Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat
blogs.computerworlduk.com
blogs.computerworlduk.com
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 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'm with you: I use OO, and I also think it's not great.
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.
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.)
It's scary that people may actually do and allow others to do it.
It is a lot scary that an average of 1 formula in 10 in Excel spreadsheets is wrong.
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.
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.
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.
[1] http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.or...
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.
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.
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.
> 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
> 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 :)
Please be kind and file an issue and provide the test-case. thank you.
EDIT: there seems no need to download Create (at this point he is on 0), it was a fair point!
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.
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.
Here is the open bug report: http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=11121
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.
I could go on....
Story of the Ribbon.
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.
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.
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".
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 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).
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).
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 =)
Also, you should really do that sort of thing as PDF. Quite easy, considering that OO has PDF export built in.
Hell, OO won't even save and reopen the same document unmodified on the same computer consistently.
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.
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).
Not to mention that PDF generation was probably added to word as a response to OO's capability.
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
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.
* It's about half as fast as it used to be.
* "Oracle" logo on the splash screen (which remains on the screen for twice as long)
* A message box that says "General error" any time I open a document. I kid you not: http://www.superjoesoftware.com/temp/general-error.png. Note that after I hit OK the document opens fine.
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.
Note: I don't have anything to back this theory of mine up, so take it with a grain of salt.