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Comparing Office Applications in the Trenches
At ZDNet, Christopher Dawson compares NeoOffice vs. OpenOffice vs. Office 2008 vs. iWork. He obviously comprares them on Mac OS X, as GeoOffice or iWork and Office 2008 are special releases for the Apple Mac platform.
His report is influenced by his experience managing the IT for a school in Western Massachusetts. Chris concludes:
iWork is very slick and integrates well brilliantly with iLife. It’s easy to use, but powerful enough for serious users. However, it’s lack of compatibility with open file formats is of concern. Office 2008 is also slick and highly functional but not nearly as effortless to navigate. Even with academic pricing (iWork is priced around $10/license academic versus almost $70/license for Office), Office is a bit pricey and hard to justify when cheaper or free alternatives exist. OpenOffice for the Mac really isn’t worth a second look right now given its lack of integration and compatibility. NeoOffice has its niggles, but is generally a solid, easy to use office suite. Even if you choose iWork of Office, it should be installed on all of your users’ machines to ensure compatibility with their students. It could certainly stand alone, as well, but the relatively inexpensive iWork is a hard bit of kit to pass up.
User:conficio: Software documentation one screencast at a time
Surprise, Open Standards are not Free of Business Interest
OpenDocument Format (ODF), the standard accepted as ISO 26300 norm, has been mired in some controversy. The OpenDocument Foundation, a group formed to promote the standard format across different applications and platforms, has now denounced its support for ODF. The reasons cited is that Sun Microsystems, in control of OpenOffice.org/StarOffice the largest application supporting ODF, does not allow more compatibility to legacy formats such as .doc or MS OOXML. Sun favors supporting legacy document formats in the application, with appropriate import/export filters, while the ODF Foundation thinks it should become part of the format itself.
Recently, Sun has come under scrutiny for its policies surrounding OpenOffice.org and ODF. Some have even speculated if Novel instituted a fork of the OpenOffice.org project. It should come at no surprise that standards, as open as they may be, are a business tool. The ODF standard and the fact that it offers transparency which enables safety in archiving documents and having access centuries into the future forced Microsoft to rethink its own document formats. Now the ODF Foundation is surprised that Sun does want to keep out direct compatibility with the rival format(s).
However, having witnessed the discussions of ODFoundation members on some mailing lists, there also seem to be some strong personalities at work. Or is it the rivalry between MS Office Plug-in developments from the ODFoundation and Sun Microsystems that is causing all the bad blood?
The sad fallout of this is that the ODFoundation wants to morph itself into a CDF Foundation, CDF being another document format proposed by the influential standard body W3C. It will stop developing its MS Office plugin to seemlessly read and write ODF documents.
User:conficio: Software documentation one screencast at a time
Students don’t Mind to Pay for Office Software
… unless they can get it for free.
A marketing study at the Univeristy of Arizona asks the question what makes students pay for office suite software and are free open source alternatives like Open Office an alternative to pirated copies of the market leading MS Office?
The research looked at how much students would be willing to pay for a legal copy if the consequences woudl be the two choices. It turns out that $98 is the media price students were willing to pay to own a legal license. And that registration was a wee more effective than the publication that the software is not registered with every document that is produced and shared with others.
Interestingly, a group of students that was educated of the free open source alternative Open Office did not show less incline to pay for the MS Office suite. The researchers conclude that stability of the product and logevity of the maker are more important than the price to pay. Also an important factor is the convenience of using an application that is already familiar and does not come with the pain of re-training.
* The article cited mentions in the introduction: “Microsoft Office suite claims an impressive 95 percent market share.” Benjamin Horst an Open Office dvocate from NY, pointed out in a discussion about this article that market share numbers are often misleading in the context of free software. Because, market sizes are measured in annual revenue spend for a particular product. However, free products do not generate any revenue, so the basis for comparison is off. By Horst’s estimation, Microsoft claims 400 Million Office installations, and OpenOffibe.org claims 100 Million. Ignoring the rest of the competition, he estimates a 20% market share for Open Office.
User:conficio: Software documentation one screencast at a time
Communist Revolution for OpenOffice.org
According to Vietnam Net, OpenOffice.org gains popularity in Vietnam. One of the leading organizations to switch is the Vietnamees Communist Party, with its 20,000 office PCs around the country. However government agencies and businesses follow suite. The movement is driven, by the international integration of Vietnam with the world economy. Vietnam wants to trade with the world and therefore must respect intellectual property rights.
as the pressure from international integration forces Vietnamese state agencies and businesses to respect software copyrights, the future for open source software seems to be brighter. Some providers of open source software products and support services have appeared
The government pushes its corporations and citizens to use legal copies of software, with full licenses. However, Vietnamese can’t afford the $200 - $500 for a fully equipped MS windows + MS Office business PC. So they switch to increasingly to open source alternatives like Open Office, Firefox, and Thunderbird. The availability of a localized vietnameese version of OpenOffice helps this effort and the nature of open source allows the country to improve on this aspect at will.
User:conficio: Software documentation one screencast at a time
OOo working on MS-OOXML support
Michael Brauer clarifies the status of OpenOffice.org’s work on MS-OOXML (aka ECMA-376).
