Real quality of OpenOffice.org

[benjamimgois]

This article was posted recently on Planet Ubuntu, and it make a very realistic comparison between the actual state of Openoffice 3.1.1 and MS Office 2007.

http://blog.lassehavelund.com/2010/openoffice-org-is-a-piece-of-crap-or-is-it/

And you, what do you think ?

[Icehuck]

This article was posted recently on Planet Ubuntu, and it make a very realistic comparison between the actual state of Openoffice 3.1.1 and MS Office 2007.



And you, what do you think ?

What happened to Excel?

[Zoot7]

Voted yes.

Openoffice isn't *bad* for the basic say, home usage but when it comes to advanced features, Office 2003 (I see no point to expend money on '07) blows it out of the water in pretty much every aspect.

[beetleman64]

I personally don't really use Impress/PowerPoint much, but I find Impress presentations to be very slick and well done. Personally, I haven't used sound in Impress, so I haven't been able to test that out.

I think he was very unfair on Writer by testing it on mathematical formulae alone. After all, surely that's what OpenOffice Maths is for. I have found no problems with OpenOffice either on Windows or Linux. Full stop.

I would also like to add that I personally hate the ribbon interface and paying through the nose for M$ Office too.

[beetleman64]

Voted yes.

Openoffice isn't *bad* for the basic say, home usage but when it comes to advanced features, Office 2003 (I see no point to expend money on '07) blows it out of the water in pretty much every aspect.

I won't deny that Office is probably the superior suite for advanced functions, but surely only a small percentage of people actually use them? Seems a rather steep amount of money for features only a certain number of us will use!

[benjamimgois]

At the beginning i have resisted the change of the Ribbon interface of office 2007, but after sometime using it, i realy think that it's a revolution on the MS office suite, it's very easy and intuitive to use. Right now i'm running MS Office 2007 on Ubuntu with CodeWeavers CrossOver and it's running smoothly.

[Queue29]

I want to see the comparison vs. OneNote

[Zoot7]

I won't deny that Office is probably the superior suite for advanced functions, but surely only a small percentage of people actually use them? Seems a rather steep amount of money for features only a certain number of us will use!
True.
But even in my case when I want to prepare a technical report Openoffice writer falls flat on its face for me. For instance I find the spell checker in Openoffice terrible and I find things like adding a Table of Contents, Page numbers, Headnotes/Footnotes a lot more convoluted than in MS Office.
Yeah, Office is damn expensive, but there's nothing really to match it.

[Techsnap]

OpenOffice.org is okay for basic home use if people can't afford Microsoft Office. Anything other I wouldn't use it at all, I'm going to continue using it here until Microsoft Office 2010 comes out then I'm going to buy Office.

[mister_pink]

\LaTeX ftw. I can't stand using anything else anymore, it just looks so much more pro.

However, on the openoffice front, its true it can be a real pain sometimes. Configuring charts in calc still takes me ages to get right each time. And I never did work out how to make a chart separate and full screen (easily done in excel - you just choose location -> new sheet in the last step of the wizard).

[Hagar Delest]

The real power of OOo is first its open format that gives you back the ownership of your documents and the data they contain.

Second, it's styles (especially in Writer). Even MS Office doesn't handle styles correctly. For long documents, it's far more powerful.

For the rest, is mostly caused by the fact we all have been somehow trained on MS Office before knowing about OOo. So there is a background easing the use of MS Office I guess.

[koleoptero]

I agree with most of the points raised in the article. I didn't have any trouble with openoffice's equation editor though. I've done a lot of homework in it for my uni.

[JSeymour]

I can't vote, because I rarely use a word-processor, even more rarely the presentation stuff, and only occasionally use a spreadsheet. But my users at work (I'm a systems & network admin) usually end-up asking for, and usually getting, MS-Office after they try OOo for a while, citing the latter's difficulty-of-use. Not all of them, but a goodly number.

But I can tell, from what little I use them (mostly to open documents others send to me) that the format compatibility part is getting better-and-better.

OOo has come a long way: From little more than a curiosity, much like Linux originally was, to a quite usable app. The OOo team is to be commended. Keep up the good work!

Jim

[k64]

Actually, they interviewed minors! I am one of the rare exceptions.

