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Christopher Dawson
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OK, now OpenOffice is definitely good enough

By | October 13, 2008, 7:48pm PDT

Summary: There is a reason that the OpenOffice.org 3.0 servers are struggling to keep up with demand. OO.org 3.0 really is a serious upgrade over version 2.4 and makes NeoOffice irrelevant for Mac OS X users (previously, OpenOffice only worked within X11; While NeoOffice did a great job porting OO.org to native OS X, OO.org [...]

There is a reason that the OpenOffice.org 3.0 servers are struggling to keep up with demand. OO.org 3.0 really is a serious upgrade over version 2.4 and makes NeoOffice irrelevant for Mac OS X users (previously, OpenOffice only worked within X11; While NeoOffice did a great job porting OO.org to native OS X, OO.org 3.0 works out of the box in OS X as a native Aqua application).

Last week I asked if OpenOffice was good enough. The general consensus? OO.org is good enough to start a flame war, but we’re not really sure if it’s good enough to be a serious competitor to MS Office.

Now that OO.org 3.0 is out, I’m having a much tougher time seeing both sides of the issue here (I actually like Office 2007/2008, by the way; I think they’re slick, well-polished, and highly functional). I had never liked the OpenOffice equation editor; this version brings a very nice graphical and text-based hybrid editor to us math teachers. Mail merge was clunky in OO.org; this version brings a mail merge wizard and improved label templates. Outline numbering tended to be a bit kludgy for notetaking in OO; this version improves the stability and interface of outlining.

Annotations are now incredibly easy to add (Insert, Note) and Office 2007/2008 formats are supported across the board. While Microsoft has dumped VBA support in Office 2008, OO.org users can run Visual Basic scripting, as well as Python and Javascript.

I’m not actually bashing MS Office here. It’s a great suite and they still have something that OpenOffice lacks: Publisher. However, Publisher was lacking on the Mac platform anyway and *nix users haven’t had access to MS Office (including Publisher) without some serious Wine work. Speaking of Access, OpenOffice continues to bring a solid database offering to all platforms. Is it as powerful as Access? I don’t think so (let’s face it - Access 2007 rocks). However, Mac, *nix, and Windows users can all interchange databases and use OO.org Base as a front end to a variety of data sources (including MySQL).

OpenOffice.org is not a clone of Office 2007 (good call, Sun). It’s a full-featured suite that gives us everything we need from MS Office and the world of productivity software while keeping the bottom line quite a bit more reasonable (you don’t get any more reasonable than free).

Yes, OO.org has been good enough for a long time; the latest release should leave little doubt for any users who had been on the fence.

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Topics

Microsoft Corp., OO.org 3.0, OpenOffice, Apple Mac OS X, Microsoft Office, Open Source, Office Suites, Software, Operating Systems, Apple Mac OS, Christopher Dawson

Chris Dawson is a freelance writer and consultant with years of experience in educational technology and web-based systems. In 2011, he became the Vice President of Marketing for WizIQ, Inc., a virtual classroom and learning network SaaS provider.