He says that OpenOffice.org does work on supporting the format with input and output filters. this means you will be able to open a document from MS Office 2007 and to save it for Office 2007 users. Office 2007 is currently the only application that supports the new format our of the box. Older MS Office versions can be upgraded.
Michael reports that the current status is reading text from OOXML documents and that there is still a lot of work to do to reach satisfactory compliance. However, he remarks that as the format is now looked at by the International Standard Organization (ISO) for further standardization and that there are many complains from interested parties about incomplete definitions and contradictions of other standards. So he expects the format to evolve and undergo changes.
Michael also points out that OpenOffice.org will fully continue to support ODF (ISO 26300) as it’s default document format.
User:conficio: Software documentation one screencast at a time
Mixed use of MS Office and OpenOffice.org
Klaus Manhart has published an article about converting documents from and to MS Office, using OpenOffice.org. He tells it as it is, that simple documents are easier to convert than more complex ones.
In his article he gives two sets of cut and dry advice for text-documents used in OOo Writer/MS Word:
Basic rules for successful data exchange
- If you know that a Microsoft Office document will be opened in Openoffice.org later, don’t use complicated formatting and functions.
- Agree on the exact Microsoft Office file format to be used. If someone generates a document that’s going to be exchanged and uses a newer version of Microsoft Office, then RTF or another format up to and including Office 97 should be used, rather than anything more recent.
- Try to avoid round-trip conversion, where documents are edited alternately with Openoffice.org and Office. It’s not realistic to have a file that’s sometimes edited with Microsoft Word and sometimes with Open Office.
- If you’re going to send an Openoffice.org document to someone who just needs to read and print it, it’s probably simpler to export it to a PDF file.
and
Maximize Word compatibility in Openoffice.org Writer
- Enable Use printer settings for document formatting
- Enable Add spacing between paragraphs and tables
- Enable Do not add leading (extra space) between lines of text
- Enable Consider wrapping style when placing objects
Learn at Plan-B for OpenOffice.org, how to enable/disable OOo Writer compatibility options for compatibility with MS Word or OpenOffice.org Release 1.1
User:conficio: Software documentation one screencast at a time
Interoprability between office suites
As an increasing number of companies and institutions migrate to Linux and OpenOffice.org, interoperability becomes more and more important. The world is still geared towards Microsoft’s document formats and that poses barriers to migration, one of which is fonts and their influence on how documents print and break into pages.
The leading Linux distributions in the enterprise space, Red Hat and SuSE delivered some new fonts that are metrically identical to the widely used Microsoft fonts. What does this mean for you? You can receive an MS Office document and use the equivalent font and print it w/o fear of it breaking into a different number of pages. It also means you do not need to update the table of content because of re-pagination. Off course the same is true in the opposite direction ODF –> MS Office document.
User:conficio: Software documentation one screencast at a time
German Schools switching to OpenOffice.org
According to Erwin Tenhumberg and an article in the German Computerwoche, many schools in Germany consider switching to OpenOffice.org. While the majority of 1200 schools uses MS Office, 25% are thinking about the switch to Linux and/or OpenOffice.org
User:conficio: Software documentation one screencast at a time
TurboLinux helps in MS ODF Converter project
The Linux distributer TurboLinux has announced it will participate in the project to convert ODF files into MS Office 2007 compatible versions. TurboLinux will offer its expertise in Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese for converting documents.
The ODF converter is a Microsoft sponsored open source project that wants to bridge the interoperability gap between the new ISO standard format ODF and the proprietary world of MS Office. Its development is behind the abilities of Sun’s MS Office plug-in, only supporting text documents at this time. However it supports Office 2007.
User:conficio: Software documentation one screencast at a time
German Schools switching to OpenOffice.org
According to Erwin Tenhumberg and an article in the German Computerwoche, many schools in Germany consider switching to OpenOffice.org. While the majority of 1200 schools uses MS Office, 25% are thinking about the switch to Linux and/or OpenOffice.org
User:conficio: Software documentation one screencast at a time
TurboLinux helps in MS ODF Converter project
The Linux distributer TurboLinux has announced it will participate in the project to convert ODF files into MS Office 2007 compatible versions. TurboLinux will offer its expertise in Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese for converting documents.
The ODF converter is a Microsoft sponsored open source project that wants to bridge the interoperability gap between the new ISO standard format ODF and the proprietary world of MS Office. Its development is behind the abilities of Sun’s MS Office plug-in, only supporting text documents at this time. However it supports Office 2007.
User:conficio: Software documentation one screencast at a time
Mixed use of MS Office and OpenOffice.org
Klaus Manhart has published an article about converting documents from and to MS Office, using OpenOffice.org. He tells it as it is, that simple documents are easier to convert than more complex ones.
In his article he gives two sets of cut and dry advice for text-documents used in OOo Writer/MS Word:
Basic rules for successful data exchange
- If you know that a Microsoft Office document will be opened in Openoffice.org later, don’t use complicated formatting and functions.
- Agree on the exact Microsoft Office file format to be used. If someone generates a document that’s going to be exchanged and uses a newer version of Microsoft Office, then RTF or another format up to and including Office 97 should be used, rather than anything more recent.
