OpenOffice Tops 21% Market Share In Germany 252
hweimer writes "A novel study analyzes the installed base of various office packages among German users. (Here is the original study report in German and a Google translation.) While Microsoft Office comes out top (72%), open source rival OpenOffice is already installed on 21.5% of all PCs and growing. The authors use a clever method to determine the installed office suites of millions of web users: they look for the availability of characteristic fonts being shipped with the various suites. What surprised me the most is that they found hardly any difference in the numbers for home and business users."
Forget openoffice (Score:3, Informative)
Information leakage (Score:3, Informative)
I love that my web browser can broadcast which office suite I am using.
Getting through the university barrier in the US (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Getting through the university barrier in the U (Score:5, Informative)
Its working fine for me at my university.
Re:Getting through the university barrier in the U (Score:2, Informative)
simple. word counts.
universities often require writing intensive courses to have x amount of word written a semester. professor will often dock major points (being 100 words under for 15 hundred word document can fail you) if they can't just see how many words are in a paper at a glance.
that and he plagarism checker databases like turnitin lack the ability to parse anything but word files. hence you see why many universities just tell students to shut up and buy MS office.
(I personally think its stupid and counterproductive)
My Anecdotals (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Getting through the university barrier in the U (Score:5, Informative)
I didn't believe this statement so I looked it up.
According to their student guide at http://www.turnitin.com/resources/documentation/turnitin/training/en_us/qs_student_en_us.pdf [turnitin.com]
At the top of page 2:
" We accept submissions in these formats: MS Word, WordPerfect, RTF, PDF, PostScript, HTML, and plain text (.txt)"
So while I think plagiarism checkers are kind of a waste of resources, your statement is still false.
Re:Getting through the university barrier in the U (Score:1, Informative)
That's terrible... At my university "word count" is meant as a guideline only, you don't have any issues unless you're over/under by like 500 words. Even then we are told that as long what we have written is quality work it doesn't matter too much if it's under/over the word count.
Your statement about TurnItIn not accepting PDFs is incorrect, they have done so for at least as long as I have been at university (4 years). From their website:
Turnitin currently accepts the following file types for submission: MS Word (.doc), WordPerfect (.wpd), PostScript (.eps), Portable Document Format (.pdf), HTML (.htm), Rich Text (.rtf) and Plain Text (.txt). All files submitted to Turnitin must be text based. Papers which have been scanned must be sent through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software before they can be submitted to Turnitin
I'm pretty sure it calculates the word count and shows it to you before you submit it regardless of the format it is submitted in and that the lecturers/professors can see this when they open the document.
Granted there's many other reasons to disapprove of TurnItIn.
Re:Repeat... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Problem is (Score:5, Informative)
All ribbons did was take the menus and turn them into tabs, then the items buried under the menus are now out in the open once you select the tab.
That's a notorious lie and people should really stop parroting it! No, a lot of commands are not now available, at least not through the ribbons. And worst is, you can't even add them to the ribbons, even if you know they exist (and they do, because you can find them when you try to add buttons to the button bar, which however the new Office discourages you from using).
So please, just fucking stop repeating this mantra that you can access all the commands through the ribbon - any even slightly advanced user of Word or Excel knows that's bullshit on a popsicle stick.
Re:Problem is (Score:2, Informative)
Which .doc format? (Score:1, Informative)
Which .doc format? Works 95? Office 97? Works 2001? Office 2k3? WfW1.0? MS Word 2.0?
File format is the real problem (Score:2, Informative)
Everyone actually is used to
Many government/agencies/business only accept submissions in "Word" format. Until we "fix this issue" in the whole world, no way OO can take over M$ Office.
That's sad, you know.