OpenOffice 2.0 vs MS Office

[alexander]

Here is a cool article about MS vs Sun in the office business, thought it was pretty clear, tasteful and most of all i dont think that anyone got paid for it :evil:

 

http://www.realtechnews.com/posts/1705

 

what do you think?

[nemo]

I think that for the author's general needs, OOo is perfect. I typically use OOo for most of my word processing needs, but unfortunately tend to fall into that .01% of the population that does actually use the advanced features of the office suite for large documents. Generally, I try to get most of my data into the document and then move it to M$ for final touch-ups.

 

I like the thought of Base, but in reality I'd have been more happy if they'd waited and released something that worked.

 

I've never had problems with Calc.

 

If the author of this article is as dependent upon clip-art as he says he is, his problem is not with the presentation software. Impress is more difficult to use than PP, but it is functional for most tasks.

 

I don't know why Draw is considered to be its own application. Apparently that makes my part of the majority. I have yet to read an OOo review from someone who understands why Draw is an app as opposed to simply shared functionality between the other OOo components.

 

Overall, I like OOo.

[alexander]

Because Draw is Gimp, only way more crappy :hihi: ...

[Kizzi]

I downloaded OpenOffice and found I had to restart my computer before anything would print. MS Word came with my computer so I used that and it prints perfectly!!!!!!

 

So I use Word.

 

Kizzi

[alexander]

that is a weird error, you should try to get a more recent version, i'm sure it works by now....

[nkt]

I downloaded OpenOffice and found I had to restart my computer before anything would print. MS Word came with my computer so I used that and it prints perfectly!!!!!!

 

So I use Word.

 

Kizzi

We had that problem ages ago, in version 0.9 iirc.

 

OOo is all we use now. Why pay M$?

 

Impress is better than Powerpoint, it just takes a few documents to get used to the different way of working. Or one that pushes the limits!

 

I open complex Word files without any real issues so far - the worst one is the automatic font substitution without warning.

 

The new database front end has a few lethal bugs in it, like locking up the program if the db server takes too long to respond, or abnormally closes the connection, and why on earth it has to be SQL or table view, with no way to switch easily?

 

Crashes happen a bit randomly because I'm using a network drive and when XP goes to sleep it doesn't quite wake up properly, and OOo dies, but I've yet to lose a single word. The closest was when we lost a document, but I recovered it from the disk cache without trouble in 5 minutes.

 

The weirdest thing is the way that the automatic labels, such as "Page X of Y", "Date printed" etc. are not consolidated, and are different between each application. Trivial things in Writer become issues in Impress because they are not there! One set would be a vast improvement.

 

The worst bit is the spreadsheet, Calc. Oh sure, it does everything Excel does, but can you get it to print nicely? Where is the ability to change the page scale and layout at printing?

 

At W!T!H! I was accused of using Excel due to the shinyness of my timetable printout. I cursed them, then explained I had simply snapshoted the screen, dropped it into PaintShopPro 7, trimed as needed, then patched what I needed, rotated and scaled the image and spooled to printer.

In Excel I would have had to do the very taxing and less easy "Set print margins" and dragged once over what I wanted to print. :)

 

The next increment of OOo will hopefully fix these things, and that will be that. And there will be peace and love aplenty. :eek2:

 

EDIT: I just RTFA, and I have to say it was the comments after it that were best. Some real idiots. However, I had forgotten completely (supressed?) the awful times I had with Word Autoformat moving things around, trying to open large data sets on slow computers with Excel, and the bizarre way Word ties your page into the printer settings so solidly... All three of which causes things to take massively longer than they should have. Worst and least forgivable, however, was the battle with page numbering in Word. Numbering from page 2, missing a page each time (2.4.6.8...) should not be such a monumental effort. Aside from that last one, OOo handles them all far better, and that last one, I address above (though it is still better than Word!)

