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Software Microsoft

OpenOffice Tops 21% Market Share In Germany 252

Posted by kdawson from the camel's-head-and-neck dept.
hweimer writes "A novel study analyzes the installed base of various office packages among German users. (Here is the original study report in German and a Google translation.) While Microsoft Office comes out top (72%), open source rival OpenOffice is already installed on 21.5% of all PCs and growing. The authors use a clever method to determine the installed office suites of millions of web users: they look for the availability of characteristic fonts being shipped with the various suites. What surprised me the most is that they found hardly any difference in the numbers for home and business users."
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OpenOffice Tops 21% Market Share In Germany More

OpenOffice Tops 21% Market Share In Germany

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  • > "...What surprised me the most is that they found hardly any difference in the numbers for home and business users."

    Wow...you are one easy-t-please individual - would you also be surprised if you found out they are one and the same...?

    I wouldn't....and you wouldn't either if you were one of them.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by girlintraining ( 1395911 )

      Wow...you are one easy-t-please individual - would you also be surprised if you found out they are one and the same...?

      Well, that's rather prejudiced! Germans know how to separate home and work life, and as soon as I find one, I'll give you an example.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Draek ( 916851 )

        As soon as you find what? a german, a home, a work, or a life?

      • Well, that's rather prejudiced! Germans know how to separate home and work life, and as soon as I find one, I'll give you an example.

        Mods, that's not funny, that sarcastic. Germans are extremely protective - almost religious - about the separation of their work and private life. Overworking is even forbidden by law.

        But getting back to the topic, over here in Germany I have seen more businesses using OO.o than home users. My data pool not sufficiently large to be any indicative and some people still thank me for suggesting them to check the OO.o at home.

  • If you consider... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by brennanw ( 5761 ) on Wednesday February 03, 2010 @12:17AM (#31005570) Homepage Journal

    ... that StarOffice was a wildly popular office suite in Germany in the 90s (before Sun bought the code), I'm surprised the percentage isn't higher.

    • You can still buy WordPerfect, but that doesn't have a lot of bearing on today's usage.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Hurricane78 ( 562437 )

      That’s reeealy long ago. Also, most people do not know at all, that they are related.
      Plus, I find OpenOffice to be a badly-designed sluggishly slow and crappy Office suite. Different than MS Office, but not better or worse.

      The reason is, that they both are waaaayyy over their maximum lifespan. They should have had a complete rewrite about 5-10 years ago.
      Until that is going to happen, they will become more and more the upside-down pyramid of software design, that killed pre-NT Windows with ME.

      Or in sho

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by stirz ( 839003 )
      Well, I also considered that. But in my experience, StarOffice has never really moved away from its niche. It was heavily promoted by a large number of magazines and put on CDs in the pre-broadband area. During my time at a big German university, I met only one person using StarOffice... it was my girlfriend who switched after MS Word had fried her diploma thesis. Oddly enough, after being bought by sun, the number of OpenOffice-users among my co-students rose sharply. Most of these new users don't even kno

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jurily ( 900488 )

      I'm surprised the percentage isn't higher.

      Excel.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sqldr ( 838964 )

      I'm surprised it's not 3 months ago and lower. Nice round number there! Next week we'll have one saying "OpenOffice tops 22.135% in Germany". Couldn't they have done this when they hit 20?

      bah.

  • Forget openoffice (Score:3, Informative)

    by OzPeter ( 195038 ) on Wednesday February 03, 2010 @12:20AM (#31005600)
    I use neooffice on my mac!!!!!!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by A12m0v ( 1315511 )

      I use IBM Lotus Symphony on Mac, Linux/GNU and Windows; and I'm thankful for Sun and OpenOffice.org.

      Forgetting OO.o is unfair to all the effort put through by Sun and the community.

  • I have introduced a lot of people to OO.org (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MarkWatson ( 189759 ) on Wednesday February 03, 2010 @12:20AM (#31005606) Homepage

    I have used OO.org to write several books, and it is what I recommend to people.

