Comments on: Why Do We Use Microsoft Office When Open Office Is Free?

By: yeti

yeti — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 09:16:04 +0000

i think it is unfair to compare two products when one is free and other is not. now lets think for a minute that both product are having same cost or both are free.

OO3.2.1 VS Microsoft 2007
i personally think the above said can’t be done. a rather better starting point will be
OO3.2.1 VS Office 2003
so what is new here in OO3.2.1 they got it easy to copy on type of software with almost same tools and programming.
Office 2007 -2010 are beautiful product in terms of output. i dont care interoperability, i care my document should look world class and then i export as pdf and bingo..
so i feel those who don’t want to shell out money or can’t afford to can keep using OO (which is again not a bad software given it is free , hmm now i am biased).
simply puting it anything for free does have a substantial benefit, but tell me on a clear conscience, would OO possible when the first version of Office came. it is possible today, when you have a big community to participate and money coming from donors like oracle and a easy way go…

By: Steve Southern

Steve Southern — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 06:28:39 +0000

I looked (and tried) openoffice too. But for me and the people in our office. It just takes too long to get used to.. After this, the speed problems and bugs make it worth waiting a little longer. We bought a site license for Kingsoft Office, which in my view is the closest thing to MS I have ever used. There is no need to relearn the UI and the compatibility is amazing. Also they inform me than the forthcoming updates handle the new MS formats… For us, there is no need to go back to Microsoft expensive. Bliss!

By: Ray

Ray — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 09:52:13 +0000

Used both, feel like the Lexus/Toyota thing about them.

Good results with both, but prefer MS over OO. It is the
polishing that does it.

In my profession we have a couple programs that are used
interchangably throughout the country. One is Medical
Priority EMD and the other is APCO EMD. Medical Priority is
like driving a Rolls Royce and APCO EMD is like driving a
Volkswagen, both will get you where you want to go but one
is much more comfortable getting you there although neither
one skimps on the really important stuff that can save your
life or kill you.

By: Mark Hill

Mark Hill — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:23:23 +0000

I’ve deployed OO for most of my users here for years, and it’s been great. PowerPoint compatibility has been good enough for me that I actually used OO to repair a document created in PowerPoint that PowerPoint itself could no longer format correctly.

Calc has been a fine alternative to Excel, though I prefer Excel’s VBA, and I still do my graphing in Excel. I wrote a label formatting printing program in OO Calc’s equivalent of VBA partly as a learning excercise and found it much more difficult to use and hardly documented at all.

We don’t do heavy duty Word formatting,so I can’t comment other than to say that in my experience, neither does Microsoft. Every time I see a complex document like a user manual with table of contents, index, etc. written in Word I am amazed at the patience that must have been required to work around all Word’s bugs. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

By: crunchygeek

crunchygeek — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:15:40 +0000

As Anna mentioned, we are forced to use M$ Office at work. It’s a government network, and the powers that be have mandated it will effectively be totally a MS shop; that way it’s less for them to “manage”.

By: Pete

Pete — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 21:29:49 +0000

Enjoying the banter.One question,why does no one mention
Go-OO the better OO.org
See here http://go-oo.org/

By: Ron Schenone

Ron Schenone — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:19:55 +0000

Once again, thanks to all of you for sharing you thoughts. Your comments are appreciated.

Regards, Ron

By: E2001

E2001 — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:06:15 +0000

Because MS Office is a SUPPORTED product. Most are afraid that as soon as they build their businesses up on top of “generally compatible open-source” software, the “compatibility” aspect will be upgraded and/or litigated out of existence. Whereas the name-brand product will always have the major company support (FWIW).

By: BillH

BillH — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:56:29 +0000

I’ve been using OpenOffice since its beta years and have yet to be disappointed. In fact, we have large spreadsheets at work that are basically log files used in our warehouses that get corrupted; when opening in Excel, MS Office crashes and the file never opens. The Microsoft solution is to restore an older version of the spreadsheet from tape backup. I’ve opened the same spreadsheet in OpenOffice and saved it back in Excel format and it works fine again.

At work, we are a Microsoft shop. At home, I have Windows as the ONLY Microsoft product that I use on my PC. It’s been OpenOffice (StarOffice before that) on my PC at home.

By: Anna McCullough

Anna McCullough — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:01:16 +0000

Oddly enough, I use Excel heavily and have found OO to open and resave my Excel spreadsheets perfectly, formulae and macros intact. It’s the Word docs that give me trouble – OO cannot open the simplest word doc correctly, unless it consists of just plain text with zero formatting. If I’ve a photo or a graph inserted, the positioning’s all wrong and forget it if I’ve captioned the insert. As a result we can’t use OO at work – we HAVE to use Office (and we’ve just upgraded to Office 2007) since that’s what people use to send us THEIR documents. I HAVE OO installed on my personal machines – but my main home system has Office 2000 also.

I don’t use PowerPoint or Access so I can’t speak to the conversion between the Office and OO versions of those programs.

I’ll agree on one point – given what I see with Microsoft’s new 2007 Office interface, OO is FAR easier to use – much more reminiscent of the older Office setups. I loathe the new UI of Office 2007. I want my options back where I’m used to finding them, rather than hunting through all these damned tabs to find the things I’m used to using – !