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SoftMaker Office 2008 vs. OpenOffice.org 3.1 214

Posted by kdawson from the attempted-dethroning-using-nerf-bats dept.
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy examines would-be Microsoft Office competitors SoftMaker Office and OpenOffice.org and finds the results surprising. OpenOffice.org — frequently cited as the most viable Office competitor — has pushed for Office interoperability in version 3.1, adding import support for files in Office 2007's native Open XML format. But, as Kennedy found in Office-compatibility testing, that support remains mostly skin deep. 'Factor in OpenOffice's other well-documented warts — buggy Java implementation, CPU-hogging auto-update system, quirky font rendering — and it's easy to see why the vast majority of IT shops continue to reject this pretender to the Microsoft Office throne,' Kennedy writes. SoftMaker Office, however, 'shows that good things often still come in small packages.' Geared more toward mobile computing, the suite's 'compact footprint and low overhead make it ideal for underpowered systems, and its excellent compatibility with Office 2003 file formats means it's a safe choice for heterogeneous environments where external data access isn't a priority.'" Note that SoftMaker Office is not free software — it costs $79.95 — and there is no version for Macintosh.
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SoftMaker Office 2008 vs. OpenOffice.org 3.1 More

SoftMaker Office 2008 vs. OpenOffice.org 3.1

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  • History (Score:2, Interesting)

    by googlesmith123 ( 1546733 )
    One of the coolest things about german Softmaker is the software they made for the old Windows CE platforms like my old HPC ïHP Jornada 680. This included Word that could actually edit MS Word files and Excel that did something more than just display data.

  • What timing (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Rei ( 128717 ) on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @04:22PM (#28534983) Homepage

    I've been dealing with a rash of OpenOffice compatibility problems with MS Office that I hope don't cause my business plan to bomb in a local business plan competition. I've been discovering that the way it saves .doc files doesn't quite match with how MS Office reads them, so things end up misaligned - tables broken up, images out of place, etc. And don't even get me started on docx... I'm going to try to get a revised (MS Office-saved) version in, but I hope it's not too late.

    • Re:What timing (Score:4, Informative)

      by gbarules2999 ( 1440265 ) on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @04:29PM (#28535047)
      To be fair, I had one Word project crumble because the damn program wasn't compatible with itself, after five minutes of sitting around. This is something even Microsoft can't get right 100% of the time.

      I think the author's overstating OO.o's negatives a bit, but that's just me. I like the way it highlights text better.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by IntlHarvester ( 11985 ) *

        To be fair, I had one Word project crumble because the damn program wasn't compatible with itself, after five minutes of sitting around. This is something even Microsoft can't get right 100% of the time.

        I've been using Word for like 20 years, and this has happened maybe once or twice.

        "Word isn't perfect so you might as well gamble on OpenOffice" is a frequently used argument, but not a very compelling one.

        • Re:What timing (Score:4, Informative)

          by Cornelius the Great ( 555189 ) on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @04:50PM (#28535265)
          I use Word at work for engineering requirements and software documentation and it's a common occurrence- I've seen several instances of making a small change (no formatting), saving it, and reopening it to find the formatting completely corrupted. Furthermore, while Office 2007 has fixed many of the formatting issues I saw in 2003, it's equally frustrating when docs (not docx files, but plain old ".doc") would display differently between 2003 and 2007 (half of the office hasn't made the switch yet).

          This means that only the 2-3 developers who have Word 2007 installed can officially save and commit changes to our official process documents and software documentation.

          Say what you will about OpenOffice- they at least can maintain consistent tabs across different versions.

        • Re:What timing (Score:5, Insightful)

          by gbarules2999 ( 1440265 ) on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @04:56PM (#28535329)

          I've been using Word for like 20 years, and this has happened maybe once or twice.

          Lucky you. Too bad I run into that issue on a regular basis every time I go print something by one of the nearby libraries or computer labs. What a nightmare.

          "Word isn't perfect so you might as well gamble on OpenOffice" is a frequently used argument, but not a very compelling one.

          Neither is "OpenOffice isn't perfect so you might as well just forget about it and pay the money for Word."

          I have no problems with anyone using either program; use what works for you. It just not fair to pick on one for having the same exact problem as the other with incompatibility.

