Whats up with OpenOffice?

[Grisu]

I really want OpenOffice / LibreOffice to succeed, but MS Office just has a much stronger piece of software. I couldn't recommend Open/LibreOffice to anyone right now, unless they were really skint.

Except that the vast majority of features will never be used/needed by the vast majority of users..

I use MS Office at work and OO at home. All I do with MS Office at work, I could do with OO as well. Sure, some features are awesome, but most people won't use them

So for all those, OpenOffice (or LibreOffice if it takes off) is a perfectly valid choice

 

[Mise]

It's not just the features, though - it's the little things too. E.g. I remember using the spreadsheet software, and it refused to not autocorrect capitalisations, no matter now hard I tried. I think I was trying to label a column heading as "i", and it just wouldn't let me... It kept autocorrecting to "I". It was incredibly annoying. Now, as annoying as MS Office can be sometimes, at least it doesn't do that! There were other things too, e.g. copying and pasting from the database to the spreadsheet and vice versa -- OO couldn't do something as bloody simple as that! The graphs in OO are much more difficult to do things with, though I may have just not figured out how to use it properly yet.

The whole MS Office suite just works so much better.

 

[Grisu]

It's not just the features, though - it's the little things too. E.g. I remember using the spreadsheet software, and it refused to not autocorrect capitalisations, no matter now hard I tried. I think I was trying to label a column heading as "i", and it just wouldn't let me... It kept autocorrecting to "I". It was incredibly annoying. Now, as annoying as MS Office can be sometimes, at least it doesn't do that! There were other things too, e.g. copying and pasting from the database to the spreadsheet and vice versa -- OO couldn't do something as bloody simple as that! The graphs in OO are much more difficult to do things with, though I may have just not figured out how to use it properly yet.

The whole MS Office suite just works so much better.

see? that's exactly what I meant....how large a precentage of all users will go and copy past from a db into a spreadsheat (hell, I've never even tried that).

as far as capitalizing the I...didn't encounter that one, though that might have to do with my language setting not being english and MS did do similar stuff unil very recently, IIRC.

 

[Till]

OO works fine for me, but i use Latex for word processing, and only need basic spreadsheet functionality. One thing that annoys me to no end is that the spreedsheet function names are localized. I keep tripping over that.

 

[Mise]

see? that's exactly what I meant....how large a precentage of all users will go and copy past from a db into a spreadsheat (hell, I've never even tried that).

as far as capitalizing the I...didn't encounter that one, though that might have to do with my language setting not being english and MS did do similar stuff unil very recently, IIRC.

How many would use the database software at all? Hardly anyone. But what % of the people who do use the db software would also want to c&p between the database and the spreadsheet? ~100% If they make a db software, I'm going to judge it based on whether it's actually usable! A db software that can't c&p properly is totally useless.

 

[mdwh]

It's clumsy to use because you're not used to it. It's a new mindset. I've yet to use word enough to see this in action, but my understanding of the ribbon bar is that the more you use it, the more common tasks you perform get put on the bar. But I'm getting used to it, and prefer it over the older office suites.

The first problem with the ribbon bar is that when commonly accessed items are on different tabs, it's much slower to repeatedly access them one after the other. The whole point of a toolbar was to provide the commonly used items on a single panel. This has nothing to do with "familiarity" - it's a fundamental UI concept about minimising time to access functions.

Another problem is that every option is now represented by an icon, where as before you had menu items. Graphical icons may work for a smaller subset of commonly used items (as with the traditional toolbar), but with a large number of features, you now have to work out what icon might represent it. Whenever I use a ribbon based program, I often have to read up in the Help to find the option. Some ribbon based programs even have an option to Find an option - the fact that you have to use it shows how bad it is!

@deanej And how are they easier to find in the ribbon?

 

[deanej]

Because now everything is upfront rather than buried. Before, items would be buried under menus, submenus, and toolbars that nobody used, and many toolbar items were hidden by default. There were even features that could only be accessed by dialog boxes that nobody uses (such as strikethrough) unless manually added to a toolbar using customize. Remember that normal users won't explore past a single level of being buried, maybe two if lucky.

