Jamie's Random Musings
Various thoughts and adventures, including but not limited to Linux, Windows XP and Widows Vista, and assorted bits of hardware new and old.
Friday 27 March 2009, 3:08 PM
OpenOffice to the Rescue
It really totally escapes me why most people pay money for Microsoft Office these days - and quite a lot of money, at that. OpenOffice does virtually everything MS Office does, and it does quite a lot that MS Office can no - such as save directly to PDF format. It can read and write MS Office file formats, so it is easy to exchange documents with others who are still unfortunate enough to be using MS Office.
jw 27/3/2009
PreviousComments on this post
As I understand it, one of the causes for apparent corruption is that MSoffice sometimes saves the wrong file size into the document.
Next time it tries to open it, it goes 'Help! I can't load a 5TB document. I quit!'
OpenOffice on the other hand sees the written size and thinks 'No way could anyone have saved a document that big on this machine. lets see how big the file really is. Hmmm 500k, better be a bit careful how we load this.'
What is very nice is that if you re-save the 'corrupted' document from OpenOffice, lo and behold, it is magically repaired and MSoffice can also load it again..
In case there is anyone why still doesn't know, a 'feature' of MSoffice is that when you save a document you also save the edit buffer. This will be likely to contain bits of every single document that has been worked on for that session - that's how a three-line letter gets to be 500k in the first place!
Thanks for the explanation - no certainty, but from what he told me when it wouldn't open, that certainly could have been the problem.
By the way, the edit buffer contents have been the source of a lot of security problems, leaks and embarassment over the years as well. But people keep paying for MS Office...
jw
My two cents plus change about MS Office 2007.
You can save directly to PDF or XPS format from the Save As menu options IF you've installed the add-on from Microsoft. I have been told that the XPS/PDF tool works in MS Office 2003 also.
What I find especially telling is that if you save your documents in PDF and XPS formats in MS Office 2007 and then open them with their "native" applications, Adobe Reader for PDF and anything Microsoft for XPS. The XPS document looks absolutely perfect but the PDF seems to suffer from the "dust bunnies" as I've previously described it. Everything in the PDF format looks at the very least somewhat fuzzy in comparison to the XPS displayed version. That includes the fonts.
With Microsoft previously pushing the XPS format really hard to supplant PDF, the user is again the victim of the "file-format war" .
I insisted on installing OpenOffice 3 on the Visaster system even with MS Office 2007 on it. The final argument that won was that I had been using Open Office and/or StarOffice for the last 5 years to write documentation. There were over 150 released documents in Open Office format on my storage server. MS Office can't open odt or swx format files.
I reminded them that they didn't have to buy MS Office for five years, so why force me to use it now?
This comment has been deleted at the users request
I made the switch to open office on my asta la vista baby machine, and I must say that I'm a convert! It's much faster and has a more integral feel to it. Strangely enough, it gets on better with vista than Office 2007. At least in my experience.
@Xwindowsjunkie - Thanks for the comments. I had heard comments from Office 2007 users about documents saved to PDF looking very slightly "blurred", too, but hadn't thought about it much. Fortunately, one thing I have been successful in doing is convincing people to avoid XPS like the plague, anyway.
Does the "Save As" PDF add-on from Microsoft really save directly, or does it still actually use a "virtual printer", as every version of Office I had dealt with before 2007 did? The very first time that I used OpenOffice, I saw the PDF button, and I was blown away when I found that I could just click it, and the document was save in PDF, rather than having to wander through various ridiculously confusing pseudo-printer control windows.
@Roger - Yes, that was my experience as well, and if you are unfortunate enough to have to try to continue using older versions of MS Office, the feeling gets stronger and stronger with each version that you go back, until you get to where it simply won't work any more. Microsoft basically says "No, we don't care that you paid money TO US for that product, we won't let you use it any more, if you have to have Office now you have to give us more money - and learn how to use it all over again, because there is essentially no similarity between Office 2000 and earlier versions, and Office 2007".
Thanks for reading and commenting.
jw
I can't say for sure it isn't a "virtual printer" simply because it operates solely as an option under the Save As menu. If you choose either PDF or XPS formats it puts the file straight onto the disk without an obvious conversion routine.
What's funny is that a file saved as a PDF from OpenOffice looks better than from MS Office 2007.
Thanks, that answered my question - if you hit "Save As" and choose PDF, and it saves, without going through additional dialog windows, that's good enough - one less problem.
Yes, I agree, the difference in quality is strange and regrettable - one more problem, and a significant one for organizations that make a lot of use of PDF.
jw
"It really totally escapes me why most people pay money for Microsoft Office these days"
Inertia, market share and the de facto standard? There are echoes of VHS vs. Betamax:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war
but I think there could be a happy ending to this particular story as FLOSS makes continued inroads into proprietary markets (I say that but have no figures to back it up!!)
Hi Jake, thanks for the comment. I agree - and I am waiting with interest to see more of your "3I's" series. You have already put words to some things that I couldn't quite nail down.
Perhaps there is another factor at work in this, which we used to run up against all the time when we first started trying to sell Unix systems in Switzerland. At the time, practically all the businesses used IBM computers. So when you needed a new computer, buying IBM was the "safe" way to go. If something went wrong, and it didn't work, you could just throw up your hands and say "hey, I bought IBM, what more could I do?", but if you bought one of those weird new Unix systems and something went wrong, everyone was after your skin because you took such a huge chance, and didn't follow the "norm". I see this as more of a "CYA" syndrome than inertia.
Could the same thing be happening with Office suites? If you buy MS Office, create a document and send it to someone, and they can't open it, or it is corrupt, or whatever else goes wrong, you can just say "too bad, it was corrupted in transmission, or it was the will of God, or whatever". But if you install OpenOffice, and the same thing happens, you are likely to be subjected to a lot of criticism.
We found this to be a particularly difficult problem to solve - in fact, it continues today in a lot of ways.
jw
The technique I used was to not tell them I made it with OpenOffice. Email recipient ignorance was bliss. I would export it to a DOC file format and email that to them. About the only times I got into trouble was when I overlaid one graphic element like an arrow onto some other graphic format picture like a jpg. Things got dicey. The obvious fix was to open gimp and merge the arrow with the picture and re-insert it merged into the OpenOffice document and then export it to a DOC file.
Most of the compatibility issues we have had, have to do with people in the office using different versions of MS Office! The company finally ponied up enough cash to buy a license of some sort to put MS Office 2007 and Visaster onto all desktops. Hence my b----hing blog about it. I still hate MS Office 2007 and prefer OO.org3. I have isolated Visaster enough so that its only my email, wiki and DOC writing machine. Everything else rides on the XP Pro system.
At home I don't have compatibility issues. Everybody uses OpenOffice.org 3 and that's it. MS Office doesn't live here. I still have MS Office 2000 Pro somewhere on its CD but its not installed and hasn't been since OpenOffice 2.xx came out.
I know exactly what you mean about compatibility problems being between different versions of MS Office, I've seen plenty of that. The other big issue, of course, is that the learning curve between versions of MS Office has been getting increasingly steep - to the point that learning Office 2007 is more of a task than learning OpenOffice.
Thanks for contributing, as always.
jw
