Alternatives to MS Office

Gandalf23

I have recently been wondering why more people dont use either OpenOffice or StarOffice as an alternative to MS Office.

Both look very similar to MS Office, have similar (or sometimes more) functionality, and are free or significantly cheaper in the case of StarOffice. Also, files can be saved in MS format, and both OpenOffice and StarOffice can open all MS Office files easily.

I have personally used OpenOffice exclusively during the last 2 years of my Masters degree in UCD with no problems whatsoever, (and there were dozens of presentations and hundreds of email attachments during those 2 years).

So why are you not using OpenOffice or StarOffice? If you are using an alternative to MS Office, which one are you using and why?

(Note: This question arises from the current problems in Beaumont with StarOffice... the staff are rebelling against it, and are shouting very loudly to get MS Office back
http://www.northsidepeople.ie/index.php?option=news&task=viewarticle&sid=1202)

jor el

I use OpenOffice.org, though not very often as I don't do that much word processing. I use it at home because it's free and I installed it at work (even though we have licences for MS and it's installed too) because I use it at home and it's easier just to keep it the same.

I have a friend who buys and sells 2nd hand computers as a sideline job and he started putting OpenOffice.org on the PCs instead of MS Office. Nobody even noticed that it wasn't MS Office, they just assumed it was a new version and happily continue.

If the Hospital had just changed the software without telling anyone then I'd bet nobody would have even noticed or cared.

From that article wrote:

current desktop software is not meeting the requirements of the hospital and is giving rise to widespread discontent

That's just bizarre. In what way does this office application not meet hospital requirements? Is the spell checker not capable of recognising complicated medical terminology or something? They're only complaining because everyone knows MS Office and they think anything different is wrong.

Gandalf23

jor el wrote:

That's just bizarre. In what way does this office application not meet hospital requirements? Is the spell checker not capable of recognising complicated medical terminology or something? They're only complaining because everyone knows MS Office and they think anything different is wrong.

I agree totally. OpenOffice and MS Office are so similar it is sometimes very difficult to tell the difference. Microsoft have also recently announced its adoption of the "industry standard" XML file format... OpenOffice has been using XML for years now... and this will make it even easier to open MS Office files in OpenOffice and vice versa http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/03/_office_xml/

I think it comes back to the "free beer" argument... people think if the software is free it must be worthless, and they ascribe no value to it.

Tobias Greeshman

I've used OpenOffice extensively when I was in college, but I tend not to use it anymore as I primarily use MS Office here at work. Since I dont really use any office suite outside work, Im sad to say I dont use OpenOffice anymore really. Pity because its a damn good Office suite!

Gandalf23

silas wrote:

I've used OpenOffice extensively when I was in college, but I tend not to use it anymore as I primarily use MS Office here at work.

What do you think would happen if the suggestion was made to replace MS Office with OpenOffice at work?

Khannie

I use OO at home and in work, though I have seen minor formatting differences in .doc files when you compare word and OO write.

Having said that, office is an expensive piece of kit. It has a lot of features that most people will never need, but we (for example) need some of the excel specific features. Attempts to open some of our (very complex) excel spreadsheets have failed in OO.

Most corporations don't question the cost as they purchase site licences, so per-head costs don't come into it so much.

Khannie

Gandalf23 wrote:

What do you think would happen if the suggestion was made to replace MS Office with OpenOffice at work?

Where I work? With some exceptions, I'd wager that nobody would mind. It's a tech company though. Living with change is the norm in tech companies......not in hospitals.

Kali

Gandalf23 wrote:

What do you think would happen if the suggestion was made to replace MS Office with OpenOffice at work?

I think you'll find the main stumbling block in switching over isn't Powerpoint, Word or Excel etc. but Outlook.. Neither of the office bundles include an Exchange compatible reader, and until they do, people will always be stuck with having two office products on their machine.