          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            by santix ( 1234354 )
            You can save as PDF and, provided the computer in which you want to print has a reader installed, you can forget about those problems. I always do that.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Dan541 ( 1032000 )

              I export to PDF as well, its a solution that works but it's still a pain in the ass to do.

          • Lucky you. Too bad I run into that issue on a regular basis every time I go print something by one of the nearby libraries or computer labs. What a nightmare.

            True that Word reformats documents for different printer targets. However in business environments, almost everyone is using an HP LaserJet, so practically for me this has never been a huge issue.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Brave Guy ( 457657 )

          Personally, I find the whole "it slightly reformats my text" argument less than compelling anyway, regardless of which office suite is being advocated at the time.

          For 99% of the cases, it doesn't matter. Heck, anyone who works in a company with both US and European offices probably gets their documents reformatted between A4 and US Letter paper sizes fairly often, and that's particularly amusing since many of them will only ever be displayed on-screen where such sizes are pretty bad for readability anyway.

          F

    • Re:What timing (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mpapet ( 761907 ) on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @04:36PM (#28535123) Homepage

      I've been discovering that the way it saves .doc files doesn't quite match with how MS Office reads them

      Hahaha!!! Microsoft is no better at retaining formatting than OpenOffice. I had one particularly wasteful work day attempting to edit a complex Word doc with embedded images, tables authored on Mac with French as the default language. We were each on different versions of Office too. The language of the document was Fr-english, so I was supposed to clean up the language a little.

      I spent Hours spent attempting to keep the document open long enough to get the information out of it before it would crash Word again. Hours!!!!!

      Do yourself and them a favor and send them a PDF. They'll think you are a big-shot with your Adobe Acrobat software and everything!!!

      • I agree. If people do not need to edit your document a PDF looks MUCH better, and it will always look the same - no worrying about different versions etc.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Dan541 ( 1032000 )

          In deed that is the entire purpose behind PDF, it is a finished copy.
          However I still get people who think it is a good idea to edit PDF files and re-save them.

          You cannot cater for all stupidity.

    • Re:What timing (Score:5, Informative)

      by Jim Hall ( 2985 ) on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @04:37PM (#28535131) Homepage

      I've been dealing with a rash of OpenOffice compatibility problems with MS Office that I hope don't cause my business plan to bomb in a local business plan competition. I've been discovering that the way it saves .doc files doesn't quite match with how MS Office reads them, so things end up misaligned - tables broken up, images out of place, etc. And don't even get me started on docx... I'm going to try to get a revised (MS Office-saved) version in, but I hope it's not too late.

      BTW, the problem is just as bad with Microsoft Word rendering other Microsoft Word files. Just this morning, I saw this example in action in a meeting.

      Last night, one of the attendees sent out some notes for us to read before the meeting. We all dutifully printed out our copy of the doc, and brought it with us to the meeting.

      Despite the fact that we all run Microsoft Office (yes, the document was created with Microsoft Office) there were 3 different versions of the printed doc at the meeting. You could tell by looking around that one version of the doc (printed from Microsoft Office for Macintosh) was aligned in a weird way when moving text around a table. Another version of the doc (Microsoft Office 2007) put a pagebreak in a different spot than everyone else's copy, and put an extra blank line between a table and its caption. This was a 3-page doc with an enumerated list of paragraphs, so differences were easy to spot when looking around the table.

      This was a Word document in plain DOC format, not DOCX.

      If you have a document that absolutely must preserve formatting, send it as a PDF.

      • One shouldn't ever use DOCs for that sort of thing, ever. I thought everybody realized what a security problem they were years ago. Beyond that there's the compatibility headaches and requiring people to us a compatible office suite.

        At this stage, I'm not sure that ODF is any better, but I've pretty much always had good luck using RTFs. And PDFs are great if you're just wanting them to print them.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by jonbryce ( 703250 )

          The common reason I find for people emailing word documents is when they are negotiating contracts. Then you see .docs being emailed between the parties and their advisers, with people suggesting various changes to the document. The final version will generally be distributed in pdf, but the discussion drafts need to be in word format so people can make changes to it.

          • The common reason I find for people emailing word documents is when they are negotiating contracts. Then you see .docs being emailed between the parties and their advisers, with people suggesting various changes to the document.

            However if different parties are using different Office versions they can have compatibility problems as people above have pointed out.

