Microsoft Office versus OpenOffice | The Coffeehouse

Animaonline
animaonline.com animaonline.blogspot.com MCP, MCT, MCAD, MCTS, IT HERO

Can someone tell me more about differences, advantages, etc?

I have used MSO for a long long time, while OpenOffice is something that I recently heard of. Perplexed

intelman

MS Office

- Nice Interface

- Well Supported

- Expensive (unless you are a student, the Ultimate Steal was nice)

- The de facto office suite standard

Open Office

- Open Source, Open Standards (.odt, .odf...etc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument ) fairly easy to understand the formats as a developer

- Ugly kinda odd interface

- Free

- Does what an office suite needs to

Honestly I prefer Microsoft Office to OO, but if I had to pay retail for it, I wouldn't buy it, I'd just use OO. I hope something like iWork comes along and puts pressure on Microsoft. Keynote is wonderful, and that iWork suite is rather cheap. Office 2007 isn't bad by any means, but I think you can get more bang for the buck with stuff like iWork.

You know it is free, why don't you just try it...

http://www.openoffice.org/

They just redesigned their webpage, it is rather nice and simple, gets you to where you want.

evildictaitor
if( !succeed( try() ) ) { while(true) try(); }

I'm one of these odd people that do things backwards, in that I started with OOo and migrated to MSOffice. And so basically here is my assessment:

MSO:

Very very heavy application
Slow
Not great when you're in a hurry
Pretty
Expensive
Has lots of bells and whistles
If you want it, it's probably there somewhere
That ribbon thing is really nice, but takes some getting used to
You can finally open doc files sent to you by colleagues and clients in the way they were intended.
Needs a (free and easy to obtain) download to make PDFs

Open office:

Ridiculously ugly
No one else seems to have it, so don't send anyone else an ODT or they'll be clueless as to what it is.
Makes PDFs natively.
Slow to startup, but relatively OK from then on.
If you want it, it's probably there, but you'll never find it.
It's ugly
It'll be under Menus -> Toolbox -> Options -> Customise ... .... -> Make -> Text -> Align -> Left
The spellcheck sucks, and is ubiquitously inserted everywhere
Free
Did I mention ugly?
Has a lot of gray
Oh yeah, and it's ugly.
But free.
And ugly.

alwaysmc2
It's not stupid; It's advanced!

I think of OpenOffice as a free version of Office 2000.
Admitedly, though, my experience with it is limited.

Office 2007 is so easy to use. Smiley

PerfectPhase
"This is not war, this is pest control!" - Dalek to Cyberman

evildictaitor wrote:

Open office:

.....
Makes PDFs natively.
....

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4D951911-3E7E-4AE6-B059-A2E79ED87041&displaylang=en

jl235

I've not used OpenOffice much, but it has always been a very good piece of software, especially considering that it is free. However I find Office 2007 to be far superior, which is why I use that instead. This is compounded with the Ultimate Steal, allowing me to get it real cheap.

elmer
I'm on my very last life.

Works is the best value product MS sell... and personally, I'd use it over OO.

j0217995

Office 2007 is awesome compared to OpenOffice. OpenOffice is free and is pushed by all major linux distributions. It however is old, outdated and ugly compared to openOffice.
OpenOffice is slow and crapware. Try using OpenOffice with a heavily reviewed document that is tracking changes. It is a piece of garbage. Open Office is Office 2000 and trying to be a copy of that.

Xaero_Vincent
Sexy me

OpenOffice 3.0 will be akin to Office 2007 without the Ribbon UI, Sharepoint, Project Management, and other "Online" stuff.

This makes Office 2007 more attractive to buisness users but not necessarly home or perhaps even small-buisness users.

j0217995

While the chagnes to the look and feel will be nice. How about the pain of dealing with reviewed documents, long documents, and dealing with tracking changes. I greatly prefer Office for dealign with tracking revisions.
Long documents 200+ pages take forever to process through OPenOffice.

Xaero_Vincent
Sexy me

j0217995 wrote:
While the chagnes to the look and feel will be nice. How about the pain of dealing with reviewed documents, long documents, and dealing with tracking changes. I greatly prefer Office for dealign with tracking revisions.
Long documents 200+ pages take forever to process through OPenOffice.

OpenOffice developers are obviously aware of the performance problems; I even agree with you about performance. For example, saving to ODF has been extremely slow for me--something planned to be fixed in 3.0.

The good news is developers are aware of it and optimizing in each release:

http://katana.oooninja.com/w/openoffice.org/performance_improvements

While Unix distributors are pushing OOo it isn't the only Office suit. Like on Windows there are KOffice, Gnome Office, Softmaker Office (which is supposibly lightning fast and more compatable than even OOo), and ofcourse Microsoft Office/Works via Wine Win32 API layer.

evildictaitor
if( !succeed( try() ) ) { while(true) try(); }

PerfectPhase wrote:

evildictaitor wrote:
Open office:

.....
Makes PDFs natively.
....

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4D951911-3E7E-4AE6-B059-A2E79ED87041&displaylang=en

I already mentioned that. The difference is that OOo does it natively, whereas Microsoft Office needs a (free and easy to obtain) download to make PDFs.

To quote myself,

evildictaitor wrote:

MSO:
Needs a (free and easy to obtain) download to make PDFs

SaraJoRedux
GirlDeveloper.com

if PDF editing was built into office it would make life worth living.

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evildictaitor wrote:

PerfectPhase wrote:
evildictaitor wrote:
Open office:

.....
Makes PDFs natively.
....

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4D951911-3E7E-4AE6-B059-A2E79ED87041&displaylang=en

I already mentioned that. The difference is that OOo does it natively, whereas Microsoft Office needs a (free and easy to obtain) download to make PDFs.