While there are open-source alternatives, like Evolution, their Exchange support is quite buggy... and porting Exchange datastores, users etc. to an open-source groupware product like open-xchange for example is a LOT of work.

snappieT

My friend worked in Beaumont admin last summer, he was well used to OpenOffice.org, so he settled right in when others hated it.

Raises the question why the uproar is only happening now, when it has been in use for over a year there...

Tobias Greeshman

Gandalf23 wrote:

What do you think would happen if the suggestion was made to replace MS Office with OpenOffice at work?

I doubt they'd go for it on the lines that they dont need it. Only use very basic facilities of Word and Excel on the rare times, so wouldn't be worth they're while really!

Capt'n Midnight

Khannie wrote:

Most corporations don't question the cost as they purchase site licences, so per-head costs don't come into it so much.

Microsoft do not do site licenses, it's a volume license. And if the PC's have OEM office then your investment is worth nothing when you replace the PC because if you upgrade OEM office the licence is still locked to the PC.

OO is getting closer all the time, several times when I went to look at a problem/niggle it was fixed on the next release
And you can get Foreign Language interfaces and Spell checkers FREE !!!

Word tables may go to mush, but that's true even if you use a different version of word so you can't hold that against OO.

Biggest niggle - using semicolon ; instead of , in Excel formulas.

dB support in Beta 2 is coming along - still miles away from an Access replacement.

Reasons for not using OO are complex documents and legacy documents but you may have problems with these on other versions of MsOffice anyway. Other reasons are where you are running fancy reports that are linked in to some sort of Microsoft SQL system where the exports are to generated using Word/Excel/Access.


For documents without macros , without VBA and where there isn't a lot of VERY complex formatting it a saving of about 100 per user per year

Gandalf23

Kali wrote:

I think you'll find the main stumbling block in switching over isn't Powerpoint, Word or Excel etc. but Outlook.. Neither of the office bundles include an Exchange compatible reader, and until they do, people will always be stuck with having two office products on their machine.

While there are open-source alternatives, like Evolution, their Exchange support is quite buggy... and porting Exchange datastores, users etc. to an open-source groupware product like open-xchange for example is a LOT of work.

I'm not sure I see this as a major stumbling block to using OO.o. I lecture in a big third level environment where MS Office is used exclusively, and no one uses any of the MS email or Internet applications. We use Pegasus Mail because it is simply better than Outlook.

There are also a huge amount of exceptional Open Source email and Internet applications available... Thunderbird, Firefox, etc... and these are gaining market share even in organisations where MS Office has a total monopoly.

I think the problem with OpenOffice adoption is deeper than this, and to be honest my current opinion is than it's more a social and political issue rather than a technical one.

Gandalf23

Khannie wrote:

Where I work? With some exceptions, I'd wager that nobody would mind.

So why not migrate to OO.o then? Surely the cost savings would be worth it?

Gandalf23

silas wrote:

I doubt they'd go for it on the lines that they dont need it. Only use very basic facilities of Word and Excel on the rare times, so wouldn't be worth they're while really!

Same question as above to Khannie... why not migrate to OO.o then on the grounds of cost savings?

I'm sorry if this sounds like me on a rant against MS here guys... I'm not... but this is really a mystery to me. If I had the choice of 2 similar cars, and one cost lots of money and the other was free, I would take the free one!!! I cant understand why the same is not true of software...

Kali

Gandalf23 wrote:

I'm not sure I see this as a major stumbling block to using OO.o. I lecture in a big third level environment where MS Office is used exclusively, and no one uses any of the MS email or Internet applications. We use Pegasus Mail because it is simply better than Outlook.

There are also a huge amount of exceptional Open Source email and Internet applications available... Thunderbird, Firefox, etc... and these are gaining market share even in organisations where MS Office has a total monopoly.

