MS vs. Open Source Office Suite Compatibility 576
Anonymous Coward writes "Though Microsoft may soon be blocking Office suite compatability with open source productivity tools, in the mean time Hal Varian (of Berkeley) has conducted the Microsoft Office-Linux Interoperability Experiment which shows a surprising amount of interoperability. Hey, another reason NOT to upgrade to the new version!"
important to note (Score:5, Informative)
Sad but true
Re:important to note (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:important to note (Score:5, Interesting)
"forward compatibility has often been a problem."
Correct, but I'd venture that most software would suffer from that, not just M$ Office.
However, please note that backward compatibility is also problematic with (some/all) M$ software.
IMHO there is no guarantee that a newer release of a given M$ program will be able to open files from an older release of that same program. Again, this is not unusual for (a lot of/some) software. But of course, with open source this doesn't pose as much of a problem.
FWIW I seem to remember running into trouble when I used M$ Publisher. I have a newer version installed on one of these machines <<gestures>> that cannot open publisher files from an older version of Publisher. These 2 different version are sequential releases...I think that is unacceptable >:\
Re:important to note (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:important to note (Score:5, Informative)
It's an unbelievable anachronism, but it's the truth.
Re:important to note (Score:4, Interesting)
Do you use the same default printer? Word pulls a lot of functions from there.
In any case...
If you want to replicate a printed document, you should use word to make PDFs. (There are free PDF makers that are almost-but-not-quite as good as Acrobat.) Word is a word-processing program, to be used for writing and "I don't really care about the specifics" document layout. If precise formatting is important, then _don't use word._ It wasn't designed to do more than "good enough" in that job.
Re:important to note (Score:4, Informative)
Re:important to note (Score:5, Funny)
Strange, I can open any document that I've created between 1989 & 2003 with any version of my word processor suite.
God love ya, vi & tex.
Belloc
Re:important to note (Score:4, Informative)
On a personal note I have had several occasions when a corrupted .doc has refused to
open at all in Word '97 but opened in
StarOffice, with the corrupted place highlighted
in red. I thought that was nice. (This particular
version of Word had a tendency to corrupt its own
documents occasionally, when we used a certain template imposed on us by our customer.)
It would also would have been interesting to note whether the alternatives have Word's awful feature of formatting pages slightly differently as a function of what printer is currently active. A few years ago this caused us to postpone a telephone conference because everyone's page numbers were different; we faxed a hard copy to everyone to correct the problem. If the open source alternatives don't have this "feature" I would call that a significant plus.
A pity... (Score:3, Interesting)
Plenty of reasons (Score:5, Interesting)
I use word processors to write school papers. When it comes down to it, writing a school paper requires one important feature, spell check. That was available on the C64. I'll bet most people are like me in that they NEVER need to upgrade (no, I don't have the trusty C64 anymore, but I haven't upgraded office since 97).
You really have to hand it to the Microsoft marketing dept for making everyone believe they need to upgrade every year.
Re:Plenty of reasons (Score:5, Funny)
Rus
Re:Plenty of reasons (Score:5, Funny)
Now, whenever I open Word and I forgot to hide the assistant, my son (from the other side of the house, mind you) will run screaming from the other side of the house to play his game or type on Word. On the way, he usually racks up 1 or 2 cats, the dog, and at least one piece of furniture. When he gets to the computer, he finds me trying to get started on a report for school.
Him: "I want to play my game, daddy"
Me: "Not right now. I've gotta do something for school"
Him: "That's not fair."
Me: "Sorry, bud, but I have to get this done."
Him (Alternate 1): "You want a piece of me?" (Assumes Jet Lee pose)
Him (Alternate 2): "I'm gonna pop a cap in your ass, daddy." (Thank his mother for that one...)
I for one have happily made the transition to OpenOffice because, well, it's just safer...
Re:Plenty of reasons (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Plenty of reasons (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, circa 1985-1990, was sorta pre-WYSIWYG. While the classic 8bit systems had "fonts" you couldn't really see them on screen. For the most part fonts were not proportional, as in print was typicaly in the form of a fixed number of characters per inch.
Some printers did have an option for proptional fonts, but this was not commonly used because you had to change your habits like using a tab rather then spaces.
There was NO real need to re-paginate if you just recycled your paper and just printed the number at the approperate point on each page. In fact, you can still do this in the 21st century if you had to.