    That said, I prefer Latex :-)

    • Re:I have introduced a lot of people to OO.org (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Maxo-Texas ( 864189 ) on Wednesday February 03, 2010 @12:44AM (#31005806)

      I maintain a 500 page RPG rules book with Ooo which has complex layout, cross referencing, tons of graphics (going to OOo shrank the size of the documents by 75% because of how I could treat the graphics).

      I went to OOo because 2007 would NOT print the 2003 version of the documents.

      The first document took me about 8 hours to convert.

      It finally dropped to about 2 hours to convert 100 pages.

      First thing was to set up default styles, ( finally had a template document which I just opened empty and pasted the content into).

      Then I would rip out all the sections and put them back in manually (it's mostly dual column but with occasional single column for headers and the conversion engine created sectioning which was way to complex).

      The toughest thing for me to solve each time was 1-3% of the graphics which were at the top right corner of the page. They would float incorrectly and randomly until I nailed them down.

      I can't see going back to Word now. Even at $10 for a legitimate corporate user, home copy.

  • What about everyone who installs msttcorefonts [sourceforge.net] for compatibility? Not to mention all the other random fonts [mondaybynoon.com] you have to accumulate to open documents?
    • My thoughts exactly. But considering that they must have a way to also distinguish Windows users with MS Office from Windows users without, it stands to reason that MS Office must install fonts that aren't normally present in a Windows installation, which is what you would presumably get with msttcorefonts. Surely somebody has read the article and can clear up all this conjecture and confusion? :P

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Japher ( 887294 )
      I don't speak or read German, so I'm relying on the Google translation and a little intuition here, so please bear with me.

      They mention testing for the Open Symbol font as the indicator for an OpenOffice install. Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't most Linux boxes come with Open Symbol installed? I know Debian does. How can they know that OpenOffice installed the font? I have a laptop on which I have never installed OpenOffice, but I do have XMing and it's font package. Guess what... my system has Open Sy

      • From the article:
        "Die Daten wurden durch den FlashCounter Statistik-Service bei mehr als einer Million deutschsprachiger Internetnutzer auf über 100.000 Webseiten ermittelt. "

        Roughly translates to "the data was collect via the FlashCounter statistics service from more than 1 million German speaking users on more than 100.00 websites."

    • Not anymore - the Freedom Fonts are good enough.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DrXym ( 126579 )
      It's not an issue if they're using the web browser's user agent and response of fonts to determine suite usage. It's very easy to weed out Linux users because it says they're Linux right there in the user agent string. The number of people anonymizing or pretending to be Windows for one reason or another is probably small enough to be covered by a reasonable margin of error.

  • Problem is (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Darkness404 ( 1287218 ) on Wednesday February 03, 2010 @12:29AM (#31005698)
    The problem I see with OOo is that it is marketed and used as "hey, there is a free (as in beer) MS Office clone!" rather than "Hey, this is better than MS Office" but the problem is the second statement isn't true. Firefox won out over IE not by "hey, we have a clone of IE" but by being -better- than IE.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by scdeimos ( 632778 )

      The problem I see with OOo is that it is marketed and used as "hey, there is a free (as in beer) MS Office clone!" rather than "Hey, this is better than MS Office" but the problem is the second statement isn't true.

      I'd say OOo is already better than MS Office because it doesn't have those annoyingly stupid ribbons. What a way to complicate usage - makes it difficult to find anything. (I have to use the MS version at work, unfortunately - damned SOE's.)

      If OOo *ever* gets ribbons I'll stomp on the feet of the developer who added them!

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Totenglocke ( 1291680 )
        All ribbons did was take the menus and turn them into tabs, then the items buried under the menus are now out in the open once you select the tab. Most normal people actually find the ribbon much easier to use because they (and I as well) never wasted the countless hours to memorize how many menus deep you had to go to find X rarely used feature. Now X rarely used feature is out in the open once you select the tab for what general thing you're trying to do - no more digging for it.