As I mentioned, its the incompatability with existing infrastructure. While moving everyone to Pegasus, Eudora, Thunderbird or Evolution isn't an issue if you have open-source IMAP/POP3 servers, hell its simple, but in a company where Exchange/Outlook is at the heart of messaging, from mail to public folders, calenders, contacts... there isn't one all-in-one solution (apart from the buggy open-xchange) which offers a valid alternative (although I am in the process of looking at Squirrelmail, but even then a myriad of plugins is not a feasible option).

Orion

Outlook can be purchased as a separate application. There's no reason not to use it and OO.o together.

To answer the original question - I use OO.o at home exclusively now. I find it superior to MS Office in many way esp. the price

Khannie

Gandalf23 wrote:

So why not migrate to OO.o then? Surely the cost savings would be worth it?

This is a corporation you're talking about.

You mentioned pegasus, are you in DIT? I used that when I was there. I would certainly advocate OO in a 3rd level environment. Certainly in labs. Can't see students giving two poos about which office prog they use.

Anyway....I recently started to use linux as my primary OS in work. I mostly develop cross platform C++ and perl, but occasionally, just ocassionaly, I end up needing the MS version of excel and I like that it's installed on my windows PC (which I will be switching to being a shared linux box soon, then I will be using a shared windows pc with remote desktop when I need one for debugging, etc.).

Beyond that, I use OO anyway tbh. Others in my group would happily switch, but the cost isn't directly an issue to us. IT installed the latest version of office on our machines, and we had no say in the issue (though because we're in software dev, we have admin rights locally and can install OO on windows).

If I were the IT manager in a small company, there's no way I'd have MS Office on machines. Probably wouldn't even have windows TBH.

Ubuntu all the way baby!

RicardoSmith

I do a lot of VBA development and development between office and other systems, for reporting, letter generation etc. So I use MSO. But I don't these issues with tables between versions of word? Yes there are differences but they are usually not a level of tables and such like.

I don't believe that learning to use applications and word, excel, access and powerpoint is a trival issue. Theres a lots of power users, espeically in companies that have spent years learning advanced features of MSO. To switch to another 4 or 5 other applications is not a small matter.

Just because you only know or use 10% of MSO doesn't mean that everyone else is the same. Its like people say that GIMP is a replacement for Photoshop. It isn't. I can learn most apps pretty fast. But thats beside the point. In companies that use IT training on systems and applications is a huge issue.

Capt'n Midnight

Kali wrote:

I think you'll find the main stumbling block in switching over isn't Powerpoint, Word or Excel etc. but Outlook.. Neither of the office bundles include an Exchange compatible reader, and until they do, people will always be stuck with having two office products on their machine.

While there are open-source alternatives, like Evolution, their Exchange support is quite buggy... and porting Exchange datastores, users etc. to an open-source groupware product like open-xchange for example is a LOT of work.

If you have Exchange, use Outlook.
It's included in the price of the exchange client access license so it's FREE.
You do not need to buy Office to use Outlook with an exchange server.

If you want to use advanced Exchange features like Cached email , and delegates and server based rules then you need Outlook.

On the other hand outlook is painfull to use as an LDAP client, so don't bother.

But if you just want email then don't use Exchange, get MDaemon instead, it's not free or opensource , but about 1/10th the price of exchange. And you can use it with it's own built web client LookOut or with most of the other popular email clients.

Fenster

My company is a big user of OO. They recently upgraded all the terminals in stores to Windows XP thin-client systems. They use OO 1.1.4 on all of them as a lot of light work is done-signs, ticketing, letters and the like. I can easily imagine they saved a huge amount of time and money (no lisence audits) by using OO.

angelofdeath

openoffice all the way, in the net cafe i work in theres 20 computers all with openoffice on them, 3 computers have msoffice on them aswell, the majority of our customers come in to do one of three things, check email, use office or play games, it's a very rare occasion when someone asks for specifically msoffice, and even if none of the msoffice machines are available, they'll quite happily use openoffice without a bother

Capt'n Midnight

You can do a lot of integration with a microsoft servers and office. The drawback to this is that application costs can spiral when all of your clients need stuff like word/excel/access because the report is generated via them instead of being saved as a file.

