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Word 2007 Vs. Open Office 2.3 Writer
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Sep 11, 2007 04:03 PM
from the by-a-nose dept.
from the by-a-nose dept.
hairyfeet writes "Bruce Byfield of Linux.com has just posted his third Office shootout between Microsoft Office and Open Office. This is the first version comparing the new Microsoft Word 2007 with Writer from the latest version of Open Office. The verdict: while Microsoft Office beats Open Office in a few categories, overall Open Office wins — but by not as large a margin as in the past." Linux.com and Slashdot share a corporate overlord.
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Curious... (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder if Open Office defaults to all the annoying rubbish turned on.
I really miss Word Perfect 4.1 :o(
Re:Curious... (Score:4, Insightful)
I hear ya! I STILL use WP 5.1, god it rocks and the macro facility is second to none. Now THAT is a word processor!
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Re:What a biased review! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:What a biased review! (Score:5, Funny)
P.S. It's spelt M$.
*Rolls in gasoline and pours powdered magnesium into hair*
*Puts bottle rockets in mouth*
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Re:What a biased review! (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't have any Karma to burn anyways
I do think the UI in 2007 is an improvement over 2003/XP/2000, but that's really anything's an improvement over that.
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Re:What a biased review! (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree the word processors are horrible, but I think that is because the concept is flaws. What we need is something like Lyx, but a lot more polished: what Lyx would be if it had received the same resources as Open Office.
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Re:Curious... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Curious... (Score:5, Informative)
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We should give this test some additional criteria. (Score:5, Funny)
Hmm, I seem to keep getting an overflow error.
Re:We should give this test some additional criter (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:We should give this test some additional criter (Score:5, Funny)
Let's be serious, would you show up to a Linux user party?
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No wonder you have it wrong (Score:4, Funny)
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What about Mail Merge? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What about Mail Merge? (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, now, if you start mentioning the myriad of problems OO has, then the score could go the other way and Linux.com might have to announce a Microsoft product the winner.
Remember, suckiness is in the mouth of blower.
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Re:What about Mail Merge? (Score:5, Informative)
Mail Merge is one of the coolest things you can do with an office suite to save some time. It shouldn't be too far beyond any Slashdotter.
Basically, with Mail Merge, you create a document and you also create a data table in a DB or spreadsheet program. For instance, a form letter. You might write a form letter that says, "Dear $DONOR, Thank you for your $AMOUNT contribution to our campaign. We are $EMOTION at your generosity. With your donation, we will be able to feed $NUMCHILDREN children in the fiscal year 2008, build $NUMHOMES homes for third world families, and provide basic medical care and education to an entire village of $POPVILLAGE." Then, in your data table, you have the donor's name in one column, the amount they contributed in the next, a word like "glad", "overjoyed", etc. in the third, and so forth. Mail merge automatically takes the data table and letter template and churns out potentially millions of personalized form letters by taking each row and substituting each entry in its designated place. You might have wondered how form letters were made? You can also use it to manufacture printed envelopes and such.
Of course, for dadaist fun you can write a madlib in mail merge format and randomly generate the data table from a dictionary--it's not only for form letters, although I imagine that's the primary application.
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Re:What about Mail Merge? (Score:5, Funny)
Kids these days...
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Re:What about Mail Merge? (Score:4, Funny)
Just be sure that if you test your mailmerge DB, and you fill $DONOR with "Rich Bastard", you don't let that go to production [ncl.ac.uk].
--Rob
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Open Office repairs Microsoft Word files. (Score:5, Interesting)
Here is the fix: Open the Microsoft Word file, that Microsoft Word is not able to read, in Open Office. Save it as a Microsoft Word file. That will fix the file, and you will then be able to get Microsoft Word to read its own file.
For that reason I think Microsoft should include a copy of Open Office with every copy of Microsoft Word. If you have Word, OO is a necessary tool.
I'm not joking. I've had Microsoft Word destroy its own file and I've used OO to repair the file, and so have many other people.
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2007...uhggg (Score:5, Interesting)
Whats funny is that microsoft releasing this "NOW WITH SHINIER GRAPHICS!" version of Office is actually causing people in my org. to use OO. There was an incident a few days ago where a user needed an XLS 2003 file, the XLS 2003 format that Office 2k7 spits out wouldn't work correctly with the software they were using, the OO version would.
On the last herd of dells that I ordered, i skipped an Office Suite all together. I know that at least in my organization, now that office 2003 is difficult to come by (I know, you can still order it from newgg.com etc.), we will be using OpenOffice exclusively.
Re:2007...uhggg (Score:4, Interesting)
Kinda sad, or Ironic, that you use the biggest barrier to open source adoption as the reason for adopting it. Thats the same argument people have been making about linux for a decade now.. Its different, I'm not used to it...