As for icons, the hover text helps with that.

 

[Grisu]

OO works fine for me, but i use Latex for word processing, and only need basic spreadsheet functionality. One thing that annoys me to no end is that the spreedsheet function names are localized. I keep tripping over that.

indeed, whoever thought this was a smart idea should be shot...recently I neede a ceiling function in excel/oo...apparently in german it's 'Obergrenze'

How many would use the database software at all? Hardly anyone. But what % of the people who do use the db software would also want to c&p between the database and the spreadsheet? ~100% If they make a db software, I'm going to judge it based on whether it's actually usable! A db software that can't c&p properly is totally useless.

Absolutely, so for those people who do use the db software, MS Office certainly is the smarter choice (tbh, I never bothered with the db-software in OO). But as I said, for the average user it makes little difference what Office they use (other then what they're used to), because they'll never need most of the functionality.

 

[innonimatu]

FWIW, Office 2007/2010 are much improved over older versions, and like Mise mentioned, if you're using anything beyond basic features also tend to be plain better.

That's your opinion. I still hear complains about the damn ribbon interface every day. And I also hate it. In fact I believe that Microsoft changed the interface just so that they could show off Office 2007 as different from 2003. Apart from the collaboration crapware they just tweaked a few features.
And I better not get started on 2010.

About OpenOffice: there's no more money-grubbing, disgusting software company than Oracle. After they killed OpenSolaris it's no wonder that people decided to fork OpenOffice. It had already been stagnant during the final years of Sun, with improvements being collected as a fork, now that Oracle is shutting down everything which Sun was it's only natural for this fork to become the main version.

Oracle will kill Solaris (not enough community interest, it'll become like another OpenVMS, a zombie crawling on on its niche), but it can't kill the GPL'd software.

 

[Zelig]

That's your opinion. I still hear complains about the damn ribbon interface every day. And I also hate it. In fact I believe that Microsoft changed the interface just so that they could show off Office 2007 as different from 2003. Apart from the collaboration crapware they just tweaked a few features.
And I better not get started on 2010.

Yeah, but I have good opinions about tech stuff.

I still hear complaints about Vista/Win7, but they're not really valid either.

FWIW, I got Office 2010 several months ago but have been too lazy to install it, so my comments regarding 2010 were mostly done on the assumption that it hasn't regressed from 2007.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

I read somewhere that most of the complains about Vista were from people who upgraded computers just barrely meeting the system requirements. Does this true?

 

[Genocidicbunny]

It was because all of the OEM's sold systems that supposedly met Vista minimum requirements when in reality they has issues with even XP.

The other problem was that there was practically no driver support at launch.

 

[innonimatu]

Yeah, but I have good opinions about tech stuff.

I still hear complaints about Vista/Win7, but they're not really valid either.

FWIW, I got Office 2010 several months ago but have been too lazy to install it, so my comments regarding 2010 were mostly done on the assumption that it hasn't regressed from 2007.

I'll grant that the UI is more consistent on Office 2010, at least. They got rid of the stupid "menu hidden in the office icon" thing, replaced it with a tab. And applied the ribbons also to Outlook.

The problem is, they "broke" the way people were used to work. Again! People who were already pissed off with having to learn again were the command were moved to, with Office 2007, had to search around for things again. Needless to say, it only got them even more pissed at Microsoft.
It was, technically, an improvement over Office 2007, but because the first impression (for those coming from 2007, at least) was again bad, I really thing it was a mistake. Plus, I haven't found any other differences justifying calling Office 2010 a new version. At least 2007 looked new. 2010 looks merely like the service pack they should have released for 2007, if I had bought it as a packaged standalone product instead of a company contract, I'd feel very much ripped off. Companies are not complaining only because the regard their contracts are, effectively, a yearly renting of software.