Re:Plenty of reasons (Score:3, Insightful)
These days people have the arrogant notion that their written text should look like it was typeset in a proprotional font, without having crossed the desk of a good editor and being published first.
And that's not really a good thing.
Re:Plenty of reasons (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Plenty of reasons (Score:3, Informative)
You're kidding, right? Compare the appearance of documents created with LaTeX to Word documents. LaTeX wins.
Most academic papers (al least in math and CS) is still done using LaTeX. It let's the author concentrate on the content and let's the computer concentrate on beatiful output.
Re:Plenty of reasons (Score:4, Insightful)
Amen, brother. My senior year in college I converted from Mac to Linux & from WYSIWYG to LaTeX, and I never looked back. Absolutely beautiful output with hardly any effort at all. I got all As that year, and while part was due to improved study habits (to write a paper, check every possible book out of the library, head to the local pub and don't leave until it's written), I credit most of it to the fact that the standard LaTeX article template is so pleasant to read.
WYSIWYG was really a step backward, unfortunately. Text should be written as content, then rendered into a visually appealing form automatically.
Re:Plenty of reasons (Score:3, Interesting)
While I mostly agree, the sad fact of the matter is that no software yet exists that can magically apply lovely documentism. They all do a fairly good job if the end-user is of the "style" mental state rather than the "hand-tune" mental state -- i.e. semantic vs. presentational markup. If they can get themselves to defer to the computer for the style, then their documents will look good.
Most people just don't grok it, though. At my church, there's a computer that runs PowerPoint slides with song lyrics
Re:Plenty of reasons (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Plenty of reasons (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Plenty of reasons (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the reason more people don't switch is two-fold. Application shock and old documents. First, while very close, OO is not exactly the same layout (and functionality!) as MS Office. I've seen people freaked out by the order of two buttons (next to each other!) being reversed. It's just too much change for some people to accept.
But the second reason is more important. People don't want to l
features (Score:5, Interesting)
Right there is where most problems will occur. Also, after reading enough of /., lack of support of VBScript would be another obstacle.
Also, I wonder how KOffice will do after they switch their file formats and stuff. It could only help, right?
Re:features (Score:3, Interesting)
Business users (Score:3, Interesting)
Home users typically don't care about VB macros. For companies, it's different.
There must be thousands of little "business applications" that are Word or Excel macros. Each of those might contain only a few lines of code, but in a large organization, there are a lot of those.
Re:features (Score:4, Informative)
Re:features (Score:3, Informative)
In fact, the lack of VBA is one of the main reasons why I won't switch away from Word right now. Try finding a developer that can understand Corel PerfectScript.. :)
Pretty light.... (Score:4, Funny)
As they say themselves, this was based on files downloaded from the Internet, which were probably designed in order to be viewed by the greatest number of people.
Hmmm... Then again, putting MS Office files on the Internet, instead of PDF of plain HTML probably means the user do not have enough computer knowledge to optimize said files. So, it's a good point.
On the other hand, I am surprised that the numbers for StarOffice are greater than the numbers for OpenOffice... How come?
Anyway, this is good news, and should be a valuable lesson for most people with PHBs... =)
Re:Pretty light.... (Score:3, Informative)
They used StarOffice 6.0. OpenOffice is based on StarOffice 5.2 (at least the version they tested).
Re:Pretty light.... (Score:5, Informative)
StarOffice 6.0 is based on OpenOffice.Org, which in turn is based on StarOffice 5.2
The reasons for the difference might be small differences between the OO.o version they tested, and SO6.0. If they use OO.o 1.1RC3, I suspect the results would be very different, as the MSOffice import filters are hugely improved in the new release.
Re:Pretty light.... (Score:4, Informative)
Money. StarOffice costs some.
No, I'm not just being snide ( that's just a value added bonus), SO contains propriatary filter code that Sun distributes under third party license, thus SO has always been a bit better at compatibility.
The OOo people are having to reverse engineering these propriatary filters themselves so they're still playing catch up. They get a bit closer with every release.
KFG
Anti-trust ruling (Score:5, Insightful)
Clearly, the intention of this settlement wasn't so that everyone could simply see what's in, for example, a word document (which is a communication protocol in itself), but how to build program which interoperate with them. Shouldn't the developers of Open Office then be able to simply download the DOC specs off of Microsoft.com and build it into their system? Or, am I assuming that the "settlement" was an actual binding agreement?