            Falcon

      • I've found OpenOffice to be quite consistent with Word 2000 and 2003 for simple formatting. Never tested it against Word 2007, but your point about different versions of Office is totally valid.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by SparkEE ( 954461 )
      Does the competition actually require you to send in your plan as a .doc file? You should be able to send it in as a pdf or postscript.

      It just always really irks me that people ask for finished documents in an editor's format. If people would just stop having this dumb expection, then it wouldn't matter if my tool of choice was Word, Ooo, Pages, Correl, html, or LaTex. They're all able to send out postscript files, and usually able to generate pdf these days.

      The only time .doc files should be getting

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Rei ( 128717 )

        They like them in .doc so that they can play with embedded spreadsheets for financial statements and balance sheets.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by datapharmer ( 1099455 )
      The proper rendering of documents is one of the main reasons PDF was created. If they require that you submit in some proprietary format that has known problems with rendering that shouldn't count against you. oh wait - its a BUSINESS competition... never mind.

      • But PDF is annoying in many ways. First, it's difficult to copy-and-past from. Second, the page navigation system is different from both typical word-processors and web browsers (HTML), at least for Adobe. And third, the fonts always look blurry to me.

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by Rude Turnip ( 49495 )

          It is not difficult to copy and paste from. I probably do this on a daily basis. The only time you can't copy and paste is if the document author was an idiot and blocked the copy/paste/print functions, or if the source content for the PDF was a scan of an older printed document.

          The page navigation system is no different than word processors or web browsers. In fact, it's a little more optimized. Using Adobe's reader, you can even turn on thumbnails and skim through a document like you're using microfilm

          • Re:What timing [PDF stinks] (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Bazzargh ( 39195 ) on Wednesday July 01, 2009 @05:14AM (#28540175)

            It is not difficult to copy and paste from. I probably do this on a daily basis. The only time you can't copy and paste is if the document author was an idiot and blocked the copy/paste/print functions, or if the source content for the PDF was a scan of an older printed document.

            No, you're wrong. In PDF text is stored as small chunks to be printed at the current point with the current font. There is no concept of a paragraph or a column. So if your text is even marginally complex - for example, you have superscripts, multiple columns, text labels on an image beside the text of your document, manual kerning, font substitution for some characters, bidi text... then you have lots of disconnected text chunks. In order to copy these, the reader needs to guess what the original formatting was. And I haven't even started on ligatures and mathematical formulae yet.

            For this reason PDF readers often have 2 copy modes: rectangular and reading-order. The rectangular option tries to preserve position information (fairly easy), while the other option tries to guess and preserve the reading order (fairly hard). The rectangular option works well on tables, but poorly on multicolumn text; the opposite is generally true for reading-order selection. Evince's text selection is rectangular, Acrobat used to have both but seems to have only reading-order selection these days.

            I happen to know this because I've done some work on fixing text selection in poppler; but its not just poppler-based readers that have a problem: its just as bad in Acrobat and (on the mac) Preview. Its not very hard to find documents with problems like this, and its one of the most-duped poppler/evince bugs.

        • I'm sure everybody is aware that PDF has annoyances. But that's very different than the situation with DOC or PPT, which are utterly broken in almost every respect. PDF actually works for its intended purpose, which is why it is so successful. DOC and PPT are only prevalent because of marketshare, not because they are useful.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Dan541 ( 1032000 )

            I'm sure everybody is aware that PDF has annoyances.

            Most of those annoyances are brought on by the idiots that publish PDF files without a clue.

            The inability to print, for example.

        • For your first point, get a better reader. It's not that hard to copy text out if you have a decent PDF viewer (and the data is actually in text, not an image of text, which is quite common). For your second point, that again depends on the reader, but I find it quite intuitive, and not really that different from word processors. You press page down, you go down to the next page... select a page number, it jumps to that page. How is that different than most word processors? As for your third comment, again,

          • It's not that hard to copy text out if you have a decent PDF viewer

            I have always run into problems in trying to copy and paste out of pdfs (this is with a variety of readers). For example, if the text is layed out in mutiple columns, selections cross columns instead of flowing down the column, which is not what is wanted. You also run into problems with ligatures. For example, fi can be combined into a single glyph and that is what gets copied and pasted instead of the two individual characters.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by jonbryce ( 703250 )

          You can fix the blurry text as follows:

          Right click on the document, and click "Page Display Preferences", then click on "Page Display" in the side menu, and in the "Rendering" section, select Smooth Text: "For Laptop/LCD screens".