[geokker]

I use Linux at work and I'm regularly forced to use OO for Word and Excel files I receive. While I'm amazed at the compatibility of the suite with Office (suspicious of reverse engineering), it's a real drag to use in terms of performance. Whenever I think of anything Sun Microsystems related, I think slooooow. It is particularly annoying as every other program I use on my Linux installation flies.

 

Power usability-wise, nothing touches Office 2003 on a freshly installed (in a month, performance will halve), fast XP machine. Word is an excellent program. I've flirted with other officey programs like star office, pages (really tried to give this a go), keynote, abiword etc. etc. but nothing comes close. I think the primary reason for this is that Office is so ubiquitous open source developers would have to support Office .bloat support to produce anything people will actually use.

 

For me, Office is a necessary evil. For now.

 

Incidentally, the Mac OS X port (not v2 yet) called NeoOffice is virtually unusable which you'll discover if you can wait the 20,000 hours it takes to boot up.

[alexander]

umm, well, in reality, there is no more powerful word processor then emacs, ask yourself one simple question, can Word make you coffee, and is it a functionality of the program without any extra modules, just freshly compiled...

[nemo]

remember the good old days when everything was done with vi?

[Buffy]

remember the good old days when everything was done with vi?

iYes!(esc)Yppppp

 

.PP,

Buffyroff

[alexander]

vi and now vim is a really good text editor, however in power it nowhere near compares to emacs; something about command tab auto completion, built in lisp interpreter, and the ability to do just about anything you can possibly imagine and actually a lot more, like i have recently made it so when you have a cursor over a function and you press f1, it will search man pages for that function, and i've been meaning to modify that to also search cpp bible for that too, but for now with no time comes no luck :hihi: Working with multiple workspaces, any kind of synthax highlighting, and all other kinds of crazy emacs stuff that i still dont know and cant imagine trying to describe... seriously, vim is good, but emacs kicks any text editors butt :evil:

[Buffy]

vi and now vim is a really good text editor, however in power it nowhere near compares to emacs....

Ppppbbbbbtttt! emacs is for wimps! Real hackers use vi! Synax highlighting? Bah! Who needs it! Programmable macros? I can type it faster than I think it! :hihi: :evil: :lol:

 

set showmatch,

Buffy

[alexander]

and that feature came to vi from emacs, emacs stands for Editor MACroS. emacs is for people who want to use a real word processor...

synthax highlighting lightly describes it, more like, propper spacing and tabbing that makes your code look more professional.

but here is why emacs over vi:

emacs is modeless

it has a lisp interpreter, which makes you be able to do all kinds of crazy stuff that text editors arent normally made to do

and emacs is much better for edditing many files at once as you can be looking at as many files as you want at once, split your screen

there is much more available commands

emacs can actually include vi in a mode if you wanted to

there is no switching between command and text modes (that gets extremely annoying in vim when under pressure)

there are special edditing models for something like 25 different languages by default

special scripting modes for different shell scripts

there is support for using 21 non english languages

then there is a special mode for latex and tex code which seems to be missing from vi

you can debug from inside emacs

there are extensive diff and file merge functions

there is actually a speciall emacs shell within emacs

oh and you can implement new modes without having to recompile your editor

oh and emacs is higly customized and customizable for more advanced users

[C1ay]

vi

[alexander]

I didnt ask for your preference, i just said that there is no more powerful word processor then emacs!

[geokker]

The modes of Vi reassure me when editing critical conf's. I never feel 'safe' using Emacs - I always think I'll compulsively lose it and knock over all the China.

 

Incidentally, while Ubuntu 5.10 preview has a fairly nice Open Office 2, Neo Office continues to irk me with its unusability.

[alexander]

were you high when you wrote that geokker? (just wondering)

modes of vi have absolutely nothing to do with compuslively loosing files and breaking China. just like Vi emacs has autosave feature that saves you files and will allow you to recover your files. And your distro stinks if there is no way to recover config files, or get originals.