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Ironic, in this case (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that Microsoft has spread FUD about re-training costs for Linux in the past makes it only more funny
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Rather hypocritical to call it FUD then (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of MS's efforts against Linux adoption have been aimed at the server market, where the difference between Linux and Windows are major - arguably more so than the difference between MS Office 2007 and OO.o (any version). The fact that people are switching to OO.o because Office 2007 is too unusual for them is a strong indication that switching to Linux would have MASSIVE retraining costs.
(Office 2007 isn't that different; have you ever used it? The ribbon is basically a merge of the toolbars and the menus, and the hotkeys haven't changed - I personally found it easier to find many the features I was used to in 2007's interface than in OO.o's, even when I had already found them once before in OO.o and had only installed 2007 a few days ago. YMMV of course but I've never liked OO.o's interface and KOffice isn't really any better.)
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Sun paid $88,000,000 for Star Office. (Score:5, Informative)
It was not "hobbyist programmers". Sun paid $88,000,000 for the software that became Open Office.
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Re:2007...uhggg (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been using Microsoft Office for well over a decade, on a daily basis. The only way in which 2007 is "worse" than either 2003 or OOo in terms of interface is that its not the same as one would expect from prior versions of Office (which have been fairly constant back at least to Office 95), so I can see why people of the "I refuse to learn anything new" crowd (which, previously, have help fuel MS Office's dominance) might prefer OOo, which is much closer the pre-2007 MS Office interface.
However, Office 2007's interface makes it so much easier to work with things (and much smoother to do things the right way that makes documents more easily maintainable, too) than the pre-2007 interface that I'm was much happier with 2007 after about a day of working with it (my only problem is that I have to switch back and forth between 2007 at home and 2003 at work, and that OneNote 2007, despite being a wonderful program on its own, doesn't have an interface that fits in with the 2007 style, being more in the pre-2007 style.)
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Re:2007...uhggg (Score:4, Interesting)
My stick-in-the-mud organization isn't touching Office 2007 with a ten foot pull. We can't afford the retraining costs and time. There's this thing called "productivity" that businesses seem to have a bit of a concern over.
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Re:2007...uhggg (Score:5, Insightful)
Fixed that for you.
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Re:2007...uhggg (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:WTF (Score:4, Funny)
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NO bias at all evidently..... (Score:4, Insightful)
Not much useful content at all, either (Score:5, Insightful)
Any series of articles that thinks OpenOffice Writer has been better than Word in the past is dead before it starts. Only the most OSS-loving evangelist would make such a claim. Of course, the claim is only made because Writer won (according to the reviewer) in more categories (arbitrarily selected by the reviewer, and having equal weight).
In this case, it's interesting that he pans the ribbons in Office 2007. It's only as anecdotal as his claim, but I personally haven't yet found anyone who's given Office 2007 a fair try and didn't prefer the ribbons after a period of getting used to them. Microsoft's usability people seem to have done their job well on this one. Word certainly isn't perfect as far as usability goes, but it's hardly the disaster this guy makes out.
On the styles count, he pans Word 2007 for not having page and frame styles, but frankly, I have never used those features in OO Writer. I use styles and templates a lot, but if I'm doing something with enough flash to be using styles like that, I'll probably be using a DTP program anyway, and neither Word nor OO Writer is really up to that kind of page layout. Meanwhile, has OO Writer got shortcut keys for styles (and for removing them) that actually work yet?
On page layout, apparently the only thing Writer lacks is the ability to link text frames. I imagine that will be of great concern to the DTP big boys! Or not, unless a whole bunch of other stuff has been added since 2.2, and a whole load of bugs fixed. (I can't tell, since only 2.2.1 appears to be available for download so far.)
The comments about templates are only about those supplied with the packages, which unless you're Joe 12-year-old doing a high school project are utterly irrelevant. Professional organisations will generally set up their own, if they use them at all, which means the tools for setting up and modifying templates are far more important than the page layout equivalent of clip-art.
On numbered/bulleted lists, Writer apparently has little room for improvement over 2.2. I imagine anyone who's suffered the pain of trying to get multi-level lists to lay out properly and struggled through the ludicrously overcomplicated numbering architecture will disagree. Lists suck in Word, but they suck even more in Writer. Neither has a feature worthy of a serious word processor.
On headers and footers, the review criticises Word for its limited flexibility. When Writer can even put the most recent heading in the header automatically, get back to us.
On the footnotes and endnotes thing, calling Word's facilities basic in comparison to Writer is rather harsh. There are one or two nice tweaks in Writer that Word doesn't have (at least, I haven't found them yet if they were added in 2007, and it didn't before). Most people will never use these features.
