A Month Without Microsoft Office

I rarely use the MS Office Suite. I am really happy with Open Office. It has done everything I have needed it to.

I just reformatted my hard drive and I didn't even bother to install MS office, because I never use it. I just use OpenOffice.org

I'm a very unsophisticated user...spreadsheets are a mystery to me ...and I never do presentations.

But Open Office Writer seems robust and very capable of handling my highly compressed Atlantis software .rtf files including preserving tables of contents and jpeg graphics really well.

And I really like being able to export to PDF and still have working tables of contents.

My machine came with Word Perfect...and it will continue to gather digital dust..especially with Open Office on board now.

Frankly speaking, OO.o is not quite upto the mark especially when you compare it to Microsoft Office 2003. Its got fewer features then its proprietary competition. Plus, support is almost good as a zero with a capital Z. bottom line. Microsoft Office is much better.

OK, I'll feed the troll...

I can't speak for the features of OO.o versus MS Office 2003, but are you serious about the support? What support do you get with MS Office? The right to search the net (including MS KnowledgeBase) and see if your problem has been solved by anyone else. What support do you get with OO.o? The right to search the net (including the complete bug database) and see if your problem has already been solved by anyone else. How is MS Office better?

I've written my dissertation using OOo Writer. I'm not a really experienced word processor, so I don't have any comparisons to make. I can say it has worked, at least. The problem with support is a real one, as I can attest from experience. I could not even find someone I could pay to help me, so I had to just try and figure it all out on my own. I've used some pretty complex layouts. The worst problem I've run into is that I've had to use some page-centered elements on some pages. This requires the use of frames and, furthermore, to get the right positioning, anchoring those frames to the page. This is where the nightmare starts. Once you anchor a frame to a page, you lose any possibility of adding pages preceding the page-anchored frames page(s). Your document will become a formatting mess if you try this. Trying to insert pages before those page-anchored frames will result in pages getting inserted AFTER them.

@Mitul

Office 2k3 may still be better in some ways, but the question any user must ask themselves is:
Is Office 2k3 360$ better than OoO 2.0

For many, many users, the answer is likely to be "no"

There used to be a time people chose Microsoft because they were "good enough"... Unlike some other things, they don't have a monopoly on that.

(And besides, for some things, Openoffice.org is simply better than MS Office...)

Money talks and BS walks. OO.o works just fine, I one wants to.

Open-Office had a more open equivlant of InfoPath call XForms. This is a non proprietry standard for XML data entry so expect support from open standards complient browsers as well.

Microsoft Office ties in with SharePoint, which more people seem to be using, thoguh SharePoint really is not a mature product. It has a lot of usability problems at the moment. There are more open alternatives for central document management and versioning, community discussion and similar.

Microsoft's updates to their products seem more and more intended to increase lockin and increase the cost of leaving. It would be best to move away before that cost of leaving becomes too great rather than wait and be even more tied in.

I've been using openoffice since I switched to linux ... Now I just install it everywhere because Sometimes MS office gives problems concerning language support ... I just download and install OpenOffice in the language of the user. Saves them money and me effort.

>>Anonymous wrote:
>>I've written my dissertation using OOo Writer.........
>>This requires the use of frames and, furthermore, to get the right

Sometimes it makes more sense to avoid Microsoft Word altogether and write your presentations in simple html and CSS (You can read up CSS in 30 minutes) with CSS you do not need frames and you get better control of your document. A smail free editor called Nvu will allow you write html without understanding any coding.

Another advantage that html presents is that the file size is smaller by a factor of 3. Microsoft uses more than 75% of your document for encryption and obfuscation ....just to keep competing editors at bay. I recently did a small presentation in Word and the same thing in html. My Word document was 186KB but my html document was 67kb. The same fonts, the same operating system, the same look and feel.

I use both oo.o and ms office and while i love open source just as much as the next guy. i agree with mitul that for some people oo.o might still not make the cut. (a) calc is not as mature as excel (most obviously data pilot is nothing compared to pivot tables) and fewer complex function (b) the bibliographic tool inbuilt in oo.o is nonexistent. Once you have used a third party add on like Endnote or Reference Manager you could never switch to oo.o until these third party addons at least support oo.o
But i agree many people might have never heard of pivot tables or Endnote before this post and for them oo.o might be just perfect but not for everyone.

I haven't used MS Office for years or even Windows for that matter. I use Open Office and Linux and don't miss the world of crashes and viruses one bit. Cya Bill! Hope you enjoy the tail lights of my wallet speeding away from you!

