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327 Comments
- mglmouser, on 10/12/2007, -20/+114I dont want to sound as if my only digg comments are negative towards to Linux community (displaimer: i'm a Mac user/developer), but I think MS is right.
Last I checked, there still wasn't anything in OO that's comparable to Clippy. - Tux42, on 10/12/2007, -13/+91MS office has lots of features that Open office does not have. Unfortunately far to many of those "features" are just worthless junk, like that stupid idiot paper clip! ;)
- Chris_F, on 10/12/2007, -46/+86Bull *****. I stopped using MS office, now I only use OpenOffice 2.0.
- 10scott10, on 10/12/2007, -6/+34the reason the copy the interface is to make it usable. they use standard interface so more don't get frustrated trying to learn how use it and give up.
- peace, on 10/12/2007, -11/+34To be fair, IIRC, the interface of MS Word is copied from Lotus Word perfect and that of MS Excel is copied from Lotus 1-2-3.
- Protoss, on 10/12/2007, -4/+27Indeed the reason they copy is because they want to make it a 'free alternative to MS Office', anything different from MS Office, and it wouldn't be a viable alternative. Like uTorrent/Azureus, notice they look the same? Because it works.
- GeekyGirl, on 10/12/2007, -4/+24OpenOffice should be thought of as another office product, not as a rip off of Microsoft Office. I use both products, selecting one over the other depending on what I am trying to do. Like any product, OpenOffice has its strengths and weaknesses, but it also has some features (like export to PDF) that Microsoft Office does not have as part of the default product.
- pocketmonster, on 10/12/2007, -5/+25"To be fair, IIRC, the interface of MS Word is copied from Lotus Word perfect and that of MS Excel is copied from Lotus 1-2-3."
Uh, no. There's no such thing as Lotus WordPerfect. Lotus never had anything to do with WordPerfect. Lotus had Word Pro (formerly Ami Pro, formerly just Ami), and that was released a year before the first version of Word, but I wouldn't really say there was direct interface copying involved.
WordPerfect itself was very late to the Windows market (Word was on 2.0 by then) and never got a good start in the Windows world.
Lotus 1-2-3 was similarly late-to-market for Windows (Lotus was cheering for OS/2) and Excel had a good head-start there as well.
Some history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Word
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Word_Pro
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_1-2-3 - ammoniaslip, on 10/12/2007, -4/+23This is all ***** FUD for small businesses. Why spend money on licenses to install MSO just to be able to do some basic document editing and tables with Word/Excel?
I installed OO.org, saved myself the money and noone complains. It may not be as pretty as MSO, it may not be as glossy and "used friendly" (another word for "idiot-proof") as the stupid paperclip makes MSO to be, but it works. And that's good enough. - argoff, on 10/12/2007, -5/+22Lets not forget we are talking about Microsoft here, that company which in 2001 called Linux a hobby OS that would never be taken seriously commercially. Then in 2003 after Linux seized a huge chunk of the server space, called Linux their primary competitive threat.
- SoberEmu, on 10/12/2007, -10/+2710 years sounds about right to me. I think OpenOffice is most comparable to Office 97. Especially in terms of UI design.
- ScoTTeh, on 10/12/2007, -22/+36Actually they are probably close to right, ***** all has been added to Office since the 97 suite.
- qwerty967, on 10/12/2007, -3/+16They have to put it there because some other company holds the trademark to openoffice.
- kabz, on 10/12/2007, -10/+23Yeah, it can hard to tell the difference between all the different versions of MS Office in use. Of course, having to more or less standardize on the Office 97 format has been what enabled OpenOffice to cooperate.
There are a couple of things that can happen here:
1. Everything can more or less keep going the same way it has for 10 years, and OO will gradually improve and gather user share.
This is bad news for Microsoft, as erosion of Office will lead to an erosion of Windows. OO is pretty much already there for regular users, who, like me, probably don't use much more than the features of Word 2, basically fonts, headings, TOC, header/footer. (Think TEX style doc)
or 2. Microsoft can start using some of the features in Vista / Office 12 / TPM to lever people into upgrading to Vista.
I believe that they've already done this once, between Word 6.0 / Office 4.2 and Office 97, where there was limited interoperability which behaved remarkably like there was a counter that once it hit 5 it would trash your doc. I know it sounds paranoid, but it has the desired effect of forcing the company I worked at to ditch Word 6.0 ASAP and buy a crapload of Office 97 licenses.