On the subjects of cross-references, both Word and Writer suck beyond the point of being usable. They just suck in different ways. Someone should introduce them to LaTeX, which uses the stunningly complicated system of naming a place you might want to refer to later, and then referring to it by name elsewhere. When the word processors here have bookmarking facilities that do this, reliably, and without a tendency to corruption, they can claim to even have a useful cross-reference facility, but until then, it's just not true.
On indices and tables of contents, the reviewer apparently confuses his own stylistic preferences with faulty design — unfortunate, considering that almost any professional typesetter is likely to disagree with him on that one. In any case, again neither program really shines in this area, though. Simple things (in terms of the kind of documents where you'd care about these things) like having both a table of chapters and a detailed table of contents are bizarrely awkward if they work at all. Again, without better support for pulling these things in and actually getting them to work (there's no point being able to generate both tables if you can't get
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Does this come as a surprise? (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Its free
2. Its open source
Does it surprise anyone that linux users go for it?
Re:Does this come as a surprise? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Does this come as a surprise? (Score:5, Informative)
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Troll (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Troll (Score:4, Informative)
Indeed. What tipped me off was this:
The ironic part is, Word needs master documents, since it cannot reliably handle documents longer than about 40 pages.
Sheesh. I've used Word with docs hundreds of pages long dozens of times. I can only remember one document that I had trouble with, and that had a huge number of embedded files all over the place.
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Why compare? (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting perspective (Score:5, Funny)
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That's great! (Score:4, Insightful)
Except where he forgot to review things like collaboration (shared workspaces, SharePoint and NetMeeting interop), revision control, integration, extensibility model, autoformatting, the insane amount of clip art available for free from the Office website, mail merge, the document map functionality, Office Update, speed, etc. etc.
People don't generally use something like Word because it's a good word processor - there are cheaper solutions for that. Word is good because it's part of a complete integrated solution. Otherwise you can get something cheaper or more specialized [wikipedia.org].
Flawed. (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, it's also somewhat amusing that OO has "won" the author's three comparisons in 02, 05, and 07, given his obvious predilection for Linux, and the fact that the article is published on linux.com. I wonder if it would have been published had he said that Word 2007 was superior?
Re:Flawed. (Score:5, Interesting)
He also missed the key difference between OO and Word for professional authors and editors: Word has a style margin (set to 0mm by default so that you don't know it's there, but easily reset). With this, you can easily see what named style is in use for each block element, which makes style-editing long documents a snip. With OO, you have to click on each block element in turn to find out what named style is currently applied, which slows editing by an order of magnitude.
I once asked OO if they intended to introduce any similar at-a-glance display, but they just buried their heads in the sand like Microsoft Marketing, bleating some inanities about how it "wasn't needed", and their interface was "just fine as it is".
Meanwhile those professional authors and editors who do use styles, and who haven't yet switched to XML for lack of a decent non-technical editor, are going to ante up for a copy of Word. Much as I hate to say it, this was one interface method that Microsoft got right and that OO has missed by 180 degrees.
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Bias? (Score:4, Insightful)
If Microsoft wrote a review / comparison this we'd have 200 comments here screaming FUD.
I'm sure Open Office is a great match for Word now, but if the writer wants to make that point, he needs to use some specific metrics.
What I like about word... (Score:5, Interesting)
Other features I find valuable in word include macros and really powerful indexes and table of contents. The whole color scheme and master documents (although difficult to learn) really are helpful.
The real problem with word is that it needs to satisfy a large number of users with different expectations. Everyone who uses word says that they only use 10% of the features, yet the 10% selected is always different.
I guess the real benefit to word is complete compatibility with other word documents. For collaborative editing, going around in cycles with different software is a pain.
Given the relatively low cost of office (about $120 for home/student, and about an incremental $200 on the purchase of a new machine for a small business license) makes it pretty difficult to switch. In a corporate environment with software licensing the cost of the full office suite for a new employee is less than it costs for the office chair. Saving money a couple of bucks isn't enough of a reason to switch.
Ask a writer (Score:4, Informative)
wp speed tests (Score:4, Funny)
LaTeX vs. Word vs. Writer (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Open Office Wins? (Score:5, Funny)
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Who uses word processors? (Score:4, Interesting)
In 2007 Word processors (like spreadsheets being used as "databases") are a non solution to a non problem; a proverbial hammer for the computer illiterate.
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Re:Open Office Wins? (Score:4, Funny)
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It's at RC2 (Score:5, Informative)
http://download.openoffice.org/680/ [openoffice.org]
and changes What's new [openoffice.org]
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Re:styles vs templates (Score:4, Informative)
A template has styled elements to it, but is more like a partially pre-populated bunch of content, like a form letter. You open the template, and it generates a stub of the document you're creating. You fill in the unique bits, and save it under a unique filename. Ideally as much of the work should be done for you by merely opening the template as possible.
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