          Adobe uses its own font rendering system rather than the one in Windows, and clear-type is not the default setting.

          If you are using the Mac, the same procedure applies except that you may have to ctrl-click if you only have one mouse button.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      This is a valid concern, but is not really an issue with the office suite. If the goal is consistent display across products, this will never happen with any office product. There is simply little incentive. Any software developer is going to want all users to use their product, at the latest version. There is almost no incentive to build interoperability outside of the proprietary suite. This is the primary reason why I stopped using MS Office. I would send stuff out, and people, who were using a mo

      • The key lesson here is that where two or more people are going to be working on a document, it's a very good idea that they all be using the same software and same version of that software. Even mixing in matching between, say, Office 2007 and Office XP can lead to formatting issues.

        "Interoperability" is not a strong suit of any of office suite I've seen. Even RTF can be mangled if you're working with different versions.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Abreu ( 173023 )

      use PDF

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rei ( 128717 )

      Whoa! I'm "Flamebait" for reporting the problems I've had with OpenOffice compatibility with MS Office, on an article about OpenOffice compatibility with MS Office?

      Wow, tough crowd.

      • Nah. The problem is that there's no "-1 Disagree" mod, so people too stupid to frame an intelligible response use "troll" or "flamebait" as a kind of disapproving grunt.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by 1u3hr ( 530656 )
      I hope don't cause my business plan to bomb in a local business plan competition.

      So print to PDF. No reflow, nothing moves around in that. Or do thay actually require you to use Microsoft formats? That would be a whole can of worms even if everyone did use MS--versions, fonts, etc.

  • Scores: OpenOffice 7.4 vs SoftMaker 7.7 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by InsertWittyNameHere ( 1438813 ) on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @04:29PM (#28535057)

    All that OpenOffice bashing and SoftMaker Office boasting and there's only a negligible scoring difference between them?

    From reading the article you'd think OpenOffice was crap (less than 5) and SoftMaker Office was the greatest thing next to sliced bread (8+)...

  • Slashvertisment (Score:5, Insightful)

    by R4nm4-kun ( 1302737 ) on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @04:34PM (#28535107)
    Either I am really stupid (which is possible I won't deny it), or this is clearly a hidden advertisement on Slashdot for SoftMaker Office. To be anywhere near a fair comparison they should have included IBM Lotus Symphony, KOffice, StarOffice and others. Not compare OpenOffice to some commercial product I don't think many people ever heard about.

    I don't understand why this has made it to the frontpage.

  • Skin deep? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @04:35PM (#28535115)
    I haven't had any trouble with any MS Office files I've thrown at OpenOffice. Granted I mostly open MS Word documents but they've all opened fine. Far more impressive to me was when I dug out an MS Office for Mac file from about 15 years ago and THAT opened in OpenOffice even though MS Word for Windows wouldn't have anything to do with it.

    So while I'm sure there are certain files which don't convert well I've been extremely happy with OpenOffice's support so far. I'm less happy about the general level of bloat and lower level of usability that comes with the product. I can't help wonder who thought it would be a great idea to toss in Python, Java, StarBasic and god knows what other runtimes into this app. There is a very cobbled together feel about the whole thing.

    • I haven't had any trouble with any MS Office files I've thrown at OpenOffice. Granted I mostly open MS Word documents but they've all opened fine. Far more impressive to me was when I dug out an MS Office for Mac file from about 15 years ago and THAT opened in OpenOffice even though MS Word for Windows wouldn't have anything to do with it.

      So while I'm sure there are certain files which don't convert well I've been extremely happy with OpenOffice's support so far. I'm less happy about the general level of bloat and lower level of usability that comes with the product. I can't help wonder who thought it would be a great idea to toss in Python, Java, StarBasic and god knows what other runtimes into this app. There is a very cobbled together feel about the whole thing.

      OTOH, I've had nothing but problems with OO and NeoOffice when it come to Powerpoint. They both mangle relatively simple files with embedded tables;to the point that the trouble to fix them is not worth the few hundred bucks it costs to Office for the Mac.

      If you only use OO or Neo it's not really a problem, and I use and recommend Neo for someone looking for a good office suite and does not need to collaborate with MS Office users. I think its great for college students; especially since it's free and sav

      • If you need seamless MS Office interoperablity stick with MS Office./P.