Hilariously enough, as I now own a Powerbook, this also rapidly accelerated an already in progress migration from horribly unstable Macs to the very marginally less unstable Windows 95. - themuffinman, on 10/12/2007, -5/+17I exclusively use openoffice, mostly the writer (word) part, and have never found something that I can do in word and not in openoffice. In my mind the only problem with it is that it is slow.
- sporkwitch, on 10/12/2007, -3/+15Not only are most of thoes features worthless junk, but most of those pieces of worthless junk aren't just that, but actually intrusive and obstructive automatic formatting trash that makes you spend hours debugging your formats because of the autoformatting you can't disable.
My father makes a newsletter for his hiking club and he spends literally an entire weekend just fixing it after MS office ***** up all the formatting after he puts pictures into the boxes the template assigns for pictures..... - Dradis, on 10/12/2007, -5/+17Same here, I switched a few months ago. I refuse to pay $500+ for a software suite that I can just get a free equivalent of.
Critics of OO.org say it's slow.. maybe, but I'll take a little slowness to keep my cash in my wallet, ready for more deserving products than MS Office. - riah, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13$500 for clippy? Count me in!
- Odweaver, on 10/12/2007, -3/+13For the cost of microsoft office I can completely upgrade my system from and AMD athlon 2400+ to an AMD 64, along with a PCI express Graphics Card, along with more ram, and I would still be able to get openoffice.org and ABIword. So personally I'd rather upgrade my computer than buy microsoft office.
- veracon, on 10/12/2007, -5/+15Let's say they did just steal the UI. No innovation. That'd mean you could get the same for $500 and $0.
Choice? - chachi_arcola, on 10/12/2007, -3/+12Clippy was enabled by default in some versions of Microsoft Office, and came to be loathed by many users. It would pop open whenever the program thought the user could use its advice, and frequently the advice was unnecessary or useless in its context. Famously, typing an address followed by "Dear" would prompt Clippy to pop-up and say "It looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like help?"
It looks like you're trying to second-guess me again you evil over-coded piece of *****! Yes, I'm writing a letter. No, I would not like help you ***** bug-eyed wank! Who in hell's orange pastures needs help writing a letter? Did Microcock get so much feedback from dyslexic baboons who needed help addressing and closing letters that some code-monkey thought to himself that this would be useful? And stop tapping the inside of my monitor you Pixar reject!!
whoa momma, where'd that come from? - t0ny, on 10/12/2007, -5/+13I would say most people that use office don't use any advanced features. Like vb. What do most people do? Write letters make flyers. Can openoffice do that? Yes? Well then why pay $500? Even thou I could get ms office from my work for free. One of the higher level editions I still use open office :).
- philovivero, on 10/12/2007, -10/+17Meh. Whatever, Microsoft. OpenOffice works great for me. Print to PDF is an awesome feature. I can just send a PDF to all my co-workers so they can see the document just as I created it (I use OO Draw to create system architecture diagram documents).
All the parts work together well. The file formats are open. The software is free. If I send you an OO.o document that you can't read, you can download the software for free to view it. The reverse cannot be said (I run a 100% Linux environment, and if you send me a broken .DOC, I literally have to tell you to send it to me again in ASCII or some other format that Microsoft doesn't know how to screw up).
Microsoft Office is just useless to me anymore. I don't understand why anyone uses it. - leodavinci, on 10/12/2007, -4/+11I love OpenOffice, I use it for school all the time. I write my paper, save it as a .doc, email it to myself, and print it off at school with Word and i have no problems. I'm sure that Microsoft Office has features that OpenOffice doesn't, but the VAST majority of users don't use anything more complicated than Centering text.
- NOFXY, on 10/12/2007, -4/+11Lets assume (not saying it is or it isn't) that OO IS 10 years behind. The majority of users really wont notice the difference. They see a program to type, do spreadsheets, and make power point presentations. That's all they care about. They're not all geeks like us wanting the latest and greatest features.
- barbobot, on 10/12/2007, -4/+10some of us dont like stealing.
- mightymouse, on 10/12/2007, -7/+13Just an FYI, I've been testing Office 12, and I'm glad to tell you that that feature is IN. So are many other features that everyone has been requesting. I personally think that Office 12 looks like a winner.
- kewlceo, on 10/12/2007, -4/+10The fact that MS is even commenting on OOo speaks volumes. They realize it is a threat--if not today, then tomorrow surely.