I use OpenOffice instead of MS Office whenever I get the opportunity because it is quite simply a better product. With MS Office I spend more time fighting all the things the product wants to do for you automatically, and which invariable are what I don't want to do. Also MS Word still stuffers badly from goofy formatting glitches where deleting a piece of text or an empty line causes the format of the next paragraph to change, etc. I never run into the problems with OpenOffice, it is a much more intuitive product to use.

To people who claims that you can't get support for OOo as
Sun is offering 24/7 technical support for StarOffice and OpenOffice.org software. If you want support for free, there is mailing lists and forums att openoffice.org

ACK.

Used OOo 2 since January (where it was pretty unstable, btw) in a "Production environment" (student-run organisation).
Except for the stability which has greatly improved since then, I think OOo 2 is a worthy contender in the "typewriter on steroids" cases.

I am pretty sure, many of those companies using a computer more or less as a typewriter reprlacemnt will ask themselves, "why pay lots of money for Microsoft Upgrades that offer little or no value to us?"
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the "cool things" (tm) in MS Office 2003 were not in the "typewriter" field, i.e. those companies might restructure their processes in order to take advantage of those features.

Bottom line (my opinion):
OpenOffice.org 1 imposed the question: "Why not OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office?"
OpenOffice.org 2 will impose the question: "Why using MS Office instead of OpenOffice?"

Earlier versions of OO (Star Office) were plagued witn an ugly interface and ugly fonts, but they were still very functional.
I have been using OpenOffice and Abiword for years now and cannot understany why anyone would pay for M$ Office.

"Also MS Word still stuffers badly from goofy formatting glitches where deleting a piece of text or an empty line causes the format of the next paragraph to change, etc"

I use Word on a daily basis and there are dozens of instances where this happens and shouldn't. The way formatting codes are handled by the MS Office apps just seems to be braindead.

There are more valuable features in OO and StarOffice 7 than in MS Office. For my business we can output anything into pdf format without needing to use extra software, so quotations, reports and everything can be sent to the clients as pdf.

Draw is also fantastically useful. The world's biggest engineering drawing package is AutoCAD and Draw can import an AutoCAD graphic as read-only and allow the user to either include the drawing in the report / quote etc or make a pdf document or a jpeg of it.

MS Office just doesn't come close.

I have used versions of OpenOffice at home since I first herd about it 2 years ago. Now I use it for my home business. OpenOffice does everything needed, and I will convert to v2.0 for the needed database program once out of beta. I have yet to find a option I need that is not in write, calc, impress or math.

Response to Mitul:

More features in MSO2003? How many regular, non-macro-writing users really need all the features? If you are a professional doc-worker, then yes, you may want features. If you just want to bloody format pages of text and graphics, free OO is more than adeqaute.

And support? Yes MS can support you, but for a fee. Hope your problem isn't "advanced", that'll really cost ya, probably as much as the software you bought. The only people using the support services have large enterprise agreements. Haven't ever had enough issues, though, to call myself. You can't get satisfactory answers on why a irreproduceable crash just occured.

Response to Groove:

I notice you attack Mitul for not explaining features. And you overlook the comment about pivot tables and bibliography that somone else raises. Nice!
Almost everyone in the scientific/research community swear by the bibliographic tools and I for one can totally appreciate what Lu-Tze says. I have done both. Bibliography by hand and with a third party add-on and while the thrid party add-on costs almost as much as Office itself, I think it is worth its price along with that of Office. In the interest of full disclosure: I am at an academic institution and office costs me only 70-odd dollars. If your justification for mot having features is that you do not need them, then you ought to compare writer with MS Works. And don't give me this "regular non-macro-writing users" thing because most softwares are not designed for the home user, they are developed for highend power users and eventually "regular" users start using them.

I've been on OO.o since build 638 and StarOffice 5.2 before then. So far, so good. OO.o 2.0 Beta still has a slight stability issue, but I find it no worse than any version of MS Office that I've ever used (I stopped at MS Office XP and went to OO.o). In the very early editions of OO.o, there were a few very complex MS Word documents which OO.o wouldn't display all of the graphics. However, that got fixed in OO.o 1.1Beta, and even that occasional glitch no longer manifests itself. I *love* the built-in PDF exporter!!