But for the general user who doesn't need such integration OO is well worth a look. Back on windows 3.1 I used to use Write with a spell checker app, because it did all the basics and was way faster than word. And you could take the doc into word , tart it up and save as .rtf and back into write again.

Yes like firefox OO is slow to load, but you can buy a lot of ram or even a new motherboard and cpu for the price of MsOffice. And I have been really suprised at how much faster OO was at printing some word files than word was.

Don't foget that things like 602suite and abiword are still out there too.

Gandalf23

Fenster wrote:

My company is a big user of OO. They recently upgraded all the terminals in stores to Windows XP thin-client systems. They use OO 1.1.4 on all of them as a lot of light work is done-signs, ticketing, letters and the like. I can easily imagine they saved a huge amount of time and money (no lisence audits) by using OO.

What do your end users think of OO.o?

Do you think they would take MS Office back if offered (as the Beaumont end users are screaming for...)?

Has your organisation made real savings by migrating to OO.o?

Fenster

I don't think anyone really cares either way. It does the job.

RicardoSmith

As always you have to use the right tool for the job. Sometimes its MSO sometimes its OO.

Capt'n Midnight

Gandalf23 wrote:

What do your end users think of OO.o?

Do you think they would take MS Office back if offered (as the Beaumont end users are screaming for...)?

Has your organisation made real savings by migrating to OO.o?

Anyone who wants office can put their name into a hat. Then tell them how much M$Office costs and how many of the would need to be let go to make up the shotfall. That's how many names need to come out of the hat.

But the biggie from the IT point of view is no headaches over licences.

InkPot

Gandalf23 wrote:

I have recently been wondering why more people dont use either OpenOffice or StarOffice as an alternative to MS Office.

... Inertia.

(Note: This question arises from the current problems in Beaumont with StarOffice... the staff are rebelling against it, and are shouting very loudly to get MS Office back
http://www.northsidepeople.ie/index.php?option=news&task=viewarticle&sid=1202)

... The 'problem' in Beaumont seems to me to be a case of technical illiterates feeling that they are somehow getting 'short changed' because they are being asked to use open source software, such as linux and open office. There is no technical argument for switching back to MS-ware (certainly not in the case of the operating system!)... and absolutely no financial argument. Its completely irrational... but hey, thats the public sector for you.

RicardoSmith

InkPot wrote:

... The 'problem' in Beaumont seems to me to be a case of technical illiterates feeling that they are somehow getting 'short changed' because they are being asked to use open source software, such as linux and open office. There is no technical argument for switching back to MS-ware (certainly not in the case of the operating system!)... and absolutely no financial argument. Its completely irrational... but hey, thats the public sector for you.

So does that imply that there are no training issues with using an Office package? So if I was to pick someone off the street and ask them to do a complex formatted document, or complex spread sheet and reports that the would be able to do as quick as someone who has training in it?

Or also that if your very experienced in say Word Perfect, that you will be as efficient doing a complex document using Word without any addition training?

Or that everyone is equally comfortable using IT systems as anyone else and that everyone learns and at the same rate?

Of course the root cause of this was that the change was dictated and no one likes that. To successfully implement IT projects, you need the support of your user base, and you need to remember that IT is there to help people achieve their objectives. IT can't achieve squat on its own.

Orion

RicardoSmith wrote:

Of course the root cause of this was that the change was dictated and no one likes that. To successfully implement IT projects, you need the support of your user base, and you need to remember that IT is there to help people achieve their objectives. IT can't achieve squat on its own.

Can't agree with that entirely. It depends on the policy in place in the organisation. In my job we dictate IT policy (subject to the needs of the workers). If there was a decision made to move to OO from M$O then it would be done. The training needs and everything else concerned would be put in place first but at the end of the day it would be our decision. That's the mentality that has been enforced in my job. In our London office a whole different mentality applies. There, the different departments own their 'own' IT equipment. And the mentality is that everyone owns their own pc. That made it so complicated for them to move from NT to XP a couple of years ago - every hdd had to be backed up and the data restored to the users' new pcs. In my office - IT own everything. Users have no local disk access at all - no local data storage etc. If a pc goes fubar we just replace it with another one - end of story.