Disclosure

Christopher Dawson

Christopher Dawson is the Vice President of Marketing for WizIQ, Inc., by day and a freelance writer and educational technology consultant by night. Well, most of his colleagues at WizIQ are based in India, so really he's working with them whenever he can stay awake. He has worked for his local school district as a teacher and technology director, for the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, and for Biogen, Inc. (now Biogen-IDEC, Inc.). He has also consulted with STATNet and Cytyc Corporation and retains close ties with X2 Development Corporation (now owned by Follett Software, the supplier of the student information system he administered for several years). Follett is paying him a monthly honorarium to act as a presenter for their "SIS Voices for Student Achievement" community (he produces occasional blog posts and hosts a monthly webinar on the use of student information systems to inform data-driven instruction and school-wide change. He regularly purchases and/or recommends Dell hardware. This is because Dell makes good hardware and has truly committed itself to education in innovative ways, particularly with their "Connected Classroom" initiative. It isn't because he has dealings with the company through his role at WizIQ (which he does) or because they have provided him with long-term loans of a variety of equipment for in-depth testing (which they have). Intel (reference designer for the Classmate PCs he has implemented in his local schools) has provided him with long-term loans of Classmate PCs for testing, as have Dell and Lenovo with their educational offerings. He may report on any of these companies as his experiences with them have direct bearing on educational technology; positive reports are not necessarily an endorsement and he receives no direct financial compensation from these companies or any others. Intel paid all expenses for his attendance at the 2009 Intel Classmate PC Ecosystem Summit which he attended as the sole representative of the technology press. He was invited to attend in 2010 but his wife would have killed him if he spent 3 days in Vegas geeking out and left her home alone with a new baby. Acer provided him with a 50% discount on an Aspire One netbook in early 2009 after he tested it for 30 days through their educational seed program. He liked the netbook at the time but it has since broken and sits unused in his office. Canonical sent him Ubuntu lanyards, t-shirts, and mousepads for his kids. He stole one of the lanyards and proudly hangs his keys from it and occasionally features his 8-year old wearing an oversized Ubuntu t-shirt on his Facebook profile. Gunnar Optiks sent him a pair of computer glasses to evaluate for a holiday gift guide. He is wearing them now as he types this because they never asked for them back and they rock out loud. Seriously - they work brilliantly and make it much easier to spend 20 hours a day staring at an LCD. If they ever asked for them back, he would fork over the $99 and buy a pair. Microsoft gave him 2 free copies of Office 2010 professional, a desktop clock, and a useless book on Office 2010 when he attended the launch of Office/Sharepoint 2010. He occasionally uses the SharePoint lanyard they gave him instead of the Ubuntu lanyard for his keys, but feels dirty afterwards. Adobe provided him with a pre-release version of the CS5 Master Collection for evaluation and ultimately provided a full, licensed copy for ongoing testing of educational applications of this admittedly expensive software. Like the Gunnars, if the license expires or they come out with CS6, he'd actually go out and buy it himself. Which is saying something, because he's actually pretty cheap. Any other companies wishing to send him cool things to evaluate, wear, or otherwise adorn his kids are more than welcome to; he promises to disclose it here if he keeps any of the stuff. Finally, because WizIQ is a virtual classroom and learning network provider, Chris, as VP of Marketing, frequently interacts with, seeks out deals with, and directly or indirectly competes with a whole lot of LMS, SIS, and other Education 2.0 companies. In general, he'll limit his reporting about these companies to news that does not impact his relationship with them or with WizIQ. If he reports on them, it's because what they are doing is newsworthy or worth the attention of his readers and not because he's trying to broker some deal, damage competition, or otherwise advance his position in his day job. LMS and SIS companies, along with other online learning communities, are a pretty important part of Ed Tech. If he stops reporting on them completely, there won't be a whole lot left. He'll be sure to call out any overt conflicts of interest if they are unavoidable. Finally, Follett Software Company pays him a little tiny honorarium every month to present on their SIS Voices webinars and to write the occasional blog or discussion thread for them. Since Follett recently bought X2 (maker of an awesome web-based SIS that Chris just happened to have used, served in advisory groups for, and frequently reported on), this is probably also worth disclosing.

Biography

Christopher Dawson

Christopher Dawson grew up in Seattle, back in the days of pre-antitrust Microsoft, coffeeshops owned by something other than Starbucks, and really loud, inarticulate music. He escaped to the right coast in the early 90's and received a degree in Information Systems from Johns Hopkins University. While there, he began a career in health and educational information systems, with a focus on clinical trials and related statistical programming and database modeling. This focus led him to several positions at Johns Hopkins, a couple-year stint in private industry, teaching high school math and technology, and 2 years as the technology director for his local school district. Most recently, he started his own consulting business and is now the Vice President of Marketing for WizIQ, Inc., a virtual classroom and learning network provider. He lives with his wife, five kids (yes, 5), 2 dogs, and a hateful cat in a small town in north-central Massachusetts. Although he is no longer teaching, his roles with WizIQ and ZDNet allow him to continue helping students and teachers add value to education with technology rather than merely adding to the bottom line.

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@markbn
akulkis Updated - 23rd Oct 2008
So OOo has to be a "mature product" before you try it....while you are stuck on Microsoft's offerings which have been lolling around at "good enough" for years.
View in thread
0 Votes
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Sadly, it falls short of my needs
Ad Astra 13th Oct 2008
I have a spreadsheet that works beautifully in Excel.
It's unbelievably slow for OpenOffice Calc. 12
minutes to open, each drop down takes 2 minutes to
register.