- Try to avoid round-trip conversion, where documents are edited alternately with Openoffice.org and Office. It’s not realistic to have a file that’s sometimes edited with Microsoft Word and sometimes with Open Office.
- If you’re going to send an Openoffice.org document to someone who just needs to read and print it, it’s probably simpler to export it to a PDF file.
and
Maximize Word compatibility in Openoffice.org Writer
- Enable Use printer settings for document formatting
- Enable Add spacing between paragraphs and tables
- Enable Do not add leading (extra space) between lines of text
- Enable Consider wrapping style when placing objects
Learn at Plan-B for OpenOffice.org, how to enable/disable OOo Writer compatibility options for compatibility with MS Word or OpenOffice.org Release 1.1
User:conficio: Software documentation one screencast at a time
Interoprability between office suites
As an increasing number of companies and institutions migrate to Linux and OpenOffice.org, interoperability becomes more and more important. The world is still geared towards Microsoft’s document formats and that poses barriers to migration, one of which is fonts and their influence on how documents print and break into pages.
The leading Linux distributions in the enterprise space, Red Hat and SuSE delivered some new fonts that are metrically identical to the widely used Microsoft fonts. What does this mean for you? You can receive an MS Office document and use the equivalent font and print it w/o fear of it breaking into a different number of pages. It also means you do not need to update the table of content because of re-pagination. Off course the same is true in the opposite direction ODF –> MS Office document.
User:conficio: Software documentation one screencast at a time
OpenOffice.org can rescue corrupt MS Office documents
The Office Letter, publishes in its May 7th issue a readers tip, how to use OpenOffice.org the free open source office suite to read and rescue corrupt Microsoft Office documents.
Paul Denize, the author of the tip writes “It appears that Word was saving files that it would later not be able to open or recover. When I closed the document, Word would not reopen them, saying they were corrupt.”
He recommends “Open Office did not complain when opening the so-called corrupt document, and managed to saved it back out. Then I could return to MS Word and open it successfully again. All I had lost was a few formatting items — some images were a different size and some grey lines were now black. I could live with that.”
Not that Paul argues to change to OpenOffice.org outright. But he seems to finds it a useful tool to rescue his corrupted Word document.
User:conficio: Software documentation one screencast at a time
Office collaboration server O3Spaces
Dutch firm O3Spaces B.V. of a program that lets OpenOffice and StarOffice users collaborate on office documents. O3Spaces is fully integrated in OpenOffice.org, so users do not need to leave OpenOffice to perform most functions. This is equivalent to MS SharePoint for MS Office.
O3Spaces is a cross platform collaboration server with integration in the desktop, OpenOffice.org and a browser interface. In this environment a team stores their documents, if ODF or MS Office format, on a central server and creates versions with every change saved. users can receive notifications if any document they have in their workspace changes.
With O3spaces users can share documents on different OS platforms, such as Linux, Windows or Mac OS X. In addition the server provides shared calendars for scheduling meetings. A workflow engine can route documents to different users for review or approval.
All documents are secured by access rights so only authorized users can access them. The user management can be integrated with any LDAP server.
The version for self installation, the professional edition, costs 295 Euros (~ $375) , for five-users. A 100-user license costs 5,900 Euros (~ $7,600). O3Spaces is also available as an on-demand version or hosted application service.
User:conficio: Software documentation one screencast at a time
OpenOffice.org Novell Edition for Windows
Ted Haeger lets us know that Novell just released its own edition of OpenOffice.org.
Thanks to Ted I now know why Novell is cooking its own version. Novell feels that the open source model is a good one. They follow the intention of open source to solve one’s own problems and contribute back to the community. In Novell’s case they solve the issues of their Linux customers and benefit all others too. All Novell additions are factored into the main stream OpenOffice.org eventually. While the community does absorb the contributions, Novell does enjoy the benefits of an advanced version that makes their brand of Linux more competitive. That sounds like a fair deal to me.
Now the Novell developers even released a version of Novell Edition OpenOffice.org for Windows. Why? Because they learned from their own experience that it sometimes takes a few baby steps until you are ready to switch from Windows to Linux. Switching from MS Office to OpenOffice.org is such a baby step. Lets hope that the Mac version is not far behind. Although I’m not sure how many Mac users can’t wait to switch to Linux.
User:conficio: Software documentation one screencast at a time
OpenOffice.org writes to Michael Dell
The OpenOffice.org community has written a letter to Michael Dell, CEO and founder of Dell Computers to offer help in making the wishes of their customers happen. Dell Computers recently opened DellIdeaStorm, a website to solicit customer ideas and wishes. One of the top items with over 24,000 votes in two days was OpenOffice.org pre-installed on Dell computers.
The OpenOffice.org community offers in the letter help to make this happen. They are proud that their product is desired by so many of Dell’s customers and want to work with Dell to offer the open source office suite pre-installed as standard or an option.
As of today “Pre-Installed OpenOffice | alternative to MS Works & MS Office” is the second most popular request on DellIdeaStorm with over 75,000 votes.
User:conficio: Software documentation one screencast at a time