So in this case - our London office would have had the same problems that Beaumont are having - but my office in Dublin wouldn't have.

RicardoSmith

"Ownership" as you've described, or having a locked down desktop. is a different thing to involving the users in their IT processes, and defining requirements etc.

What happened in Beaumount seems to be (since we don't know the full story) is that they dictated what the users should have and use without getting the support of everyone concerned.

Its very dependent on what you are doing. Some applications won't work without local access, and in a locked down enviroment.

rsynnott

Gandalf23 wrote:

(Note: This question arises from the current problems in Beaumont with StarOffice... the staff are rebelling against it, and are shouting very loudly to get MS Office back
http://www.northsidepeople.ie/index.php?option=news&task=viewarticle&sid=1202)

They've been using StarOFfice and OpenOffice for about 3 years there; are you sure it wasn't something else? There was some talk of Linux migration, which WOULD no doubt terrify the staff.

rsynnott

Gandalf23 wrote:

I agree totally. OpenOffice and MS Office are so similar it is sometimes very difficult to tell the difference. Microsoft have also recently announced its adoption of the "industry standard" XML file format... OpenOffice has been using XML for years now... and this will make it even easier to open MS Office files in OpenOffice and vice versa http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/03/_office_xml/
.

They've been talking about this for quite a long time (since Office 2000). Don't bet on it happening.Anyway, does anyone bother to update to new versions of Office anymore?

Capt'n Midnight

rsynnott wrote:

Anyway, does anyone bother to update to new versions of Office anymore?

You have to hand it to them, the concept of the OEM license was inspired.

Orion

RicardoSmith wrote:

"Ownership" as you've described, or having a locked down desktop. is a different thing to involving the users in their IT processes, and defining requirements etc.

The only involvement given to the users in our office is informative and identifying and planning training needs. The decisions are made at a different level and implemented. imo that is the way it should be - IT staff are the ones best qualified to make these decisions. The only factor that would prevent them being taken is a cost/benefit analysis which we do first. A bunch of users not wanting to move to x because "it's free = crap" or "I'm used to y and I want to keep it" just isn't entertained. That philosophy has been cultured over years to ensure that we are able to do our jobs properly without that kind of crap.

Orion

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

You have to hand it to them, the concept of the OEM license was inspired.

However much we complain about MS their business strategies are usually just that - inspired. Gates is no programmer but a very shrewd businessman.

Gandalf23

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

You have to hand it to them, the concept of the OEM license was inspired.

I totally agree... inspired

Gandalf23

RicardoSmith wrote:

So does that imply that there are no training issues with using an Office package? So if I was to pick someone off the street and ask them to do a complex formatted document, or complex spread sheet and reports that the would be able to do as quick as someone who has training in it?

Or also that if your very experienced in say Word Perfect, that you will be as efficient doing a complex document using Word without any addition training?

I'm not sure I totally agree with this. You make the point earlier that there are potentially a lot of power users in companies... in my opinion this is the exception rather than the rule. Most users (e.g. in Beaumont) would need and use about 10% of any office application they are using. Thus retraining in a different office application should be fairly minimal as OO.o is so similar to MSO. "Power users" should have the IT savy to be able to become proficient in any office application if they are really "power users". An example would be anyone who can use Excel to a very advanced level... they should have very little difficulty in using the spreadsheet in OO.o.

This however does not mean training is not needed. Training should be fairly comprehensive in any migration to OO.o, but should concentrate on winning hearts and minds rather than the technical issues. Training needs to make the user understands why the migration to OO.o is taking place, and should ensure than every user understands that "free" does NOT mean "worthless".

