Microsoft Office versus OpenOffice | The Coffeehouse

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

vesuvius wrote:
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!

I must agree with your post. Often enough with open source software it seems like someone just decided to stick some buttons somewhere that do something. Must open source programmes, FireFox excluded, seem to put far too little effort on the UI. It comes back to the whole designed by developers, not designers point.

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

Xaero_Vincent wrote:
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.

I'll provide one example from each of calc, impress and base

Calc: Adding trendlines/lines of best fit and then finding equations from those lines is far behind that is Office 2000

Impress: Having to manually change the colour of the bullet points each time you add them if your text colour is different from the default

Base: Only being able to create relationships where at least one of the fields is a primary key.

DigitalDud

Xaero_Vincent wrote:

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.

Ugh the more I learn about OpenOffice the more horrible I realize it is. Their code is an abortion, I hope the contributors all know German. This has to be the biggest C++ project that uses new/delete for memory management.

5 seconds is an eternity on a computer, especially when the only added value is essentially a Letter wizard.

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

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.

Ahahahaha! Sorry, I thought you were being serious for a second there.

Bass
www.spreadfirefox.com/5years/

Both are very good office suites, but OpenOffice.org is free and MS Office is very expensive. MS Office has more features in general but there are some interesting features OpenOffice.org has on it's own like OpenGL/3D effects in Impress, SWF creation, PDF creation, Google Docs intergration (with a plugin), and cross platform support. In OOo's roadmap there is also many ideas that are not present yet in MS Office, like PDF editing. So it's not all there yet but it's becoming very powerful. I can't really say which is better then the other though, I like and use both.

magicalclick

For me,
MSO has:
1) Every business is using Excel for data transfer and other non-standard communitcations, ie, non-EDI.
2) VBA. All my programs for my compnay is using VBA. It bypass security check and people are more willing to use it since they are using Excel, their familiar app.
3) Integration with other MS product like MS Great Plains Smart List, one of the most important feature in GP.

Lloyd_Humph
If Blackberrys are addictive cellphones, Channel9 is the ultimate addictive website.

I love Office. It looks, feels and IS better than Open Office. Personally, every time I've used OO, I've felt as if I'd been sent back to when I was 7...

Office: fluid, simple, pretty, powerful, easy to use
OO: why are simple tasks obscured?