I am a network engineer in a K-12 academic environment in the USA. My school district--one of the larger ones in this country--is most definitely a "Microsoft shop," so you can imagine the types of complex MS Office documents that I get sent to me. :-) One spreadsheet even has embedded Visio diagrams! OO.o has been able to open even that one perfectly since v1.0.0.

As for the "there's no Outlook" criticism, well, so what? Ximian Evolution already does the job in fine form. I use Evolution to access my MS Exchange Server email and have been for the last two years.

Is OO.o perfect? Of course not; no software is. For what I do (writing reports, making presentations, manipulating data in spreadsheets), is it better than Microsoft Office? Yup. No question.

Well all you folks ! MS Office sure has been the king of the hill for sometime now. But people should realise that life is not standing still for anybody not even MS, MS Office or its boss Bill Gates. So I think the time has come for MS to bend the way the wind is blowing and not try to change its direction as they seem to be doing with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts decesion to dump proprietory formats for open standard documents. Goliath ultimately fell. To be replaced by something new and better (in this case 'free' as in both meanings ).

I am a consultant in the IT field. 6 months ago, I reformatted my laptop and installed Linux and Open Office. Open Office is perfect. Export to PDF in the click of a button, connectivity, interopability...

Perfect!

Open Office 1.3 together with Kontact do everything I need, and Kontact syncs with my Palm Pilot as well as outlook did back in the dark ages.

Open Office 1.3 together with Kontact do everything I need, and Kontact syncs with my Palm Pilot as well as outlook did back in the dark ages.

Bye bye Bill Gat?s, bye bye micro$oft!

I edit, layout, and send to print a monthly newsletter for my kids' k-12 school. People send me MS formatted stuff all the time and I can always open it with OO.o on Linux or MS XP.

Open Office has a styles feature that blows MS Word away. I can create styles on the fly and easily apply them anywhere in my document. I have four styles I use on my newsletter and the control of alignment, spacing, font, indentation, etc. is dead easy.

MS Word is all about format lock-in. Open Office is all about freedom. Look for the next version of MS Office to break Open Office's ability to read and write MS Office formats.

Massachusetts is doing the right thing. The data belongs to the people and should not be locked into one vendor's hardware.

I have found the OpenOffice.org database product (Base) to be quite buggy and difficult to use. My biggest gripe there is it's quite difficult and unintuitive to import data like I do so often in Access.

As for the M$ pivot tables, I think it's just a ridiculously sloppy implementation and it long should have been fixed or removed. If you think you need crosstabs, buy SPSS, or another statistical package. Or learn how to do it with the built-in tools that spreadsheets already have.

OpenOffice is a fantastic set of tools for the document jockey working at the office, on the road, at school or at home. The ability to read and write *most* MS Office documents is 'good enough' for almost all users.

It is unfortunate that Microsoft insists they will NOT offer their office suite with the capability of reading and writing OpenOffice's new OASIS open standard format - I guess them grapes are pretty sour.

The Microsoft stance that the OASIS XML Open Standard is an inferior format is a vapor thin veil of lies - you don't see Microsoft not supporting text and RTF file formats.

I expect OpenOffice 2.0 final to offer Bill & Empire some sleepless nights, especially in view of the speed at which development is progressing in the open source environment. OpenOffice 2.0 will probably skim off a considerable percentage of SOHO/home/school users while nibbling at the corporate office market - what do you think OpenOffice 3.0 will do to Bill's document cash cow?

Expect to see OpenOffice 2.0 packaged for free in all new computers being sold over the counter next year - why pay for even Microsoft Works when a superior product is available FREE?

Bar

After using all the programs of OpenOffice, I have found it to be an excellent competitor to MS Office. I have discovered a few tiny features it lacks, but many that I like better. I keep MS Office on my machine in case a compatability or stability issue arrises, but I have yet to have one problem. And best of all, I can routinely upgrade this office suite for free, rather than shelling out ridiculous wads of cash to microsoft.

Over the course of the last two years I have become a major fan of open source products. I would predict in the next couple of years, armed with free, stable, and powerful programs such as Firefox, Thunderbird, and Open Office, the market share of Linux will finally see some sharp increases. This, in turn, will most likely help out Apple as well. The days of Microsoft dominance will begin to draw to a close.

Who would even pay for microsoft office when openoffice.org can do everything it does.

Response to shapart:

Still people do. Wonder why. Maybe openoffice is not all that these people are saying it is. Oh no. We can't believe that. It must be an M$ conspiracy...now that makes us all feel better.

