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Seven Reasons To Go With OpenOffice.org 2.0

Most people won't need MS Office anymore.

I still remember the early days of Star Office. It wasn't Free Software back then. It has its own "desktop," left nav tree, and file open dialog box that doesn't work quit the way you expected. But it has one thing going for it—it can open Microsoft Word documents.

Sun bought Star Office, made it Free Software with a new name OpenOffice.org, and kept working on it. Yesterday, they released OpenOffice.org 2.0. I grabbed a copy and installed it on my work machine.

I've been forced to use OpenOffice.org at work for a year and a half (OCI won't buy me a copy of MS Office) and it worked out well. I can read, write and print MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint documents just fine.

The 2.0 release prompted me to reflect on the choice between MS Office and OpenOffice.org. And I see a lot of reasons to go with OpenOffice.org. Here's some of them

  1. OpenOffice.org 2.0 is Free Software. It won't hurt you to just install it, even if you later also install MS Office
  2. OpenOffice.org 2.0 understands more file formats than MS Office. You can open an MS Word document in OpenOffice.org, but you cannot open an OpenOffice.org Writer document in MS Office
  3. OpenOffice.org 2.0 works on many platforms: Windows, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, and more while MS Office only works on two: Windows and Mac
  4. OpenOffice.org 2.0 file formats are open and standardized. This ensures the long term viability of documents
  5. OpenOffice.org 2.0 generates PDF files from its documents, spreadsheets and presentations for easier sharing
  6. OpenOffice.org 2.0 contains a new database module, not unlike MS Access, that is based on the pure Java database engine HSQLDB and allows users to create form based applications and reports based on the data
  7. OpenOffice.org 2.0's document format, OpenDocument, itself an industry standard, is being adopted as "standards" by huge organizations, like the U.S. state of Massachusetts. They are already posting *.odt formatted documents on the web

Of course, not everyone can migrate to OpenOffice.org 2.0 right away. Reasons to keep on using MS Office:

  1. You are a heavy MS Office user and just don't feel like learning a new thing all over again
  2. You are in an environment where MS Office is the standard and it would take five years to change that
  3. MS Office formatted document is the end product of your work and the fidelity requirements are high (particular fonts, etc.)
  4. You simply like the feeling of paying Microsoft money (or make your employer pay just to highlight your importance)
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Posted by Weiqi Gao on October 21, 2005 9:53:47 PM CDT #


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Re: Seven Reasons To Go With OpenOffice.org 2.0

Comment from Eric Burke on October 22, 2005 11:41:19 AM CDT #
As much as I'd like to switch, OOo has major problems. Just try opening several of the OCI training courses in OOo. Notice how it completely screws up any arrows and callouts. Also observe how pixellated and blocky the graphics look. And once your presentation grows to a certain size, OOo slows down and becomes unstable. It is a great concept and is better than ever, but usability is sub-par, stability is sub-par, and graphics/fonts look really horrible.
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Re: Seven Reasons To Go With OpenOffice.org 2.0

Comment from Weiqi Gao on October 22, 2005 11:53:53 PM CDT #

I had your use case in mind when I listed my exceptions. What I wrote applies mostly to the casual communication oriented users of MS Office. They'll draft a 3 page document containing only are few format/style elements (title, section, paragraph) and email it to the team to review and mark up. From my experience, that's where most MS Office users are.

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Re: Seven Reasons To Go With OpenOffice.org 2.0

Comment from Jason Z. Li on October 22, 2005 11:28:54 PM CDT #
Most people won't need MS Office anymore.
I do not buy that. I would say
Most geeks won't need MS Office anymore. Most people could use OO instead of MS office, but they would not. For the business market, not many managers would risk their positions and bonuses just for saving the cost of MS Office. For average home users, the chance is even slimmer. Unlike open source free frameworks, which are used by application developers, MS Office is primarily for corporate end users. Corporate end users do not care about the cost.
OCI won't buy me a copy of MS Office
It would be different if you charge OCI for your hours:)
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Re: Seven Reasons To Go With OpenOffice.org 2.0

Comment from Weiqi Gao on October 23, 2005 7:50:43 AM CDT #

You are right in your accessment that some MS Office users won't switch simply because of inertia. As long as they feel like paying Microsoft the licensing fees, they can keep on paying Microsoft the licensing fees.

But if their use cases can truly be satisfied with OOo, sooner or later they will find that out.

Similar scenarios are being played out in other product categories: Solaris box vs. Linux box, Oracle vs. MySQL, WebSphere vs. JBoss vs. LAMP, etc.

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选择OpenOffice.org 2.0的七个理由

Comment from errorter on October 23, 2005 1:10:21 AM CDT # 
我翻译了您本文的部分内容，见：
http://slashdotcn.org/article.php/20051023131635953

推荐一个有意思的地方，关于OpenDocument "OpenDocument for an Open Future" :)
http://opendocumentfellowship.org/
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Re: Seven Reasons To Go With OpenOffice.org 2.0

Comment from Rob Kennedy on October 25, 2005 3:45:30 PM CDT #
I can think of another one for those with a home network and don't want to pay Microsoft for three copies of their software. Use Open Office on the other two.

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