No scripts, just formulas.
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I believe the reason is ...
MisterMiester 14th Oct 2008
... that Open Office is parsing the data while MSO is reading it directly into memory because it's binary. Gotta love those proprietary formats via Microsoft. wink
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BS
frgough 14th Oct 2008
You have to parse any data to get it to where you can interact
with it in human-readable format.
0 Votes
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You need to get out more ...
MisterMiester Updated - 14th Oct 2008
You can save the data in XLS binary format on Excel, a proprietary format which is going to load faster. See for yourself:

http://www.robweir.com/blog/2008/05/spreadsheet-file-format-performance.html

If you're going to make a statement at least make it factual so you don't look like an idiot. wink

Edit:

I'll show you the interesting part of the source so you can't blame me for not finding it:

"Not too surprising. These binary formats are optimized for the guts of MS Office. We would expect them to load faster in their native application.

So what about the new XML formats? There has been recent talk about the "Angle Bracket Tax" for XML formats. How bad is it?

* Microsoft Office 2003 with OOXML = 1.5 seconds per 100K cells
* OpenOffice 2.4.0 with ODF = 2.7 seconds per 100K cells

For typical sized documents, you probably will not notice the difference. However with the largest documents, like the 16-page, 3-million cells monster sheet, the OOXML document took 40 seconds to load in Office, the ODF sheet took 90 seconds to load in OpenOffice, whereas the XLS binary took less than 2 seconds to load in MS Office.

http://www.robweir.com/blog/2008/05/spreadsheet-file-format-performance.html
0 Votes
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Relative comparisons of file performance
Ad Astra 14th Oct 2008
So, is there an easy way to find out how many cells
I'm using?

And, why the hell does Open Office take 2 minutes to
update a drop down menu?
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I have no idea ....
MisterMiester 14th Oct 2008
And, why the hell does Open Office take 2 minutes to
update a drop down menu?

I have no idea. You can check out the forums at OpenOffice.org:

http://www.oooforum.org/

Jump in, do a quick search. It may be something very simple. happy
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yes, something simple
markbn 14th Oct 2008
OO slowness sucks and there is no fix.
  • Flagged
0 Votes
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Ah, forum based support.
Ad Astra 14th Oct 2008
So it's MAYBE compatible, but only if we're willing to
modify a 12 MB spreadsheet to find out. happy

Sorry, the only way OO Calc works for us is if we can
take our EXISTING spreadsheets and use them without
having to maintain two separate versions.

Keep in mind - I would LOVE it if it worked that way,
I can probably get many of my customers to switch, and
Calc's ability to lay out sheets in points rather than
Microsoft's rubber rulers would be a great boon.
0 Votes
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Your Solution.
kozmcrae 14th Oct 2008
Keep using Excel, keep paying for upgrades and hope you never have to export your spreadsheet. And one more thing, don't complain about it.
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Why does OO take 2 minutes to update a drop down menu?
aussieblnd@... 14th Oct 2008
Cause you have a slow computer!
0 Votes
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It works with no lag in Excel
Ad Astra 14th Oct 2008
Try again?

Could it simply be that OpenOffice Calc isn't
optimized for performance to the same degree?

I've checked the forums. We'll see if anyone has an
answer.

My experience with forum based support is that it's
great for asking really basic to internmediate
questions.

When trying to explain a performance issue, or get
into technical details, you get told "Wurld
Dominashun. Ur Doin' It Rong", or snippy comments
about inadequate hardware, using software poorly, etc.

Or, in other words, it's always the user's fault,
never that the programmers didn't actually talk to the
users about what they felt was important, because, you
know, that's boring and you have to talk to dumb
people. happy
0 Votes
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Those famous hidden API calls to make MS look good and competitors bad....
fr0thy2 14th Oct 2008
they'll be up to that, guaranteed.
0 Votes
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RE: Why does OO take 2 minutes to update a drop down menu?
ahumeniy 14th Oct 2008
You're not being better than MS with that answer. It's the same answer they gave to the "Why Vista is slower?" question.
0 Votes
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Translation
daengbo 14th Oct 2008
What is meant by "binary format" is that it is a dump of memory to the file. There's no need to parse anything. It's almost exactly like the difference between cold booting your computer and resuming from sleep. The file just needs to be read and put into memory and the program is ready to go.