To quote myself,

evildictaitor wrote:

MSO:
Needs a (free and easy to obtain) download to make PDFs

You can thank Adobe for that... apparently they threatened to sue if PDF export was built into Office (which it was in the early betas of O12), so it was pulled before the final release (I think in the Beta 2 technical refresh, if I remember correctly).

intelman

SaraJoRedux wrote:
if PDF editing was built into office it would make life worth living.

That would be a gift only God can give. But what Office or Windows had PDF readers by default...now that would be sweet.

DigitalDud

intelman wrote:

That would be a gift only God can give. But what Office or Windows had PDF readers by default...now that would be sweet.

Vista reads XPS files that's better than PDF right? It's XML.

GoddersUK
I CAN has cheezburger and you CAN'T has stop me!

Personaly I think MS Office is the only good office suite I've ever come accross.

alwaysmc2 wrote:
I think of OpenOffice as a free version of Office 2000.
Admitedly, though, my experience with it is limited.

Office 2000 is waaaay better than open office.

rahsoftware
Me, Rob & my C9 Guy hard at work :-)

I must admit I’m a big fan of XPS; Adobe PDF seems to be getting heavier and heavier these days.

elmer
I'm on my very last life.

rahsoftware wrote:

I must admit I’m a big fan of XPS; Adobe PDF seems to be getting heavier and heavier these days.

Not to mention the app crashes... I swear, Adobe should be made to write all their software in managed code, as they can't seem to write safe, stable unmanaged code.

Xaero_Vincent
Sexy me

GoddersUK wrote:
Office 2000 is waaaay better than open office.

No its not.

Its only faster. But frankly performance is a big competitive factor.

OOo suffers from performance issues because of lack of optimizations in the early days. Hopefully by OOo v3.0 the performance and memory footprint wil be semi-competitive to other office suits. It's developed in Java so the memory footprint will always be higher but today's Java is known to be almost as fast as native code.

DigitalDud

Xaero_Vincent wrote:

OOo suffers from performance issues because of lack of optimizations in the early days. Hopefully by OOo v3.0 the performance and memory footprint wil be semi-competitive to other office suits.

OpenOffice has awful code quality, which is probably largely responsible for its poor performance and slow development. Take a look, its practically unmaintainable.

Xaero_Vincent wrote:
It's developed in Java so the memory footprint will always be higher but today's Java is known to be almost as fast as native code.

That is a lie, its not developed in Java but in C++, and loading the Java runtime is optional from what I understand, it just loads out of the box because Sun had their hands on it. You can't blame the language, its just crappy developers.

Also Java is known to be almost as fast as native code? Who cares, what about the crapload of I/O required to load the virtual machine, or the huge memory consumption?

GoddersUK
I CAN has cheezburger and you CAN'T has stop me!

Xaero_Vincent wrote:
No its not.

Its only faster. But frankly performance is a big competitive factor.

OOo suffers from performance issues because of lack of optimizations in the early days. Hopefully by OOo v3.0 the performance and memory footprint wil be semi-competitive to other office suits. It's developed in Java so the memory footprint will always be higher but today's Java is known to be almost as fast as native code.

No really, the only application that could make that claim is writer.

Calc is way behind Excell 2000
Base is way behind Access 2000
Impress is behing PowerPoint 2000 (although it is the one closest to catching up)

Xaero_Vincent
Sexy me

GoddersUK wrote:
No really, the only application that could make that claim is writer.

Calc is way behind Excell 2000
Base is way behind Access 2000
Impress is behing PowerPoint 2000 (although it is the one closest to catching up)

OK, well if you have facts that can back that up.

I'd like to know what features in Office 2000 that are missing from the latest encarnation of OOo.

Xaero_Vincent
Sexy me

DigitalDud wrote:
OpenOffice has awful code quality, which is probably largely responsible for its poor performance and slow development. Take a look, its practically unmaintainable.

Fair enough. I havent really looked at the code but they are obviously trying to improve it. The optimizations started appearing after v2.2 are extensive.

DigitalDud wrote:
That is a lie, its not developed in Java but in C++, and loading the Java runtime is optional from what I understand, it just loads out of the box because Sun had their hands on it. You can't blame the language, its just crappy developers.

Also Java is known to be almost as fast as native code? Who cares, what about the crapload of I/O required to load the virtual machine, or the huge memory consumption?

OK, I looked this up and your sorta right. The various creation and save wizards use Java. You still need Java if you want complete functionality.

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Java_and_OpenOffice.org#OpenOffice.org_2.0_Functionality_depending_on_Java

The Java VM isn't that slow. Under 5 seconds of disk I/0 on my P4 system. Once its loaded all applications have a fast startup. That said, I wouldnt develop in Java but neither would I in .NET or Mono.

vesuvius
Das Glasperlenspiel

This is like the Windows/Linux debate really, only reduced to office.

The lead designer for the ribbon has this video from mix 08. Only after watching this and seeing what goes into Office from a usability point of view, can you sufficiently segregate (evildictaitor has unwittingly done this already) why Office 2007 is better. Please watch this video for a true masterclass in presentation.

Microsoft's chief weapon is usability studies and data collation. How things look and work is now of paramount importance to end users. Open source lacks this impetus and open office will not be using the ribbon anytime soon. Unless they cough, cough, innovate as shown in this video.

It must be said that people really miss this point so often. If you pay for something and it does not work, you complain. Microsoft have to deal with this aspect in the product cycle lifetime for all their products. The net resultant is (usually) a better product. This is missing from open source and you put up with things because they are free. The rate of change consequently is far slower so these products suffer.

Please Please Please watch Jensen!