Re:Anti-trust ruling (Score:5, Informative)
What I don't understand by this is that under the US anti-trust settlement, Microsoft were made to release the specifications of their communication protocols to competitors.
That's true, in spirit. In actuality, if I remember correctly, the conditions under which MS is required to open the protocols for the office products contain at least two rather difficult obstacles:
1 - Licensing fees [slashdot.org]
2 - J. No provision of this Final Judgment [usdoj.gov] shall:
MjM
Oops, they did it again...
No, not licensing - more like this: (Score:5, Informative)
373. However, the major comments concerning file formats request disclosure of the file formats of Microsoft products such as Office. Office does not meet the definition of Microsoft Middleware, and so it does not fall under Section III.D. Nor is Office implemented natively in a Windows Operating System Product, so it does not fall under Section III.E. Thus, the file formats for Office will not be disclosed or licensed pursuant to the RPFJ.
Paragraphs 371-375 on the page contain more information about it but that's the main point.
Office 97 - All You'll Ever Need (Score:5, Insightful)
Word 2004 can't be many lines of code from self-awareness.
MS went absolutely over the top with Office; you get "features" now that well over 99% of their user base will never even SKIM the surface of.
Clever marketing and PHB one-upmanship are what convinced the masses to go with this ridiculous and unnecessary upgrade path.
Operating Systems progressing through research and improved hardware I can understand; but you DO NOT need a new version of a bleedin' word processor every year.
Don't forget ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't forget incompatibility between formats used in some of their different MS Office versions.
zOutlook 97 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Outlook 97 (Score:5, Insightful)
so I buy an entire Office Suit for an email client?
Something must be amiss here.
It is starting to get funny sort off, as I unwrangled myself at home from Windows now for a couple of years and see just how far OpenOffice has come. Even at work most of the stuff I work on I create in OpenOffice and then save it into Windows format so that others can use it.
I was starting to think last night and realized the only reason I do HAVE to use windows at work is so that I can use Exchange (calendar) and get virus scanned 3 times a day from the Helldesk.
Re:Office 97 - All You'll Ever Need (Score:5, Interesting)
And yet features that lots of people would find useful aren't incorporated because they don't fit in with MS strategy.
When I tell small business clients that OpenOffice will write PDF documents just by going "save as", their eyes light up.
Re:Office 97 - All You'll Ever Need (Score:3, Informative)
I have found this to be an invaluable feature, since I use AppleWorks. I use the pdf features to create my CV and cover letters, and the rich text format to share with MS Office users.
Re:Office 97 - All You'll Ever Need (Score:4, Informative)
What would they sue them for? From Adobe's web site (http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/adobepdf.ht ml):
"An open file format specification, PDF is available to anyone who wants to develop tools to create, view, or manipulate PDF documents."
Re:Office 97 - All You'll Ever Need (Score:4, Informative)
PDF is an open format. Microsoft don't incorporate it in their products because they don't control it, not because of any legal reasons.
Re:Office 97 - All You'll Ever Need (Score:3, Insightful)
And Microsoft don't incorporate it because it would kill the
Re:Office 97 - All You'll Ever Need (Score:5, Interesting)
MS went absolutely over the top with Office; you get "features" now that well over 99% of their user base will never even SKIM the surface of.
Clever marketing and PHB one-upmanship are what convinced the masses to go with this ridiculous and unnecessary upgrade path.
The problem is, there are a lot of heavy-duty Office users who do use those features that somebody who just writes one research paper a month never uses. For example, some companies run their whole production and financial planning in custom-built Excel spreadsheets, and if Excel 2000/XP/2003 offers some feature OpenOffice doesn't they'll never switch in a million years if it requires them to rewrite the whole shebang.
Just because you don't use a feature of your Office suite, don't assume no one does. One percentage of ten million Office users equals a hundred thousand people who absolutely depend on that feature.
Re:Office 97 - All You'll Ever Need (Score:3, Insightful)
And you might even break it down further. Maybe your accoun
Re:Office 97 - All You'll Ever Need (Score:3, Funny)
Per Abrahamsen
Church of Emacs
Re:Office 97 - All You'll Ever Need (Score:4, Insightful)
You must be a marketing guy's dream. It's all about you, isn't it. You ask for a feature, you get a feature, and everybody else gets locked in to the only proprietary office suite that has that feature, even though the benefit of that feature is so obscure 99% of people won't even know it exists.