Good news: it's orders of magnitude faster than a proper file format.
Bad news: it's an incredibly buggy and unsafe way to program. Reading files from old versions is really tricky.
0 Votes
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Office 2003 or Office 2007 formats?
B.O.F.H. 14th Oct 2008
Being familiar with both XML file formats, I am curious as to which one you are using for this. If it is Office 2007, it could be (as much as they may claim otherwise) that OpenOffice Calc takes a while to read the zip file and parse the xlsx format. This is a rather verbose XML based file format and they may not have the fastest parser for it yet.
0 Votes
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The file is in Excel 2003
Ad Astra 14th Oct 2008
It has no macro, just Excel functions.

It IS doing something that most people wouldn't dream
of using Excel for.

It's also a file we send out to customers.

We've watched 2007 adoption rates and haven't updated
the file to 2007 specs yet, even though the additional
levels of conditional formatting would be of great
help.

Many customers have asked if it works in OO, and every
time a new version of OO comes out, we try it and see.
It fails each time, though it IS making progress.

It used to not open at all, then it used to open and
handle the INDEX() and INDIRECT() functions
differently from Excel. Now it just blows chunks on
performance.
0 Votes
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Consider this...
Mitch 74 14th Oct 2008
- you're using the binary file format: it is an almost direct memory dump of Excel's state when you save your data, that's why a corrupted file will make Excel crash, but OO.o can still open it (OO.o filters every file format it loads in a different thread, making it crash much less often and allowing file restoration); performance cost, as seen in another post referring to a well-written article, shows that this fact alone creates a x30-x45 speed impediment;

- Excel's formulas need to be parsed and converted to OO.o's formula model; since Excel's formulas leave something to be desired (check CEILING() and FLOOR() on negative value for example), it adds another layer of translation: more time;

- in an Excel spreadsheet, two values are saved: actual value and displayed value. On import, OO.o considers that the two should match, and recomputes everything, which adds yet more time on huge files;

- INDEX() doesn't match between the two suites, as you say; this is in part due to the fact that both apps don't see a document the same way, and OO.o in fact needs to store an extra setting and execute a different code path when INDEX() et al. come from Excel: more time;

- there are still performance bottlenecks in OO.o, although it's gotten much faster;

- you could try increasing how much RAM OO.o allocates: a 12Mb spreadsheet may work better with more than (default) 20 Mb;

- Finally, if said spreadsheet is, indeed, very much used, you may want to consider doing a proper port to OO.o (save it as ODF, and re-work those formulas that cause trouble to fit OO.o better; some workarounds or settings asked by Excel may not be needed in OO.o): this should make it load faster.
0 Votes
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Thank you for the lesson!
Linux User 147560 14th Oct 2008
Seriously, it's appreciated that you took the time to explain in detail as to why OO seems slow with MS formatted documents! Thanks! devil
0 Votes
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I found it interesting and helpful
spookyone1 22nd Oct 2008
As someone who must use Excel at work and OO.o at home
(on Ubuntu) I am delighted to know these things. It helps me
work around to know WHY problems happen. Thank you!
0 Votes
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The Real Issue is that...
notlehs 14th Oct 2008
OpenOffice is a Java Based Application.... and MS Office is a Windows API application. The Java Based Version will NEVER perform as well because the JRE has to interpret the Java code into the Win32 API.

Platform independence has a price...speed.
0 Votes
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Java has been JIT-compiled for quite some time now.
Joel R 15th Oct 2008
Java JREs from Sun (and the no-longer-supported Microsoft one as well) have not interpreted Java bytecode by default for years. While I do believe that it’s possible to set them to do so, for performance reasons they have for years now been compiling the bytecode into 100% native host CPU machine language at load time, known as “Just-In-Time (JIT or JiT) compiling.”

This way, the Java code remains Java bytecode on disk, but becomes native ML in RAM.

It’s still not as fast as hand-coded ML, but then again, Office 2007 isn’t made of that anymore, either. It’s made of .NET Framework 2.x IP (Intermediate Processor) managed code, which, like Java bytecode, is JiT-compiled at load time.