        MS Office does not offer compatibility between different versions though. If you want a document to display the same on different platforms, and do not need to edit documents then .pdf is the best format to use.

        Falcon

    • The problem isn't really OpenOffice handling Word doc files. The problem is more if you produce a Word doc file in Open Office and send it to someone using Office it usually looks like crap to them. If you create the documeny, publish it as PDF and send it to someone on Windows, then you are fine. The problem arises if you actually have to share an editable .doc file with someone using MS Office. In that case Open Office is usually pretty much a fail, especially if the document is non trivial, with compl

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @04:38PM (#28535151)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • The problem is (A). Not even microsoft has figured out how to do that between versions.

      • The problem is (A). Not even microsoft has figured out how to do that between versions.

        This just brings us right back to the question you were trying to answer.

        Microsoft isn't very good at developing software, so it's not surprising that they can't write a decent word processor. However, there are hundreds of more talented software companies on the planet - so why can't they do it?

        I think the answer is pretty obvious. It's not about the quality of software. People can and do write better word processors than Microsoft. It's just that the business world dominates this category of software, and

        • As someone who loathes their business practices, I think over the years, MS Office has turned into a very good product. And MS does have a few very good products.

          The biggest problem I think they face is that with little serious competition, a lot of the spit and polish never gets addressed. Daily I come across a stupid usability issue that I wish they'd fix. But since they don't listen to direct feedback all that much, it likely will never be fixed.

          OS X prides themselves on usability and polish, and people

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Astadar ( 591470 )

      It's not hard to write a better one. It's hard to write one that's still compatible with the a) unpublished, b) quirkily implemented, c) voluminous spec that is MS word. At least sufficiently well enough to be a modest replacement.

      I'm sure the folks at OO.o have been trying VERY hard to match Word behavior, but it's obviously not that simple.

      I've run into several issues where OO.o doesn't render word docs properly and many more where an OO.o saved doc doesn't render properly at all in Word.

      A shame, really

    • Blizzard the *game* studio?

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by MobileTatsu-NJG ( 946591 )

      Why doesn't Blizzard or some other studio do it?

      Man.. imagine what the splash screen for that would look like!

      • Yes, I can just imagine the kickass cinematic - "forget the word processor, give me a longer intro movie!"

        Perhaps Blizzard should re-do that Office 2010 The Movie that Microsoft released.

    • A game studio, doing "serious" software? Risky move. A failed attempt at that pretty much destroyed Infocom.

  • Why pay $80 when you can get Office for $50 (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    So I can buy Softmake Office, a MS Word clone, for 80 bucks. Or I can wait for a sale and pick up MS Student and Home for 50 bucks and I get 3 licenses for that price...

    Thanks but I'll stay with the free OpenOffice or I'll drop 50 bucks on the real deal.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by westlake ( 615356 )

      I can wait for a sale and pick up MS Student and Home for 50 bucks and I get 3 licenses for that price...

      If you are a student with an .edu address you can have it all for $60. The Ultimate Steal [microsoft.com]

      If your employer participates in Microsoft's Home User program, it's all yours on disk for the price of S&H.

      These are just three of the reasons why the free-as-in-beer office suite just doesn't generate all that much excitement.

  • SofMaker (Score:4, Informative)

    by Brandybuck ( 704397 ) on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @04:53PM (#28535303) Homepage Journal

    I purchased SofMaker suite since they support FreeBSD. It's decent software, much much lighter in weight in OpenOffice, and free of annoying featuritus. It's chief drawback is its proprietariness. If they ever open sourced it, I would banish OpenOffice forever from my harddrives.

    • Why would I use a Office suite which is free of features? I mean I want to actually use that think, don't I?

      It would be like using Gnome. (Their basic idea was very good. But the implementation is horrible. I'm really objective here. I would have loved for Gnome to also be a software design success.)

      When did it happen, that features became somehow uncool to a small but loud subset of the people (I guess)??
      Is it perhaps, because the developers of software with features did not get the point of good defaults

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by jedidiah ( 1196 )

        > Why would I use a Office suite which is free of features?

        Because your actual requirements are meagre and more resemble the sort
        of word processing programs that existed for home computer users before
        Word Perfect wannabes became the forced defacto standard.

        > When did it happen, that features became somehow uncool to a small but loud subset of the people (I guess)??

