu items have been moved to.
Some companies probably figure that if they wait, e.g., 2-3 years to upgrade to MSO 2007, many people will have done some "re-training" on their own time anyway, having purchased a newer version of MSO for home use or friend a child or whatever. I was surprised that even in the tiny land of southern Oregon here, the community college has already switched over to MSO 2007 (and Vista too).
Yes. M$ shot themselves in the foot with their compatibility problem. Last week the accountant for a company of 40 people was weeping blood about the potential update costs to (yet again) keep the company computers in peace and harmony. Friday (with great trepidation!), he moved to OO. Customers can be abused only to a point and it looks like M$ overweened itself. Last known use of Word may well be to write their own epitaph.
99% of my use of OOo is word processing. As far as I can tell, it does everything MS does. Or at least, I have not found anything I cannot do that I want to do (except import PDFs).
--
Dirk
http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.onetribe.me.uk/wordpress/?cat=5 - Our podcasts on weird stuff
I use OO at home but it is kinda old (1.1.4) Does Calc nowadays support engineering format for numbers? So xxxE-6, yyE-9 etc instead of x.xxE-4, y.yE-8? That is something I missed from Excel.
ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.