This is why Office 2003 (the last CPU-native ML “unmanaged code” version) and earlier are noticeably faster than both Office 2007 and OOo.
0 Votes
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errr... no.
Mitch 74 16th Oct 2008
To set things straight:
- OO.o 1.x allowed you to use Java as a scripting/macro language, but didn't require it; in fact, StarOffice pretty much predates Java.
- OO.o 2.0.0 implemented several of its new features in Java, such as the database module and most of Impress' functinalities; using OO.o implied Sun's Java installed to work properly
- OO.o 2.0.3 and following saw massive migration from Sun-specific Java elements to either more portable generic Java (running on gcj, for example) or being rewritten in C++, finishing with...
- OO.o 2.4.1 requires Java only when using the database module as both a standalone database (accessing another database through, say, ODBC or a native driver doesn't require Java), and designing user interfaces (doing stuff a la Access), or when executing Java applets embedded in a document (obviously).
- OO.o 3.0 doesn't use Java much either.

However, and this is a misconception, OpenOffice.org is NOT written in Java, or any other bytecode-based or interpreted language; its core is written in C++, its interface relies more and more upon native system APIs (see the Carbon/Cocoa discussions on the Aqua port, and the Gtk+ port mostly done by Novell for GNOME for example), and Java is used only when a native component isn't available; said elements are getting more rare as OO.o is getting more modular and using other projects' libraries.

It's like saying that MS Office 2003 is written in HTML+Javascript because it requires IE on the system.

For slowdown concerns, see my previous posts; if you find cases I haven't mentioned, please check OO.o's bugzilla and vote/create the issue. If you do it well enough, it may be solved by 3.0.1.
0 Votes
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Thanks, Mitch - comments inline.
Ad Astra 14th Oct 2008
- you're using the binary file format: it is an
almost direct memory dump of Excel's state when you
save your data, that's why a corrupted file will make
Excel crash, but OO.o can still open it (OO.o filters
every file format it loads in a different thread,
making it crash much less often and allowing file
restoration); performance cost, as seen in another
post referring to a well-written article, shows that
this fact alone creates a x30-x45 speed
impediment;

That's pretty much what I figured from reading Rob
Weir's blog.

- Excel's formulas need to be parsed and converted
to OO.o's formula model; since Excel's formulas leave
something to be desired (check CEILING() and FLOOR()
on negative value for example), it adds another layer
of translation: more time;

That should only apply when opening the file the first
time. It's the performance on the drop downs that
truly sucks.

- in an Excel spreadsheet, two values are saved:
actual value and displayed value. On import, OO.o
considers that the two should match, and recomputes
everything, which adds yet more time on huge
files;

Right - and I'm willing to tolerate long load times if
the drop downs work.

- INDEX() doesn't match between the two suites, as
you say; this is in part due to the fact that both
apps don't see a document the same way, and OO.o in
fact needs to store an extra setting and execute a
different code path when INDEX() et al. come from
Excel: more time;

INDEX() and INDIRECT() now work as I expect them to
from Excel, which is why I have some hope that Calc
will one day be usable for us. That day isn't today.

- you could try increasing how much RAM OO.o
allocates: a 12Mb spreadsheet may work better with
more than (default) 20 Mb;

I'll give that a try.

- Finally, if said spreadsheet is, indeed, very
much used, you may want to consider doing a proper
port to OO.o (save it as ODF, and re-work those
formulas that cause trouble to fit OO.o better; some
workarounds or settings asked by Excel may not be
needed in OO.o): this should make it load faster.

At which point I'm maintaining two versions of this
spreadsheet (one for Excel, one for OO Calc), When we
use it internally, we only use the Excel version,
because of performance issues. It's the customers who
want an OO Calc version that I'm trying to help - but
they're not a big enough demographic yet to be worth
forking the sheet and doubling my development times to
keep them synchronized.
0 Votes
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RE: Thanks, Mitch - comments inline.
richdave 14th Oct 2008
Not sure if this comment is appropriate, but Open Office opens a lot faster in Linux. Still not as fast as Ms Office, but not nearly as slow as you are experiencing.
0 Votes
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I'll answer both here...
Mitch 74 16th Oct 2008
While code bases are pretty much the same between the UNIX (Linux, Solaris, xBSD) and Win32 ports, there are some cases when the underlying OS is causing performance drops in OO.o: it is, for example, quite obvious that OO.o loads much slower on Windows XP than on, say Mandriva Linux 2008.1 installed in dual boot on the same machine, and both using the Sun binaries (using Novell's GNOME-optimized Go-oo builds would increase the delta even further).