- GruntboyX, on 10/12/2007, -5/+11Personally i am a fan Of MSoffice. I have given OO 2.0 and MSoffice equal time. When i was in college OO served my purposes very well. However, when i got into upper level classes and my enginnering documentation had to be "
"prettyfied" I ran into quirks with Open office. Also because i was the only one in my group using OO it created problems with headers and layout issues. In fairness, most problems were small, However type setting was critical and the swapping of the file between OO and Word caused nothing but headaches. I stubbornly tried to convince my teammates to switch, but they practically ganged up on me because they didnt want to change and couldnt share my feelings about using expensive software. Not to mention they viewed OO as screwing up the document and not Word. So to be compatible with everyone else and not having to deal with the headaches i just shut up and started using word.
After graduation i am required to test and analyze lots of product and thus i gather tons of CSV text delimited data. Instantly i tried using Calc to organize and compose charts and graphs. And i ran into 2 problems, the first problem was that everyone at work was using MSoffice. so i ran into the same problem of compatibility i did in college. The second problem was i actually wasnt impressed with Calc. Excel although clunky at times offered a smoother way to graph data. The best part is i didnt have to reorganize my data just because i wanted to graph it. In Calc i had to move the data around and the graphing options were limited. The more i used Excel the more profecient i have become with it, and although it crashes periodically, i know exactly why and i can work around it. My current nuance is that it can not graph more than 32000 data points per series...that is annoying since the spreadsheet goes to 655XX. So i guess the moral is. When in college and at home i use OO it serves my basic purposes perfectly. When working in groups or at work. I rather use MSoffice. The group is more productive because we are all familiar with the software, and actually some of those "rare and unused features are useful in a business enviroment". - dnaspydir, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9microsoft says a lot of things...
- martinus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Beeing "behind" does not say anything. By Microsoft's definition LaTeX is probably 20 years behind, yet it has layouting qualities that let MS Word look like a terrible joke.
- brhad56, on 10/12/2007, -6/+11Because OpenOffice is not microsoft.
- ModernTenshi, on 10/12/2007, -6/+11I've been using OpenOffice.org as my main office suite for a little more than a year now, and so far I don't miss Microsoft Office in the slightest. I can see where Microsoft Office would be a boon for large corporations, but for small businesses, students, and hell even your general computer user, OOo should be all they really need. I ran a workshop at my school that went over FOSS, specifically Firefox, OOo, and GIMP, and at the end gave each attendee a free CD with all the software I demonstrated on it. Nearly everyone who attended that I talked to later on said they absolutely loved it. One guy, literally the very next day, said that he had already given copies to three of his friends and his parents!
This is why I like FOSS: it actually lets me HELP the end user. No longer do I have to simply tell them, "well, you're using WordPerfect, and that's not compatible with the systems here on campus, so what you need to do is go and buy Microsoft Office," then tell them they have to spend $150 to do so (Student and Teacher Edition in this case). Or, I can say, "well, you're using WordPerfect, and that's not compatible with the systems here on campus, so what you can do is go download OpenOffice.org, free of charge, install it, and use that instead."
Now, out of those two scenarios, which do you think the user is: a) going to be more happy with; and b) likely to go through with? - chrisu, on 10/12/2007, -6/+11Even if M$ office does have features that OpenOffice lacks there are features on OpenOffice that I can't find in M$ office (such as the ability to convert to PDF). As for the stuff that OpenOffice lacks, is £300 per license really worth the missing features?
Also there's the issue of trust, OpenOffice is Open Source, MS Office isn't. - bradbeattie, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9Agreed. While it might be a modern office system in terms of functionality, it certainly sucks in UI design. I'm guessing that's because the open source movement mainly attracts programmers. Any idea how we can recruit more UI designers?
- Stinkbug, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9What about Open Office Draw? The cool thing about it is that I can create flow charts very easily. Draw little connector lines then move the boxes around and the connecting lines move and stay intact with the boxes that I connected them to. Maybe I just know how to do it, but I haven't found anything comparable in Microsoft Office.
- ModernTenshi, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6It's not a $150 student license. There is a version of Office called Microsoft Office 2003 Student and Teacher Edition. It's really meant to be sold only to, well, students and teachers. The supposed benefit is that this version allows you to install it on up to three machines. Microsoft claims this as a benefit because parents can buy it for their student, then turn around and install it on their machines as well.
I actually bought this before I started college, then learned about OOo. Needless to say, after messing around with OOo, I was pissed that I paid $150 for what I considered to be a comparable office suite. This is exactly what spawned my idea for the workshop that I talked about. I wanted to let students know that there was a free alternative out there that would allow them to type their papers, but they won't pay out of pocket to do so. I go to a private Catholic university, where tuition just for commuters is $20k a year (around $25k for resident students), and $150 could be used for two text books. By showing them there's an alternative that gives them what they need, but they can get it for free and legally share it with anyone they know, they learn about FOSS and its benefits, and hopefully carry that forward for the rest of their academic career.
