It shouldn't happen to an IT consultant
Spend your time doing business, not IT.
Tuesday 30 December 2008, 6:32 PM
Do Open Office's troubles matter?
Should the news posted by Michael Meeks claiming that the Open Office (OO) Project is in trouble affect the decision to use it?
Excel PowerPoint and Word have evolved pretty slowly. The last version saw very few new features added. When Microsoft conducted a customer survey asking what users wanted from the new version “more than 90 percent asked for features that were already available in Office.” (quoted from here). Microsoft concentrated on making things easier to find in the 2007 version by moving away from menus to enlarged Toolbars (‘Ribbons’). Great for the inexperienced, a pain for those who already knew where features live.
A major reason for not switching to OO, familiarity with Microsoft Office, went away. Open Office is more like the MS Office most users know (if not actually love) than Microsoft Office itself. We’ve not seen any radically new ‘killer-app’ features added to Word, Excel or PowerPoint for some years. Unless Microsoft significantly improve Office, OO shouldn’t have too trouble much keeping up. If security flaws and bugs are fixed plus new file formats supported chances are it’ll continue to compete effectively.
There are though other barriers to switching. OOs occasional failure to perfectly decode complex Word and PowerPoint documents was a frequent concern. That’s no longer an issue, every tricky document I’ve thrown at OO 3 looks exactly the same as it does MS Office. The exception is that OO, not surprisingly, can’t handle MS Office macros, something that most seriously impacts some Excel users. Another missing feature, critical for some but ignored by most, is MS Words handy ‘Split Windows’ capability enabling two parts of the same document to be viewed and edited simultaneously. Something I would hate to be without.
Would I be happy running a business on Open Office? Well there’s still no getting away from the need for Outlook, it may be a recourse hungry monster but it is the de-facto standard. Every mobile phone and PDA syncs with it, you know every other email clients' messages will display properly in it. But its available separately from around £35 so that’s not big a deal. Similarly Microsoft Access, for which the is no OO equivalent can be had from around £80.
I’d certainly install OO, if only as an easy to way export files as documents PDFs and as a handy backup should the occasional file disagree with MS Office. Nonetheless In practice most business never know when a vital Excel spreadsheet or Word Document chock full of macros will drop into an inbox. But if you really don’t need the things it can’t do, then it is simply down to how comfortable staff are with OO. I would encourage them to give it a try.
Excel PowerPoint and Word have evolved pretty slowly. The last version saw very few new features added. When Microsoft conducted a customer survey asking what users wanted from the new version “more than 90 percent asked for features that were already available in Office.” (quoted from here). Microsoft concentrated on making things easier to find in the 2007 version by moving away from menus to enlarged Toolbars (‘Ribbons’). Great for the inexperienced, a pain for those who already knew where features live.
A major reason for not switching to OO, familiarity with Microsoft Office, went away. Open Office is more like the MS Office most users know (if not actually love) than Microsoft Office itself. We’ve not seen any radically new ‘killer-app’ features added to Word, Excel or PowerPoint for some years. Unless Microsoft significantly improve Office, OO shouldn’t have too trouble much keeping up. If security flaws and bugs are fixed plus new file formats supported chances are it’ll continue to compete effectively.
There are though other barriers to switching. OOs occasional failure to perfectly decode complex Word and PowerPoint documents was a frequent concern. That’s no longer an issue, every tricky document I’ve thrown at OO 3 looks exactly the same as it does MS Office. The exception is that OO, not surprisingly, can’t handle MS Office macros, something that most seriously impacts some Excel users. Another missing feature, critical for some but ignored by most, is MS Words handy ‘Split Windows’ capability enabling two parts of the same document to be viewed and edited simultaneously. Something I would hate to be without.
Would I be happy running a business on Open Office? Well there’s still no getting away from the need for Outlook, it may be a recourse hungry monster but it is the de-facto standard. Every mobile phone and PDA syncs with it, you know every other email clients' messages will display properly in it. But its available separately from around £35 so that’s not big a deal. Similarly Microsoft Access, for which the is no OO equivalent can be had from around £80.
I’d certainly install OO, if only as an easy to way export files as documents PDFs and as a handy backup should the occasional file disagree with MS Office. Nonetheless In practice most business never know when a vital Excel spreadsheet or Word Document chock full of macros will drop into an inbox. But if you really don’t need the things it can’t do, then it is simply down to how comfortable staff are with OO. I would encourage them to give it a try.
PreviousComments on this post
"Similarly Microsoft Access, for which the is no OO equivalent " - so did I imagine "Base" then? It looks like a database to me, in fact it looks a lot like Access!
To quote from the OO website "BASE is a fully featured desktop database management system".