Michael Meeks does extensive profiling of OO.o's different file operations; Linux (I do mean, the kernel) provides tools that allow very good tracking, and many stumbling blocks have been removed in this case; same for Solaris.

However, Windows XP didn't provide such extensive tools for a code base the size of OO.o's, and sometimes even using those tools would skew the results.

This results in extremly numerous non-contiguous disk AND memory accesses when loading OO.o, while most UNIX ports out there actually optimize this process, WinXP doesn't - or used to. It's gotten much better, especially on machines that have Java installed (Java presence is now detected asynchronously).

This would make OO.o's cold start extremely slow on Windows, while the very same version would load in under 6 seconds on GNU/Linux. Things have gotten better, and Vista improves things a bit with its much better memory management - and better profiling tools.

This may also happen with complex documents that would require lots of pages flush: one of OO.o's ongoing improvement is cleaning up those cases, and there are now documented (and fixed) cases of MS Excel documents taking ages (34 minutes) to load would now open in 30 seconds. Again, it may behave differently under the two OSes - give it a whirl, and check out Novell's port too (it includes some fixes and optimizations that haven't made it to 'vanilla' OO.o).

It would help tremendously if you could provide a copy of your file (with sensitive data removed, but make sure it still exhibits the unrequired behaviour) to the OO.o developers with a bug report: this may actually help a LOT, as finding very complex documents is the most difficult part for a developer (they actually ask for it). You could also discuss it on the developers' mailing list: it's not THAT much work for you, and it would help everybody (as your problem probably affects many others).
0 Votes
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Actually, you're going about the problem
alaniane@... 22nd Oct 2008
backwards. If you want to be able to port the document to both Excel and OO then store it in a format that both can read. There's no need to keep them both in their native formats. However, you have to determine what's more important portability or performance because rarely can you have your cake and eat it too.
0 Votes
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Can you try this...
TripleII-21189418044173169409978279405827 14th Oct 2008
I did this with the famous George Ou test about 2 years ago. He had a spreadsheet that was super slow to open in OO. I took his spreadsheet, opened it in OO and yes, it was very very slow. I saved it as native ODT, and doing so appeared to strip out a lot of Officeism's (I don't know what). When I re-opened the native version, it was much much faster. I then, for completeness, saved as OO's .xls format to verify it was still the same in Office and it was.

I don't have any idea (I am not a format expert) what the root cause was, but it worked.

Just for grins, can you try that with the new OO? Save it native, then time the open after closing/re-opening OO?

TripleII
0 Votes
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And saving a distributed worksheet in two formats makes sense why?
Ad Astra 14th Oct 2008
Most of my customers use Excel.

A few would like to use OO Calc because it's cheap.

I've saved it as ODT, and yes, when it's not doing
file translations, it opens faster.

It's the internal performance with drop down lists
(which I use to ensure that data is entered correctly)
that murder this thing's utility for me. 2 minutes
per drop down is not acceptable when there are over
400 needed in the app.
0 Votes
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So native performance helps.
TripleII-21189418044173169409978279405827 14th Oct 2008
That's good. I can't talk to your drop down lists, but find it hard to believe 2 minutes per, I have been doing this a long time. I could understand it if the list is populated from an external database (which I have done), but even then, the performance hit was usually on the order of 5-10 seconds.

I couldn't find anything describing the abysmal times for drop down lists on Google, and am wondering where the data for your drop down lists comes from. Just wanting to understand.

TripleII
0 Votes
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Yes, it does.
Ad Astra 14th Oct 2008
My typical workflow looks like this:

I have a worksheet labeled "Parameters".

In that worksheet are named ranges, usually a drop
down list populating range, and the lookup table I'm
using the drop down list to pull data from.

For example, I'd have a range of cells called
Engine_Types. It would be the first column in a range
of cells that's named Engine_Type_Data

Select the engine type, and the data for that engine
is pulled by HLOOKUPs into adjacent cells, where it's
fed into equations.

I use this extensively.

I also use INDEX() and INDIRECT() to populate a
reports page, and use conditional formatting (using
data pulled by INDEX and INDIRECT) to format it
prettily.

Now, I will cheerfully accept that what I do in Excel
is something that 99.99% of Excel users will never
attempt. But it does, in fact, work.