The feature I NEED most is no new features. If you have a need that isn't met by existing word processors, then I don't want to share documents with you. The fact of the matter is that not only do I NOT CARE what you *think* you need, I need you NOT to have it and to be forbidden from using it.
That's because I need an office suite that doesn't lock my business information into a proprietary format that cannot be supported by open source tools. Both of those drive cost for my business and home PC.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's been said before.. (Score:3, Interesting)
I've finally decided to just write my resume in XML (no kidding) and write a couple XSDs to turn it into an
Re:It's been said before.. (Score:3, Insightful)
The magic of RTF and PDF (Score:5, Informative)
Not to mention the office copier at my only client site is Red Hat based and will take a scanned copy and email you a PDF. Very handy.
What I'm very curious about is will MS make Word be able to open sxw files by default? Perhaps when OO hits critical mass? Something tells me sxw support, if it comes, will be in some hard to find converter pack that asks you for your original office CD.
Corresponds with my findings (Score:5, Informative)
Most of the problems are with word document are with imbedded graphics. Sometimes they show up in funny places. Sometimes not at all.
Large spreadsheets can be a problem (export from something). OOo has a limit at 32000 rows, it does give a nice warning about it, thought.
Haven't had any problems with powerpoint presentations.
If I could get the rest of the house to spend the time to learn to use OOo, MS-Office would be dumped in a second.
One thing is sure - we will not be buying new Ms-Office licences (but as we have already payed for those we have, I'll not be forcing something new on exsisting users, when it isn't nessesary).
Re:Corresponds with my findings (Score:3, Informative)
If they don't show up at all, the author made a link to the graphic, didn't actually embed it. It's still on their hard drive. If they show up in funny places, they left it as a "floating" embedded graphic, and the spacing shifted enough (change of fonts, margins, etc) to make it move.
To nail a graphic into place in any word processor, don't link it, and make sure the "
Microsoft don't discriminate (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft may soon be blocking office compatibility with ANY productivity tools. They don't care whether the source is open or closed, just that it is not a Microsoft product.
Really surprising? (Score:3, Interesting)
office compatibility is not a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to send anything to outside your organization, send if in PDF format. Its portable and "write-protected".
And inside your organization, for sure someone already has ditacted a office package as "the standart". If it is Windows Office, KOffice or StarOffice, it doesn't matter, because everybody will use the same product.
If you get some of this files from outside, just use one of the many converters available around.
The problem with the Linux Office packages is simply one:
Everybody that already worked 2 days with a computer knows how to work with MS word, MS powerpoint and MS excel. Switching to another office package is seen as a dificult task, because the interface is always diferent.
My 2euros (cents dont buy you anything these days)
Maybe it's not just compatibility - but exposure (Score:5, Interesting)
No, I think that they will keep there advertising campaign going and offering the likes of MS Works as the alternative to their more expensive package. And how many basic system users do you know of that have been following the development of OpenOffice ??
The average user walks into a computer store and says "I need a computer to type letters / send mail / basic calculations", and I can almost guarantee that the salesman will make an MS Office
Re:Maybe it's not just compatibility - but exposur (Score:3, Informative)
They have: StarOffice.
Nice to see... (Score:5, Insightful)
Although it must be said that this study is *quite basic*. The authors, to be fair, do point out however that "This particular experiment should be considered a pilot study that could be extended to a larger one.
Our experience in the 'real' world is exactly the same - compatiblity, for the most part, is *good enough*.
We have been rolling out small pilots with a number of clients using exactly this line of reasoning. For many IT departments who have lived through the *gratuitous incompatibilities* between succesive generations of Microsoft Office, this is all that is required to evaluate alternatives.
Yes, we should strive for 'perfect' interoperability. No, it is not necessary to begin migrating real businesses to an Open Source desktop.
Just my 0.02!
Format change (Score:4, Insightful)
What Microsoft is about to do, is to introduce an enourmously complex, ill-documented format. Just wait'n'see.
missing data? (Score:5, Interesting)
StarOffice is pretty good (Score:4, Informative)
SO 6.1 beta has PDF output (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact, 6.1 seems a nice product generally and is the first version of SO that I think I can actually recommend to clients when it is released. It may even be possible to train users to export PDFs for email, which would be a big win.