This is why I say that software like OOo is perfect for students, home computer users and small businesses. It gives them basically everything they need in terms of office productivity software, but doesn't cost them a thing. Tell a college student something is free, and you have their undivided attention. - Elranzer, on 10/12/2007, -10/+14All new $500+ updates to Office has been "new theme, Frontpage bundled with every other release." Where's the innovation?
Good job adding Base in OOo 2.0 to cover the lack of an Access clone. All Open Office needs now is a Publisher-like program to make fun stuff, and a Mac-only PIM program like Entourage... and they'll be all set. - C00001, on 10/12/2007, -14/+18Really, though, who can live without Clippy on their desktop?
- jinexile, on 10/12/2007, -1/+57of7 is also linking to a media volume license which basically gives you the right to make a copy of your existing purchased software, you still need an the license for the extra PC you'll be installing it on as well as an a license for the original full version.
- exilio, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5OpenOffice.org is limited on features, but not by 10 years. MS Office is a superior product, but not worth $500. This should be shocking to anyone. In the absence of any real competition, MS is basically free to charge what they want...duh!
- technomom, on 10/12/2007, -4/+8Microsoft forgets the cardinal rule of the market. A free thing doesn't have to be better than the not-free thing it compete with. It only needs to be "good enough" to prevent the buyer from parting with his/her cash.
For myself, OO is good enough. My kids have been using OO at home for school projects and have no trouble switching to Office when they go to school because for 99.9% of the projects, they don't need the Of course, now that I've mentioned this to the teachers, they are considering switching to OO to save the school some real money.
JoAnn - svidrod, on 10/12/2007, -28/+32no way open office is even close to the functionality of office 12 or the GUI.
- duality, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Amen to this. As one of the posts above states, OpenOffice may run slow, but rather than shelling out $500.00 for the faster-running Microsoft Office, I personally would put that money toward buying a new computer that makes OpenOffice and everything else I use run faster.
As a student at a university that has a deal with Microsoft, I could very easily get the latest version of Microsoft Office for free. Not that it would do me much good after I graduated though; it's not like I can legally share it with the rest of my family.
OpenOffice isn't without its problems, but I'll still stick with the free route. Someone else also mentioned running OpenOffice from a flash drive, which I also do. Heck, I even installed OpenOffice on my grandmother's laptop. (Off-topic: I also installed Firefox and hid the Internet Explorer icon, and she's not the least bit bothered by any of these things.) - earlycj5, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Not that I don't use my fair share of MS Office but geez, if you're gonna slam a product as not being "up to par" then slam it for features it really lacks. It DOES track changes. Has since sometime in Version 1 when I started using it...
- milkfilk, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6OOo also provides an API to other developers. Say you want a webpage that can dynamically generated a Word .doc out of "blah blah". OOo gives you the tools to do this. While it is a user-land application, it is also doing things behind the scenes. And lots of other projects leverage the work that OOo has done. In this way, MS Office isn't so 'open'.
Else, there's lots of subjective opinion out here, I won't add to the noise. - LtData, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4As was said above, they have to. From the OpenOffice Distribution and Linking page:
Trademark
Because of trademark issues, OpenOffice.org must insist that all public communications refer to the project and software as "OpenOffice.org" or "OpenOffice.org 1.x," and not "OpenOffice" or "Open Office."
http://www.openoffice.org/about_us/OEM_and_CD.html - Petronski, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7The core feature set of Word is done, and has been done for years (since Word 2000, I'd say). There's nothing more to add. A word processor can only be so many things and Word has been "all that" for half a dozen years. Everything else since then has been interior decorating. (Yay clippy!?!)
Open Office Writer is ready for prime time now, the only thing it needs is faster boot time. - oooo, on 10/12/2007, -4/+8It can, just set it in the preferences to always save as .doc
- shakin, on 10/12/2007, -7/+11Let me know when Excel can save a CSV file without screwing up the format (removing quotes, etc). Also let me know when Excel can import a space-delimited file and give me control over where the fields are (selecting the size of each field in the original text file). I work with 150 MB+ documents that come in various formats, none of which are Excel. Excel is absolutely brutal at working with text data.
Everybody in my office who needs to work with this data has switched to OOo Calc. It does a great job. -
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