It doesn't in OO Calc.(For that matter, a quick search
on OO Calc doesn't seem to let me use the contents of
a named range as the source for a drop down list.)
0 Votes
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Maybe
daengbo 14th Oct 2008
Maybe what Tripell is getting at is that you could try saving in ODS then using Calc to convert back into XLS. That's what I get from his post, anyway, not keeping two separate versions.

It all seems like a lot of work for you, though. I'm glad to see that you respect your customers enough to try to make it work for them.
0 Votes
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Re: Sadly ... short of my needs
FL Guy 14th Oct 2008
Likewise. I tried to switch to OO 2.x and (very) reluctantly, have switched back to Office.

Performance is simply awful in OO, both when loading the app and opening files (esp. files saved in MS Office formats - for now still the defacto std in many offices & groups).

Even Office, which while feature rich, for years has set the standard for 'bloatware", seems snappy by comparison.

Also, there were an number of useablity issues which individually could be considered minor, but slowed my productivity to the point that it was worth it to go back to Office. Unfortunately.

I think OO is a fantastic idea, and I VERY much hope work continues on it.

However version 2.x at least was far from ready for prime time (full time, frequent use). At least in my experience in my office(s), and in my home.
0 Votes
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One truly sees the problem.
deowll Updated - 14th Oct 2008
For demanding users MS office clearly has the edge.

On the other hand I made a basic ledger spread sheet to help a friend keep up with her husband's business and church funds and it ran like a charm in Excel and Open Office.

Let's be fair. If I'm going to pay a lot of money, at least to me and most people, MS office had better be able to do a few things that OpenOffice can't do.

Of course the only reason I bought my last copy of MS Office was I teach people to use it.

At home I was doing fine with Open Office.

I do look forward to getting a grammer checker.
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A few annoying bugs
DonRupertBitByte 13th Oct 2008
Yeah, I miss the grammar checker in Writer, and I've found a few bugs here and there as I use Writer to a moderate degree with all my internal government documents.

For example, if you use the format painter often on a multi-page document, the format painter doesn't always work correctly and won't capture colors and a font change. Another annoyance I have found is that if you load a document full of screen captures, it slows the scrolling down significantly on a multi-page document.

Despite the flaws I have discovered, I'm going to keep using it, because it's still pretty good for something that is totally free.
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Spell checker
patibulo 14th Oct 2008
For me it's the other way around: when working with Word at work, I miss the spell checkers for other languages that you get with Oo. I know my situation is a bit particular, because not everyone writes in five different languages everyday. But it is not uncommon for people outside the US to write in 2 or more. And Oo beats MS Office hands down in this.
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Depends on Office source langauge...
pico_D 14th Oct 2008
My Office 2007 is German, comes with German, Spanish, French and English (maybe also Italian? I'm at work and only have OO.o 2.4).

The UK English version only has English spelling and grammar, the European versions seem to have most major euro languages, including English...

When I moved to Germany I had to buy the language pack for Office XP (worked with 2003 as well). For ?40 it gave me around 30 different languages.

If you are working in multiple languages, the kit is well worth getting hold of!
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I have found this as well
914four 15th Oct 2008
I write in multiple languages as well, and the spell-checker always bugged me, although it did get better in 2003.

I haven't tried 2007 or OO 3.0 yet, but will download the later once the rush is over. Having used both MSOffice and StarOffice/OpenOffice for years I switch back and forth regularly without much difficulty. With my new laptop, I now no longer have MSOffice anywhere, and haven't really missed it so far.
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Re: Annoying Bugs..
zdnet@... 14th Oct 2008
Sounds just like my experience with Office.
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RE: Annoying Bugs
zdnet@... 14th Oct 2008
Sounds just like my experience of Office...
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RE: OK, now OpenOffice is definitely good enough
iravgupta 14th Oct 2008
Till the time OpenOffice Writer cannot open complex Word Files correctly, i.e. it does not make the formatting go haywire, and while saving the file in .doc format, it does not give a discouraging message about how some of the formatting you have spent hours upon might be incompatible with this file format, i dont think there is any point even discussing migration to OpenOffice.
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Why don't you make all your docs
rikasa Updated - 14th Oct 2008
in OO and avoid the hassle? The better OO gets by virtue of its own unique feature set, the less likely tackling proprietary formats will remain the criteria for it to 'get in the door'. Bar initially having to figure out how to use OO to correct formatting issues you currently face, migrating to OO would by definition mean you'd dump Word anyway - problem solved.
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This is crazy
iravgupta 14th Oct 2008
And that means i go to each f my client and tell them that i have ditched Microsoft Office and so should you otherwise i will annoy you by sending files that you cant open.
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Crazy? It worked for MS
iTeaBoy 14th Oct 2008
That's how they overcame the dominance of Wordperfect in the early days of MS Office.

