Microsoft Office vs. OpenOffice.org

Between my office and home I have MS office 2003 and 2004 ( macintosh version ) as well as open office.

In the past ( pre 2.0 days ) I would have agreed with anyone who said that open office was nice for a free application, but not quite ready for daily enterprise use. However I actually like open office 2.0 BETTER than MS Office. I write a ton of large doduments most use tables for pretty formatting, and little things like their dynamic toolbar which changes the toolbar automatically based on if you are working inside a table, working in the main document, working with an image, etc...

I do some fairly complex spreadsheets, spreadsheet functionality is about par.

It has a presentation application that looks Okay, but I have a mac and presentations in Keynote beat all.

Open Office comes with a Database application like Access with ODBC connectivity. Havn't really used it much, but it appears quite functional.

As for attaching documents to emails, it is true that Other office suites to not open Open Documents, but as long as you can easily save a document to microsoft word format before emailing it out. Inbound documents will automatically be recognized by Open office and will open just fine.

Open source software is making huge leaps in functionality and are becoming very high quality polished applications. This is especially true of Open Office.

Jeffrey R. Anderson
Director of Healthcare IT
Community Health Center of Buffalo, inc.

...it is true that other office suites do not open OpenOffice Documents, but as long as you can easily save a document to microsoft word format before emailing it out.

I agree, but it's much simpler after installing OpenOffice on a workstation, go into the settings and set word processing documents to save in Word format, spreadsheet in Excel, etc. You can always "Save-As" to OpenOffice format if you ever need it, but it's nice to have the default be the most compatible format, especially for less experienced users.

In summary -

So far we really only have posts offering comparison and expounding the virtues of OO writer... Considering the average office nowadays has moved well past the point of Star-Writer being the only use we have for a computer (although I do still own a copy!!), what other comparisons can be drawn? - I think it's very important that we assess this from a users perspective rather than a perceived designers 'feature' perspective... i.e. How well does OO compare for:

Company accountants, financial controllers or other statistical staff?

The project management team?

Desktop Publishing staff?

Database users and (possibly) designers?

Architects and Engineers?

Network and Systems Engineers? (doing network schematics etc.)

Sales staff or others with a responsibility for tracking events, products or financials?

Senior Executive Management?

It would be great if we have people working in these positions who would like to comment...

Cheers, Don

Hi, Don,

I use the spreadsheet portion, Open Office Calc, primarily for tracking web stats. It has been fine for communicating with others who use Excel within my office. I also have also been able to open Excel spreadsheets that have been posted by other organizations to share with us (which have somewhat spiffier formating). I miss the handiness of certain toolbar options that I am used to in other spreadsheets and I haven't yet found how to add them to the toolbar, HELP file being somewhat limited.

Also, in this thread, PowerPoint 2003 another TechSoup user had good luck using the slide show portion.

In terms of Desk Top publishing, which portion of OO would you use? Does OO have a Page layout portion?

Best wishes,

It would be interesting to associate this experience with your role Sasha - What do you do within your NPO?

Cheers, Don

Hi, Don,

I am referring to my use of Open Office in a for profit organization that interfaces heavily with nonprofits.

My role there is in marketing with the primary work being in writing and design work. I use Open Office Writer quite heavily for the writing and sharing of documents, but I don't do any real design work in OO, just very simple stuff like figuring out where headings and bullets go.

I use the Open Office Calc primarily in my web site maintanance work, for keeping web site stats. In addition it is very useful for opening documents that are sent to me by others which were created in Excel.

Open Office is installed on other computers. I am not sure who else is using it or what their experience is. I always send my docs in Word format, so that it isn't an issue. I know that our IT staff uses it every now and then to open documents.

My own personal (nonwork related) involvement with nonprofits is less complex, so the issue of file sharing doesn't much come up. File sharing was the issue that led me to start using Open Office.

Does that answer your question?

Best wishes,

Company accountants, financial controllers or other statistical staff?

Calc Does a lot Some of the statistical wizards in Excel aren't on OOo most of the functions are though.

>The project management team?

This isn't a function of OOo, (and in office a part of Outlook, but needs Project Server)
There are other OSS Email/Project management apps outside of OOs including web based eGroupware KDE's project manager and I believe Evolution.

Desktop Publishing staff?

I've used the draw app to create various signs and flyers, and it does a great job, not on par with Illustrator but compared to Word it does much better. As for comparing Publisher, I'd go to something more serious like Pagemaker, Illustrator, Scribus or Inkscape if going beyond OOo or Word.
One peeve is OOo font handling in Linux, but I am sure it will improve.

Database users and (possibly) designers?

As a long time DB guy I've been warend away from Access as it (without an SQL server) can be very limiting in a network environment, and also has some security issues. I havent tried OOo Base.

One problem with many of these easy to use GUI DB apps is they can do quite a lot, up to a point - once that is reached you then have to totally re-tool for something more flexible, so I try to not paint myself into that corner.

Architects and Engineers?

In a pinch draw would suffice for simple stuff, but the pros would look for something beyond an office suite to do ther min work.

Network and Systems Engineers? (doing network schematics etc.)

OOo draw has some cool charting tools, with smart connectors and such, really like that above Word offers.

Sales staff or others with a responsibility for tracking events, products or financials?

I assume you are comparing spreadsheets, Calc is getting better they implemented thier version of a pivot table and such so a lot of the stuff of Excel can be done in Calc. Question is always raised on capacity (but I would not want sheets as big as some people want to use!) The one thing that keeps us here with Excel for Windows is some reports use Active-X controls (I chalk it up to developer's prefernece) and limits it to Windows Excel only. We pull out a Windows laptop for that one.

Great comparison -- one of the few where someone has done their homework; and I thank you for that (this will help me answer a handful of questions for my newest 'students').

There are some new builds out there that might interest Mac users specifically -- NeoOffice is basically a java wrapper that gives OpenOffice a Mac GUI (otherwise, you'll have to use the X11 windowing environment until the OpenOffice project folks have time to complete the native-feel version for Macs -- estimated middle of 2008). [http://trinity.neooffice.org/ ]

A great partner to the office suites, GIMPShop is an image-editting application that chases the functionality of Photoshop, pairing the GIMP open source project with a user interface that is designed to make the learning curve less steep for people who have already taken the time to learn Photoshop (but can't budget for the cost). [http://www.GIMPShop.com/ ]

NVU (now 'Kompozer') is a fine replacement for Frontpage, especially if your group is upgrading to a newer version of Microsoft Office that no longer includes their HTML editor. [http://www.kompozer.net/ ]

The neatest thing for the people I support has been that these applications are available for all three platforms (Windows, MacOS, Linux). It makes moving from one workstation to another less of a shock as one project completes and another is launched. I try to keep up on these for my (mostly nonprofit) clients here: [http://macbigot.blogspot.com/search?q=demo-ware ]

OpenOffice is my company's official productivity suite. Its cross-platform in a way that MS Office is not. For example, Word for the Mac has many different features and ways of doing things than Word for the PC. But OpenOffice on the Mac is just like OpenOffice for the PC. So it breeds familiarity with the package that is transferable to other operating systems. And we don't worry much about file types, either. If we have to send a doc to a client, usually that's in PDF format. Or we save as an MS Office doc if they also need to edit.