If folks actually paid for MS Office, you'd hear a lot less complaining about OpenOffice,org's alleged shortcomings. Let's be brutally honest here...How many MS Office users got the software:

1. From work
2. From spouse or another family member
3. From a friend
4. From Internet (warz)

To the anonymous fellow with the page-anchored frame: It is not true in the slightest that inserting a page before a page-anchored frame will result in the page being added to the end. It IS true that your inserted text will go exactly where it was told to go: at the insertion point.

It is ALSO true that if you anchor a frame to page 2 it will stay on page 2! That's what page anchoring DOES. If you don't want it to stay on page 2, but would prefer it to float from page to page with the surrounding text, you should anchor it to a paragraph, not a page.

This isn't a problem with OOo at all. PEBKAC.

Also, it's worthwhile to note that, for many users, OO.o replaces not just MSOffice, but MSOffice + Acrobat, a considerably greater savings than the $360 quoted. In OOo, PDFs retain advanced features like thumbnails and a working table of contents, unlike the PDF print drivers commonly used in conjunction with MSOffice. OpenOffice.org rocks!

I have both OOo and M$O installed on my laptop - about the only time I ever use M$O is for Outlook which I need to sync calander and contacts with my phone and Powerpoint which OOo still doesn't really convert satisfactorily -- though I confess I haven't tried the new Beta yet in this respect.

Support? - go to the OOo forum post your problem --- in my experience you usually get a detailed reply on how to solve your problem fairly soon after posting --- I have found the OOo form a fantastic support site for OOo.

The worst thing about Oo is Sun is somewhat over it.. Sun Sucks ASS.. I wish Google would release Google Office and use Oo as a template.. And have there own project, im sure there would be 10x more free devs working on Goggle Office than what is now with Sun.

Just my $.02

Google Office anyone?

I have to use office 2003 for work... don't ask. I still have my ubuntu with OO there for backup to sometimes do things Office can't.... yes I said can't.

I think that the previous posters remarks are closer to the real issue here. I think the days of the large dinosaur "office" suite are numbered, and that web applications, and yes probably delivered by google, yahoo et al, will change most peoples desktops. Portables will still need local apps while on the move and disconnected, but probably not the massive installs M$ currently gives users.

We shall see.

Good posts in here.

I'd like to put my 2 cents in too for any user thinking about trying OOo for the first time.

Think of it like the car your may own. Most likely, the majority of people don't own the best, most expensive, feature-rich car on the market. If you're like me, you made a decision to compromise on cost verses features and appeal.

A decision to use OOo is similar to that. You may find it does or doesn?t have all the features you like or need. And you may or may not like its appeal. But at least it doesn?t cost you any up front cash to find that out. I?d say it?s kind of like test driving a car you are interested in getting. And best of all. If you think OOo sucks, you can always just delete it without hastle of trying to get your money back.

I use OOo at home and MS Office at work. And most people probably use MS Office at work too. This might be the only way most people get to test drive MS Office without forking over any cash first. That experience will help you judge OOo.

I find OOo gets the job done at home for me and my use. If I encounter a quirk or two, I just remember what I paid for it (nothing) plus I understanding that it is still going through changes. Obviously OOo is not as mature of a product as MS Office. But time does not stand still either.

One thing I find for certain is that MS Office does work over-all better in an office full of Microsoft products. And why wouldn?t it. Microsoft makes sure it stays that way. And if you like vendor lock-in and a big brother, it is definitely the product for you.

Remember that when you evaluate OOo at home. And remember opening Microsoft's secret, proprietary files like .doc and .xls in OOo are a testimony to hard work by people that have to reverse engineer these file formats because MS doesn't want anyone to read and write them without forking over sums of money and strict licensing control. So in some cases you will need to cut OOo some slack if you are expecting 100% compatibility with MS Office files.

Response to OO Ranger:
So 3 out of 4 copies of office are unpaid for. Well not really likely. Most versions require a rather painful method of authentication. But as you claim, with 75% of office was "pirated", Microsoft must be going broke.

@Anonymous on Wednesday, September 07, 2005, 01:15 PM (PST)
I did not see where OO said that 75% of office was pirated. He/she/ or it stated that there were 4 likely sources for getting the crappy m$ software for free. OORanger also never mentioned any "pirated" software, rather OORanger mentioned using and installing a product without paying for it. My job's m$ license (until m$Office97?) stated we could take it home and install it for free.
"Most versions" of m$Office in current use do _not_ require the onerous activation sequence (which can be hacked easily if there is a will).
pirates took money from their victims' pockets, software sharers refuse to put their money in the corporate coffers. Piracy is a poor term for a software sharer and is a disservice to a hard working sailor type of thief.