Bundle deals of MS Office with new PC's then reach critical mass where users have to have MS Office just to read files their customers etc send them.

And it's what they're doing again with the docx format.

Hopefully this time round enough people will prefer to change to an open format using the free OO than migrate over to docx, and we can all be free from this MS Office lock-in addiction that MS has been keeping us slave to for too long now.
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Actually...
wolf_z 14th Oct 2008
You have it *backwards*.

MS could always read documents from other word processors, and export in their format.

Having been using word processors since the CP/M days (Anybody remember Select? Perfect Writer? :)) I can tell you that Word 6.0 was where MS conquered the world. And that was a *DOS* product!

Word has always read and written Word Perfect, in fact you can with a single checkbox enable a WP interface in Word.

Try to keep up...
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Precisely
frgough 14th Oct 2008
One of the things that helped adoption of MS was that it read
competing file formats perfectly. People could work on Lotus
spreadsheets in Excel and no one would ever know.

It's called barrier to entry, and it's one of the reasons Mac is
doing so well these days.

Wordperfect was the program that refused to open any file but its
own.
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Sorry...
iTeaBoy 14th Oct 2008
you have misunderstood.

I was commenting on MS history of using proprietary formats in MS Office (or Word 6.0) to cause people to migrate to MS Office from their existing word processor (Word Perfect etc) just to read MS Office docs sent to them.

Word 6.0 had to be able to read and write Word Perfect files (because almost everyone used WP at the time) but it wasn't the default format for saving docs. So anyone using WP had to either ask for it to be re-saved in WP format or go out and buy MS Office.(or Word 6.0)

Word has always read and written Word Perfect, in fact you can with a single checkbox enable a WP interface in Word.

Exactly - MS plan was to make the trasition from Wordperfect to MS Word as easy as possible and make not transitioning as difficult as possible (by proprietary format issue) and then once everyone has migrated you have lock-in forever.... bwahhhahha bwaahhaahha [aka Dr Evil style] wink

That is until someone else does the same thing but gives it away for free.

try reading and comprehending...
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So, what you are saying...
pico_D 14th Oct 2008
is that in order for OpenOffice to succeed, it needs to seamlessly import MS Office documents, without losing formatting or messing up the document?

That's all the OP asked for... wink
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If you'd bother to look I replied to the 'This is Crazy' post
iTeaBoy 14th Oct 2008
Which was in respose to the suggestion to migrate all MS Office docs over to OO format.
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So your saying....
ShadowGIATL 14th Oct 2008
that companies are wrong for wanting market share? MS has never been in the business of giving away Office, so it only stands to reason they would want you to switch to their's. What company would build software and then say, "Hey, if you want to use our stuff you can, but only if you want." Another point to ponder, if MS was to give away Office Standard, (which is basicly the version OOO competes with) then OOO and WordPerfect would hurt very badly. The reality is MS could afford to do this, while still charging for the "premium" versions. So stop complaining that MS is acting like a business and focus on why OOO can't gain ground with a FREE product.

Knowledge is Power.
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A few questions
rikasa 14th Oct 2008
Cheers for the info.

So basically, MS used interoperability to get the foot in the door and raise awareness, and then by virtue of a superior feature set they took over, right? However; as the most used features for an office suite usually form a small portion of what's available, is it fair to say that over time MS's success with Office was more a matter of leveraging their desktop monopoly (note: of course I don't mean bundling by this - just better integration)? Has MS continued with their 2-way interoperability theme such as supporting ODF since its standardization in 2006?

My guess is that is OO and in particular version 3.0 may gain more traction as awareness of its ability to meet core Office suite needs at no cost increases. Is this the reason for the sharp reduction in MS Office's prices of late (esp. where I am here in Japan)?

Sorry for asking so much.
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@markbn
akulkis Updated - 23rd Oct 2008
So OOo has to be a "mature product" before you try it....while you are stuck on Microsoft's offerings which have been lolling around at "good enough" for years.

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