Word 2007 Vs. Open Office 2.3 Writer 492
A reader 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.
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(
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.
Troll (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Microsoft Office is better (Score:1, Interesting)
Let me give you just one example: Microsoft Office, since at least Office 2000, has an easy way for you to assign special symbols to keypress combinations. OpenOffice doesn't. This is a known bug [openoffice.org]. The reason why MS Office can have this feature and OO doesn't is because OO doesn't have the manpower to add features like this. This is because you didn't pay for the software, so their isn't enough money to pay developers to make the software as feature-full as MS Office is.
And, yes, I agree about the Office 2007 interface. What was Microsoft smoking on that day?
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
styles vs templates (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Curious... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Troll (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps it has as much to do with structural complexity as length. Theses tend to be somewhat book-like, with longer sections of text and fewer headings. Some of them have lots of graphs, which usually seems to create issues. Perhaps yours didn't have so many? Or maybe you're just lucky? Personally, for a thesis I wouldn't use either Word or Writer, I'd use LyX. It's optimized for exactly that sort of document.
Anyway, I've always found that with legal-type documents, once you get beyond about 60 pages Word gets pretty unstable. OTOH, I've got a couple of incomplete novels that run to over 300 pages and Word hasn't given me any trouble with them, which supports the notion that structural complexity matters.
Re:Curious... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Missing from Open Office. (Score:3, Interesting)
Er, no, its not. First of all, Microsoft Office is more than just Word which is available separately; the price of Word alone, or of non-commercial Office licenses, is substantially less than the cost of commercial Office licenses.
I'm not sure what you mean by "bundled versions"; in one sense, all Microsoft Office versions, as opposed to separate applications, are "bundled versions". But the "restrictions" on, say, Microsoft Office Home and Student are that it has a no-commercial-use license, and it doesn't include Access or Publisher or some other things that Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are quite usable without. It also does include OneNote 2007, which only the really expensive commercial Office bundles do, and comes with a 5-seat license. For home users, it would seem eminently usable.
Almost everyone I know that uses Microsoft Office at home, whether 2003 or 2007, uses the Student and Teacher (2003) or Home and Student (2007) non-commercial 5-seat version.
Certainly, interface preferences are to a degree subjective and vary from person to person, but I don't think mind-reading is involved in using the Office 2007 interface.
Word - OOo - Word - ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's what I love about the two word processors. When you import a Word doc into OOo, it looks pretty good, except it seems to replace all the styles with "n0003957" and "z8937zaa" tags. Then, when you make your edits and send it back to the original guy, and he opens it up in Word, all his styles are screwed up, and it's your fault.
That's why in my corporate environment, we only use Word. Because the two just don't do round-trip very well.
--Rob
Re:Curious... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What about Mail Merge? (Score:3, Interesting)
I finally decided to ignore the company standard, wrote the document using ReStructured Text and delivered a really sharp-looking PDF in a tiny fraction of the time it took to attempt to do the same thing in that steaming pile of crap from MS. No one really cares, and I could have generated RTF or something to convert to a Word doc if they did. I really started with an open mind since I hadn't used Word recently, but after about the 10th time it would randomly change fonts or styles or mess up the auto-numbering, I was getting violently angry at it. I've never seen a piece of software do so many wrong things for no obvious reason. It was like anti-DWIM... some kind of perverse AI that was smarter than HAL 9000, but evil.
I also wrote some non-trivial documentation in OpenOffice about a year and a half ago, and while it was somewhat buggy as well, it was far easier to use than Word. This was 2.0, IIRC, and I found it overall to be nice to use. I was able to get done what I needed to get done, make it look how I wanted and didn't suffer from constant alterations for no apparent reason. The difference was, at least to me, that while both programs were buggy, OOo was buggy because, well, it has bugs. Word seemed buggy more because it is so grotesquely overcomplicated you could never predict what it was supposed to do, leave alone whether it did it, and when it didn't do what I wanted, I could never figure out why it did what it did, and in many cases why it would even make sense to do what it did. For instance, I quickly learned that the only way to change the font of a particular piece of text was to select the text, change the font, at which point Word would change the font for the entire document, and then choose undo, at which point the entire document would revert to the original font except what I had originally selected. This behaviour was very consistent, so I had to conclude that was probably how it was supposed to work. Either the developers of Word should be shot for having such a huge and obvious bug, or shot for thinking that kind of behavior doesn't violate practically every principle of UI from the last 30 years. Similarly, I found that Word supported exporting a document to HTML, which was useful for the work I was doing, but any time I would use that function, there was a fair chance that the resulting HTML would contain completely random color or style changes that weren't in the original. It was like using IBM software from the 80's, except the IBM software, while being the pinnacle of user hostile, was at least logical.
Word is the most horrible piece of commercial software I've ever used that wasn't written by some 11th grader in Visual Basic 3 as a piece of $29 shareware. Oh wait, I have to add "or wasn't written by Rational". Gotta be fair, now.
Re:Curious... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
objectivity is impossible (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Curious... (Score:3, Interesting)
What about large files and new WordPerfect? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've tried Word and some time ago OpenOffice to see if I could transfer these character sets over from WordPerfect. However, I found the former hard to use and to paraphrase the article it doesn't do well with manuscripts over 40 pages. The seeming inability to adequately handle "master document" indices that would its use in handling large files out of the question. The comments with regard the ability of Open Office to handle manuscripts with hundreds of pages seems hopeful, but I'm dealing with 2,100+ pages not hundreds.
Two nice things about OpenOffice I liked was that it runs under Linux, which I use for many things not Word Perfect, and that files that include graphics seem to be saved in a much more compact, space efficient way (although I find the interface a bit more awkward to use, perhaps because of long familiarity with WP 8.0.
As I add graphics the MS is getting quite large (presently about 233 MB) and it is taking an increasingly longer time to do periodic backups, I have given thought to upgrading my computer (a Dell xps M140), but I fear what I will discover about the new WordPerfect in a Vista environment.
Has anyone had experience with WP when making the jump to Vista? With all the graphics I'd like to incorporate, I expect the document to be 2 - 5 GB in size ultimmately.
Does anyone have comments from extensive experience dealing with very large documents using Open Office or the newer versions of Word Perfect running under Vista? I'd like to be open minded but the integrity of my work is paramount.
Has anyone had any success in translating the various extended character sets in Wordperfect to Open Office? When I last checked this was not possible, except via a (then, now?) expensive proprietary interface.
Are there other better wordprocessors that I should consider for incorporting lots of graphics into an already very big text file?
As for macros, I often process text using JEdit, which has extensive macro capabilities, in particular the ability to work on arbitrary windows (rows and columns) at one time, which is great when one has multiple lines of data that need to be placed into a new format interactively.
Suggestions from knowledgeable users would be appreciated. Real data dealing with file sizes and backup times, time to open and search/find would be especially informative.
Anyone heard of others dealing with even larger files?