So does Open Office.org 1.1 RC3 (Score:5, Informative)
Features (Score:5, Interesting)
Beside attempting to do table formatting with strings of spaces {I know this is acceptable, even encouraged, in programming, when monospaced fonts are used; but it totally breaks proportional spacing}, the author also had manually numbered the pages.
I was heavily tempted to refuse to do the editing on the grounds that (a) the original material was unfit to use as a starting point and (b) I was having difficulty finding a copy of MS Word.
And now, the point, part one. What I'm really looking for is a word processor that can take such childish attempts and format them properly. Work out where the author was trying to line up the tabs, and change the space-spaced stuff to proper tabbed columns.
Or, maybe someone could make a USB shotgun accessory that will blow a luser's head off if they try certain effects. Such as
- Attempting to format using spaces
- Attempting to generate page numbers, tables of contents, or anything else that the computer can do for you, by hand *
- Using more than three fonts in a document
- Using the font 'comic sans MS' for anything at all
The point, part two, is that WordPad is not a word processor. It does not incorporate a spelling checker. Whose priorities are so warped that they would omit such a basic necessity while incorporating changeable fonts and colours? It matters not what meretricious decorations are applied to the text if the spelling is all cocked up! It does not even qualify as a text editor; it is a viewing tool. And a poor one at that, because its output often does not resemble the output of Word.* I have actually heard of someone creating a spreadsheet, then adding up the figures with an idiot-calculator and entering this in the total box
Re:Features (Score:3, Informative)
Excel does this, does it very well.
I often use Excel just for its ability to take data and organize it, assuming it's delimited by a common field. Wonderful for adapting documents. In theory star office offers this in their calc, but I have never a
Office 98 only exists for MacOS (Score:5, Informative)
The only version of Office that is called Office 98 is for MacOS, as far as I know. For Windows the more recent versions are 95, 97, 2000 and XP.
It is also very interesting to see the difficulties for Microsoft's Office suite when it comes to the interoperabilities between Office 97 on Windows and Office 98 on MacOS. At a company I worked at in 1998, we had both Macs and Windows machines, and amazingly enough, it was not trivial to make some documents written in Office 97 on a Windows machine work in Office 98 on a Mac (and vice versa).
Table missing an important result (Score:3)
The article does mention that, but I reckon most readers will just look at the table and say "I need 100% - I'll take MS office"
Re:Table missing an important result (Score:3, Informative)
They forgot to test FILE EXCHANGE options... (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, this tells us very little about interoperability, as needed in an office/colaboration environment, where people need to read my files and my revisions to their files.
Just to read other people's files, I prefer a format like PDF anyways.
Re:They forgot to test FILE EXCHANGE options... (Score:3, Informative)
OOo was thinking of doing the same iirc.
(btw for those that say rtf is less powerful - it's not. rtf can do everything the latest word can do - even ole objects etc)
More recent tests? (Score:3, Interesting)
Do we all have the attention span of ferrets? (Score:5, Insightful)
What good is OpenOffice if it's illegal? It'd get railroaded right off of the "legitimate" Internet just like DeCSS, and if someone finds out that you used it, you could very well go to jail. Not my cuppa.
I wish that we in the SlashDot community would have a longer memory, and that we would organize some sort of community against the DMCA (for it is the law which permits this sort of egregious BS). We should be rallying in the streets, but we're not. Pretty soon we may all be FORCED to buy a PeeCee with Windows and MS Office, or we will be completely unable to interoperate with the DRM-"protected"
Re:Do we all have the attention span of ferrets? (Score:3, Insightful)
First of all the DRM coming to Office is not manditory, its a choice the user can make. Secondly MS adoption is being hampered by their own products. There are plenty of corporate environments still using Office 97, NT 4 and Windows 98 if not for anything but the simple reason that it takes time to do large roll-outs. While new machines come with XP there wasn't the mass-exodis to it like MS hoped for, and in Servers most people are just now making it up to Win2
Do you have the intelligence of one? (Score:3, Insightful)
Take off your tinfoil hat. The DRM feature is not a part of the file format itself. It's a feature in Office that you can turn on when you save a document, so that you can secure it for other people in your company only to read it! It's not even on by default.