        Once people realized they were being perpetually charged over and
        over again for the same thing and when relatively pointless features
        like t

  • I've used NeoOffice, which is a native OS X port of OpenOffice, and also OpenOffice on Fedora. While it's certainly capable software, there do still seem to be some "gotchas" when it comes to MS Office interoperability - but the big issue is how ponderous it is. Java apps still seem to have this basic issue with not feeling "snappy".

    Now I'm using the latest version of Pages from iWork. I started out just thinking of it as "maybe getting a little less dependent on Microsoft"; but I've found I just plain like

  • If they have any sense. Not only does it shield them a little from euro trust-busting legislation, but it also propagates MS proprietary file formats and breeds developers that are familiar with them. None of these things is bad for MS in the long run. A near toothless competitor is a godsend to MS.

  • Randall should try creating a document on a Mac, editing it on an MS Windows PC, and opening it on a Linux machine. Let's see, MS Office, N/A, SoftMaker, N/A, OpenOffice ... we have a winner.

    Most documents I get these days are in PDF format. The occassional MS Word documents are usually so simple that the best way to read them is using antiword. Just about every Excel file opens fine in OpenOffice 1.1. The most problematic powerpoints are those created by Mac users with embedded Quicktime files - no one

  • Buggy Java implementation... NOT (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @05:25PM (#28535653)

    "Factor in OpenOffice's other well-documented warts - buggy Java implementation, ..."

    OpenOffice ist not, and never was, written in Java. It's C++. And it's open source, so you can even look that up. The point is: Why does a review, whose reviewer didn't even bother to do elementary facts checking, end up on the front page?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Locutus ( 9039 )

      Why does a review, whose reviewer didn't even bother to do elementary facts checking, end up on the front page?
       

      when it's a slow news day and/or there's a need for more ad dollars.
       

      Lob
       

    • Saying bloated and buggy C++ is no /. material.

  • Still rocks!

  • Can anyone tell me why the Openoffice.org application has the .org in its name? That is usually used to designate a website's domain, not desktop software. It's really weird that they'd put that in the name of a piece of application software.
    • Apparently, Microsoft somehow got exclusive rights to the word Office. Or something like that.
      • How does adding .org make the word "office" disappear? In any case, Microsoft only has trademark rights to "Microsoft Office", not just any use of the word.
        • I don't know. Maybe because now it's their website address instead of a common noun, or something equally ridiculous. I personally think they should drop the OpenOffice.org name from all of the icons in the start menu. Why can't it just say Writer, Draw, Base, and Calc? And in the context menus, why wouldn't they make it say "Open with OpenOffice.org Writer" instead of "open with swriter". It's like they have a deadline and just want to get the product out of the door. Anyway, I use it and so do my children

    • Re:What's with the .org? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Zantetsuken ( 935350 ) on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @06:23PM (#28536361) Homepage
      Wikipedia:

      The project and software are informally referred to as OpenOffice, but this term is a trademark held by a company in the Netherlands co-founded by Wouter Hanegraaff and is also in use by Orange UK,[3] requiring the project to adopt OpenOffice.org as its formal name.[4]

      • That's completely retarded. How does adding .org suddenly not make it trademark violation? If I started a company called Microsoft.org, then Microsoft would successfully sue me. Why would this be any different?

        If there was a trademark issue, then why not just pick a completely different name? The more I hear about this outfit, the more it reinforces my conclusion that it's the product of diseased minds.

  • I'll agree with previous posts. This is nothing more than an add for a new app. I will NOT be visiting their site. Besides at $79(39 educational) I'll take iWork from Apple and have an awesome Presentation app and office compatibility, Of course we need another office format like we need a hole in the head but hey, you opened the flood gates with your fat price tag.
    BTW: I still recommend OO to everyone. You can't beat free and it seems like a pretty solid office app on every platform. Frankly, I'd choose i

  • Softmaker Office 2006 is available for free for Windows, not trialware or anything. If you're running Windows and you'd usually just be using AbiWord or OpenOffice, it's way lighter and much nicer.

    http://softmakeroffice.com/ [softmakeroffice.com]

    Notice: Only TextMaker and PlanMaker are present (Word and Excel). If you need more advanced functionality, give 2008 a shot. They have an excellent student discount, also.

    I don't mean to just pimp software or anything, but this is a great product from a tiny software company in Germany,

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