All the same, I think people should stop sharing m$ software and should instead use Linux and OpenSource software, think of the benefits to your conscience.

Novell makes their own custom version of OpenOffice that ships with their SUSE and Novell Linux Distributions. Those versions include some great enhancements for operating with MS Office.

That version is of course supported by Novell NTS, which works with development to check fixes into the OOo project directly. So, support for OpenOffice is definitely available for those willling to pay for it (other than the free stuff available on newsgroups, etc).

Response to los:
"Sharing" a single user licence be it software or music is defined as piracy by the sellers/copyroght holders. It might be semantics but the semantics are defined by law not by people who actually do the "sharing"
if most versions of office do not require the onerous activation sequence, the I must say these same versions don't cost $300+ either. Then let's treat both suites as essentially free and compare them on their merits. Which brings us back to the conclusion that if everyone got both softwares for free, most people will go with the more mature software - MS office (even if they don't actually use many of the extra features).

I use MS Office most of the time, mainly because I have lots of spreadsheets and databases with page after page after page of VB. Obviously open office doesn't support this. I have tried open office several times but it is just no good for me because of all the VB!

I have not looked into Open Offices scripting capabilities, but if it does support scripting it would most likely take months to convert from my VB code.

I think for the basic user open office would work well though, once they have learned where all the standard options in office have moved to.

Actually, I have used StarOffice since 5.2 at home & Corel at work.

MS is NOT a requirement here - an Insurance Agency...

Life *is* good.

PS _ when I uninstalled a junky MSO 2003 trailware @#%&! installaton from my laptop - it smashed the operating system installation...

MS's way of saying "Thanks for giving us a try..."...

Well, I just got through reading all the "pros & cons" of OO.o vs M$O as you all list them herein. I have used Many office suites over time, and am now using M$O 2003 which I got through our User Group to do their monthly newsletter. It is complicated and has a lot of whistles, which I don't need and have difficulty explaining to my wife for her computer use. I now use Excel extensively (after using Lotus for long time), and use Front Page & Publisher. Can someone out there tell me just what there is in OO.o that compare to the six modules in M$O, and does it run on Linux and/or XP or does it have a preference? Does it have an email client or do you have to use one of the "non M$O" ones etc. Appreciate bringing me "up to speed on this".

Response to SeaJay:
Lots of folks run OO.o on LINUX and I have run the last 3 versions on XP. I do not know of any preference it might have. There is no built in email client or browser... but works well with anything you might have. I have used it along with Eudora and Outlook Express. The equivalent modules are WORD vs Writer; Excel vs CAlC; MSQuery vs OO.o BASE; MSPaint??? vs OO.o DRAW (WAAY better!); PowerPoint vs IMPRESS; FrontPage vs WRITER/WEB... Also almost everything can be saved as some newer and older versions of MS formats as well as PDF without needing any other file converters. Of course MS formats of various ages and types can be read as well. I regularly send my MSO formats home from my Win2K Pro machine to my XP unit, edit those items with OO.o functions, then save them back to the original MS formats and send the updated items back to the office... I have NOT had a single translation problem with WORD or Excel... I do remember having some glitches with Powerpoint vs Impress, but that was a while back with an older version than I am using now.

I work at Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) in Durban, South Africa. A few years ago, we had to move +- 200 users from Microsoft Office 2000 to OpenOffice.org 1.0.3 due to Microsoft Office licensing costs. We did the changeover in a few days. There was no training period. Everyone went cold turkey.

Of course, there were complaints. There were a few bugs in OpenOffice.org, but most were solved by upgrading to newer versions. We had to do some technical support, but we did not know anything about using OpenOffice.org, and had to find things out ourselves. This was never an obstacle, though. Within two months, we were not getting any more queries about how to use OpenOffice.org. The users were happy (unbelievable).

All in all, it was suprising how easily we managed to replace almost all copies of Microsoft Office 2000 with OpenOffice.org, and version 1.0.x at that.

I have hefty experience with both openofffice and ms office, and find them relatively similar.
however, how hard could it possibly be to make a simple graph with the open office spreadsheet? Wow. It is actually ridiculous. i prefer excel over it any day, however, openoffice is free and a testament to the hard work of many individuals. kudos to openoffice