W
On the net = prepped for sharing ? (Score:4, Informative)
It would be interesting to see how the non-MS products coped with semi-embedded documents which are references to network shares.
Office isn't 4 disparate applications it is an application framework that happens to have some pre-configured applications.
There might be an application you know as Word but it is quite happy to live as an ActiveX control instatiated in your IIS Application.
I used to use it as a report generator, fill in some web forms and out spits the documentation.
The ability to open every word document on the planet is only part of the journey.
Sad but troo.
Commercial alternatives (Score:4, Insightful)
What would have made the article truly compelling would have been to also have compared things like Wordperfect and even MS Office itself. I haven't seen quite the same comparison of word processors or office suites in years, like 6 or 7. If Star Office and Open Office meet or exceed the compatibility of the commercial alternatives, that's a huge step.
Many businesses are petrified to move from MS Office and Windows but won't look for themselves at alternatives. They believe what they see in print and a comparison like that includes other commercial suites as well as MS Office would be very compelling. Most of you have heard things like "well, PC Magazine says if I snort onions through my none, Windows won't crash as much" and they just believe it and might even do it because they read it somewhere.
I don't think MS Office would achieve a 100 in any category either. Just from the font issues that crop up, formating issues, use by one person of a feature that another doesn't have installed, etc., would keep it down to 97-99 range also most likely. But it needs to be seen in print.
Too bad they didn't test TextMaker (Score:3, Interesting)
Confirms the already known (Score:5, Informative)
Now, we just need to squash a few annoying bugs (like the print preview in the spreadsheet module, still not fixed in 1.1rc3), make a native OS X build and we got a free, open-source, efficient cross-platform office suite that works, no matter the OS it's running on, with a consistent UI. Hey, Netscape got popular back in the days also because it was available on all platforms...
Furthermore, the openoffice file format is so easy and straightforward (just zipped XML) it could just become the ideal ubiquitous file format we're looking for. Btw, I wonder why no other open-source office application can read and/or write it. Shouldn't be hard writing an import/export filter...
Just my 2 cents there...
What's Stopping Us? VBA (Score:3, Interesting)
The number of Word features we change, replace or enhance is enormous: "Wizards" to guide creation of tables with their captions, startup items to ensure option settings, repair commands to fix things when you've messed up your own document, etc. etc.
Without at least source compatability with VBA and the object models, moving to any other platform would be a tremendous undertaking. We did it 8 years ago from WP to Word '95 (and to a lesser extent from Word '95 to Word 2000 four years ago), and we don't want to start from scratch.
Office 2003 fully supports xml documents (Score:5, Informative)
whitepaper [ftponline.com]
i've used the betas, i've seen it work. it's not a proprietary binary stream wrapped in xml headers - it's a fully ascii, 100% fidelity xml represented word document. with schema.
the binary formats always change every major version. it's doubtfully due simply to malice, it's more likely due to increased business pressure to cram more features in.
but all that aside, compatibility is the primary reason to upgrade to 2003.
Screaming at the top of my lungs (Score:5, Informative)
OFFICE 2003 DOES NOT BLOCK ACCESS FROM OPENOFFICE UNLESS THE USER TELLS IT TO!!!!
FFS, RTFA next time, people! Not only does the user have to tell Office2k3 to implement DRM and jumble the format, but there has to be a Win2k3 server on the network running the DRM manager application.
In order to use IRM (Information Rights Management), according to the article, the customer has to spend boatloads of money.
This feature is not about closing off office applications. It's about protecting IP and controlling access. M$ isn't selling O2K3 on the basis of "Hey, it's not compatible with other applications and that's why you should buy it!" They're selling it on "Hey, you can control who gets to read, print, and modify your documents, and that's why you should buy it!"
It has nothing to do with OSS, FOSS, Slashdot, or anything else. It's just a feature they want to sell to the intellectually paranoid at an extremely high price.
For the second time, there is nothing to see here, MOVE ALONG...
Murdering MS Office (Score:3, Insightful)
It would then be desirable to be able to use this as part of my Perl, PHP, C, Java, and Python programs which I have to run a lot at work. That way I can, for instance, write custom forms to input timesheets, generate the timesheets on the fly as *.xls, store them to disk, send them via email, and generally decrease the amount of time it takes to get common clerical tasks completed for the employees, and (hopefully) they'd better spend the 5-10 minutes a week we saved by... I dunno... working.