[squilookle]

At the beginning i have resisted the change of the Ribbon interface of office 2007, but after sometime using it, i realy think that it's a revolution on the MS office suite, it's very easy and intuitive to use. Right now i'm running MS Office 2007 on Ubuntu with CodeWeavers CrossOver and it's running smoothly.


I'm the other way round. I was impressed by the ribbon at first, but then when I started to try and do more advance stuff I found it got in the way. I prefer the old menus.

[JDShu]

While Open Office Spreadsheet is clearly inferior to Excel, these two particular applications in the article work fine for me. Writer has vastly improved since a couple of years ago and most importantly, does not lose formating when converting to doc format. For me, Writer and Word do the same things equally well. Impress I use much less, but the article is ridiculous when it compares two different backgrounds and claims that PowerPoint is more professional looking. I quickly opened up impress and looked through the default backgrounds to find something equally "professional". Not to mention this has nothing to do with program quality.

[insane_alien]

i'll admit openoffice can be hard to get the hang of but i haven't touched another office suite for quite some time(okay, i had to do vba programming in excel 2007 for a class and i occasionally check compatabiltiy by opening it in word 2007 but thats it).

i'm comfy with openoffice, with 2007 i don't know where half the features are.

this said, i'm starting a job on monday where i will be required to use office 2003 regularly so i guess i'll have to learn it.

[cguy]

I agree that MS's office suite is superior to that of Sun's Oracle's, but the test for Writer/Word consisted of writing equations?! Give me a break (and a long one)!

You can write equations in Writer in a similar way you do in LaTeX and it's MUCH faster/convenient than using the mouse in Word. And it's really easy to get used to!
That's how you write lots of equations, not by using the GUI.

If you don't write too many of them, you can bare the GUI on those rare occasions.
This is definitely not a good way to compare the two products.

The tests should have consisted of writing an article and setting up the layout, formatting the content, inserting stuff etc.
That's the essence of both Word and Writer, not writing equations.

[RabbitWho]

When we got our computer 10 years ago we had to pay 100 euro for Microsoft Office, just for MS word and Excel (which was basically just a table for my mother as we couldnt use the formulae anyway)
100 euro!
Open office is free!
It does everything we need, and some of those things it does better (for instance it's much easier to position pictures on the page and move them around without messing up your formatting)

[madnessjack]

All very valid points. But as I'm sure many will or have pointed out, one is better value for money, and I'm sure the other has had more investment in it's development.

[pizza-is-good]

I want to point out that the students in the research had probably used MS Office before and were used to it, but had never used OOo and probably spent a lot of time figuring it out.

I like OOo, I have not had any problems. Yes it is not the ultimate thing, but it gets things done quickly and very professionally for me. It crashes less than MSO, and uses less resources than MSO. I've been using it for 1.5 years and I am happy with it.

[scouser73]

I want to point out that the students in the research had probably used MS Office before and were used to it, but had never used OOo and probably spent a lot of time figuring it out.

I like OOo, I have not had any problems. Yes it is not the ultimate thing, but it gets things done quickly and very professionally for me. It crashes less than MSO, and uses less resources than MSO. I've been using it for 1.5 years and I am happy with it.

I agree, and will add that such posts about the OpenOffice versus Microsoft Office or any posts like that are subjective. You either like it and want to use it or you don't, I just don't see the point in seeing how one application fairs against another.

That being said, OpenOffice has always been exceptionally good.

[chewearn]

In the past, I had used MSOffice 2003 exclusively in my job (a corporate requirement) and I have no problem with it. Making presentations, documents, and spreadsheets (with complex formula and macros).

More than a year ago, I no longer worked in a corporation and stopped using MSOffice. I now rely exclusively on OpenOffice for presentations, documents and spreadsheets (also with complex formula and macros).

The learning curve for the shift is hardly noticeable.

One thing I don't like about OpenOffice in Ubuntu though is the non-intuitive toolbar icons. I could never find anything quickly. OTOH, I don't have this problem with the same OpenOffice toolbar in Windows. So, I think the icons used in the Ubuntu installation need to be looked into.

[frncz]

I found Calc to be unusable for large spreadsheets (so slow, it hangs) that I nearly reverted to Excel, until someone pointed me to gnumeric, which is very fast and seems to have all the functionality I need. Cleverly produces PDFs of graphs with a right click. I still don't need Excel.
Try it out.

Mike