Gandalf23

rsynnott wrote:

They've been using StarOffice and OpenOffice for about 3 years there; are you sure it wasn't something else? There was some talk of Linux migration, which WOULD no doubt terrify the staff.

Beaumont migrated approximately 80% of all desktops to StarOffice... the remaining 20% stayed with MSO for various reasons. They didnt have any Linux operating systems on desktops, but have significant Linux backend stuff.

This paper by Brian Fitzgeral (University Limerick) and Tony Kenny (IT Manager Beaumont) gives all the details http://www.netproject.com/docs/Beaumont.pdf. The interesting thing about the paper is that it gives absolutely no indication of the "apparent" staff discontent that is now public news.

Gandalf23

Macros42 wrote:

The only involvement given to the users in our office is informative and identifying and planning training needs. The decisions are made at a different level and implemented. imo that is the way it should be - IT staff are the ones best qualified to make these decisions. The only factor that would prevent them being taken is a cost/benefit analysis which we do first. A bunch of users not wanting to move to x because "it's free = crap" or "I'm used to y and I want to keep it" just isn't entertained. That philosophy has been cultured over years to ensure that we are able to do our jobs properly without that kind of crap.

I dont agree. There are huge amounts of case studies where this has been proven to be the wrong approach, and I would bet the farm that everyone reading this post will be able to think of a personal example of where they have actually seen this approach fail. The thinking that "IT staff are the ones best qualified to make these decisions" is certanly true when you are considering technical issues, but the ultimate success or failure of IT systems depends on a lot more than technical issues.

Having said that however, I do admit that this is the "typical" approach adopted by some IT departments. AIB are currently in the process of a migration to StarOffice and Java desktop http://www.hos.horizon.ie/pressroom/pr290604.html
and you can be certain that end users will have no say in this... cost benefit analysis will ultimately dictate things in AIB, and this will be driven by the IT department who "are the ones best qualified to make these decisions". It will be interesting watching from the sidelines...

RicardoSmith

I amused how easy everyone assumes people can pickup a new application. I support and develop for a wide range of users, all ages and abilities. A lot of them simply can't pick up new applications, no matter how similar very fast. Some people just are techophobic. It takes them ages. Some of these people can be senior management. To them IT is a tool. It should bend to their will not the other way around. Why should a company be IT driven and dicated to by IT policy. Its bad business. The best companies I've worked in, IT supports the business, it is not dictated to by it.

However I'm a supporter of OO. But unfortunately I always end up doing some VBA everywhere I work, its a skillset thats marketable as its a useful business tool. But I agree with Gandalf23 that you have to win the hearts and minds of the users. I can't see that dictating policy is the way to go.

The content of that PDF is interesting. Especially as it doesn't contain any feedback or comments from the user base. It also indicates that there were continued problems with the deployment og star office from day one. This seems to have continued for a very long time. I guess the users just got fed up of all the problems. Theres also the point that users greated fear is of their skillset. Staroffice would not be percieved as useful skillset, whereas MSO is.

Khannie

RicardoSmith wrote:

you have to win the hearts and minds of the users.

The easiest way to do that is with cold, hard, CASH.

Come upgrade time, if you offered half the cost of an MS office licence as a bonus to those who switch, I reckon you'd find pretty quickly that it wouldn't be such a problem.

Cynical? Hell yes. Correct? I know I'd take it if I could.

Gandalf23

RicardoSmith wrote:

... users greates fear is of their skillset. Staroffice would not be percieved as useful skillset, whereas MSO is.

Bullseye

BatThing

silas wrote:

I've used OpenOffice extensively when I was in college, but I tend not to use it anymore as I primarily use MS Office here at work. Since I dont really use any office suite outside work, Im sad to say I dont use OpenOffice anymore really. Pity because its a damn good Office suite!

Same here ... since i use Ms office in my office i have to adhere to it want it or not in any case while i was still in college i came across a nifty alternative called the 602 pro office suite.u can get it here : http://www.software602.com