If there's any tools out there that do this already, and I've just missed the boat (or several), I'd love to know. But if there's nothing out there, I'd love to do it myself. It's the doing that gives me pause. ;)
Bonus points (Score:4, Funny)
I've said it before, and I'll say it again... (Score:4, Insightful)
The OOO data design tools that allow you to work with MySQL and PostgresSQL via unixODBC are a start, but still too difficult for the average Joe.
Get this... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:New version of what? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:New version of what? (Score:5, Funny)
Yes. OpenOffice is pure evil and will bring about the rise of communism, followed by the fall of civilization. The skies will burn and the rivers will turn red with blood. The Great Old Ones will return to bring unimagined terror to mankind and it truly will be hell on earth.
Oh, wait, my mistake.. that's just the text of a Microsoft internal memo.
Re:New version of what? (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, I keep hearing rumors about a Spice Girls reunion too.
Re:New version of what? (Score:3, Insightful)
New version of what? The Microsoft or the OpenOffice?
New version of Microsoft Office. They're coming up with new incompatible file formats. Real bad for interoperability everywhere.
If OpenOffice, is there something wrong with it? Please, tell me, why shouldn't I upgrade?!
OpenOffice is just fine, and each new revision brings better MS Office compatibility.
That is, until the next version of MS Office, which has patented technology in its file form
Re:Lock in (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is when someone important (a customer, a government) expects you to read a file in the locked-in format and you don't have MS Office. It's troublesome to convince your customers to save the files into HTML/CSV/TXT/whatever before sending them to you or publishing on the Web. So practically you have to pay for the MS Office licence to be compatible with everyone else. Hopefully this will change.
Re:Lock in (Score:4, Insightful)
That isn't lock-in, that is someone sending you a file in a format you don't like. I've had people send me files in PDF when I needed a Word file, but that isn't lock-in either. If you are hired by a person or company to do a job, you need to make sure you accommodate them, and that includes using whatever they want for file (within reason). If they send you something in Word, you use Word because that is what the customer wants, not because MS has somehow now mysteriously "locked you into" Word. It's not MS's fault that someone you deal with uses Word and you don't want to. That's not lock-in, that's you now liking how businesses operate.
Re:Lock in (Score:3, Funny)
If you include Wine in the mix, then the answer is a resounding...sometimes [winehq.org].
No, you numpty (Score:5, Insightful)
Because PHB is their boss the rest of corporate minions now have to upgrade to the shiny new locked up tighter than a virgin's snatch version of Office in order to read the irrelevant inane bullshit.
Re:Lock in (Score:5, Insightful)
My information is mine, Microsoft prevents me from exporting my data from its closed formats, that's vendor lock-in.
Re:Results not valid for everyone (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:A spalling chackar (Score:3, Interesting)
Using the wrong vowel isn't a logical idiocy like asking where the "Any Key" is. It's a simple failure of having learned every possible word by rote.
No, it is the logical idiocy of failing to RTFM. Standardized consistent spellings coincided with the rise of dictionaries, which are the authority on spelling and usage of words. Every child should have learnt in grammar school (they did in *my* day, by God!) that if they were not absolutely certain of the proper spelling or usage of a word they should co
Re:A spalling chackar (Score:5, Insightful)
Correct.
"which are the authority on spelling and usage of words."
Incorrect. So incorrect, in fact, that it betokens a complete lack of understanding of the English language and how she is spoke; and spelled.
C has an authority. Java has an authority. French and Icelandic have authorities.
English does not. Nobody died and made Noah Webster king. Dictionaries are snapshots of the language as it exists in the majority opinion of a panel of experts ( who often disagree) and many ( if not most) dictionaries disagree with each other on certain particulars.
English is open source and we make it up as we go along.
KFG
Re:Unusable (Score:4, Informative)
I must be a power user by the way because I have very few word documents that import correctly in ooo. IMHO ooo is perfect for the kind of stuff you could also use wordpad for (i.e. 80-90% of what business people use it for). Anything involving more complex layout stuff, embedded objects, complicated tables etc is almost certain to cause some degree of problems when importing from word. As a rule of thumb, if it needs to look good on paper don't use ooo to print a word document. If you need to do round trip editing (import, edit, export), make sure you don't lose information in the process. Both the import and export process is imperfect.