        • Re:Problem is (Score:5, Informative)

          by blind biker ( 1066130 ) on Wednesday February 03, 2010 @02:51AM (#31006626) Journal

          All ribbons did was take the menus and turn them into tabs, then the items buried under the menus are now out in the open once you select the tab.

          That's a notorious lie and people should really stop parroting it! No, a lot of commands are not now available, at least not through the ribbons. And worst is, you can't even add them to the ribbons, even if you know they exist (and they do, because you can find them when you try to add buttons to the button bar, which however the new Office discourages you from using).

          So please, just fucking stop repeating this mantra that you can access all the commands through the ribbon - any even slightly advanced user of Word or Excel knows that's bullshit on a popsicle stick.

          • Furthermore, the ribbon increased the number of clicks required to use some features, mainly because a different ribbon tab is automatically selected each time you click on the document.

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by ais523 ( 1172701 )
              This is my major problem with the Ribbon. Yes, after a while it makes things easier to find; my issue isn't with that. It's with the number of clicks it takes to do something. It used to be that all the commands you used frequently were in the toolbars (one click each); and everything was in the menus, in case you wanted to do something unusual (and maybe you had to hunt around for it a bit; that didn't happen that often, though). Now, there's only one way to find things: via the Ribbon. But you have to sel

        • I find no noticeable difference between menus and the ribbon as far as finding stuff. One still has to learn where the options are to find them fast. A better approach when you have gazillion options would be a quick text search of options where you can type in a small portion of a word(s). Mini-Google, if you will. If you cannot find your option, you can add your own synonym so that your word works the next time. Maybe common synonyms can be sent back to HQ where they are incorporated into the next version

          • Basically what you're asking about, is an office suite, driven by a command based interface (like Vim and Emacs), with a nice auto-complete.
            (Which by the way, I think is a nice way to cram all the tons of features in a simple interface).

            Notice that similar command-with-autocomplete exist elsewhere :
            - Firefox's awesome bar (who needs hierarchical bookmarks anymore ?)
            - The KDE4-reamped version of the good old "Alt-F2 - Run command" (now with awesome-bar like search feature, and icon previews)

            Even microsoft wi

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by jacquems ( 610184 )
          The ribbon is fine for average users; it has the tasks that average users need to do on an average day. However, the REALLY rare tasks are now so hidden that I had to enable the Developer tab to be able to do things like work with templates. As a professional user (I'm a technical writer. We mainly use Framemaker, but sometimes have to use Word for some documents), I find the ribbon horrible inconvenient.
      • I bitched about the ribbons and having everything moved around, but after getting used to it, I'd say that it's a better UI than the old office. I don't have to go digging through some sub-sub-menu to find what I want. Almost everything the average user will need is immediately available on the ribbon. I have some disagreements over which tab certain items are place on, but for the most part it's a fairly sane design.

        Compared to all of the other problems that Word (Or any other MS Office application.) ha

      • I'd say OOo is already better than MS Office because it doesn't have those annoyingly stupid ribbons.

        You (and power users with entrenched habits, in general) may hate Ribbon, but it wasn't just thrown in there to look how well it does. There were surveys and tests before it was accepted, and most casual users were found to do better with the Ribbon.

        After MSOffice 2007 was released, that test was essentially scaled out to the entire user base. And guess what the results are? A hint might be that in Office 2010, all applications that didn't have Ribbon yet (such as Outlook) are getting it...

        • You (and power users with entrenched habits, in general) may hate Ribbon, but it wasn't just thrown in there to look how well it does. There were surveys and tests before it was accepted, and most casual users were found to do better with the Ribbon.

          No, that's not what Microsoft designs for. They don't design for ease of use; their design goal is to design software in such a way that the users blame themselves for any problems instead of blaming Microsoft. The ribbons show so much information all with pretty icons that any user who cannot find things blames themselves for being stupid - that's Microsoft's intention. In contrast, put the same user on a Macintosh using non-Microsoft software, and suddenly the problems go away. And if there are problems,

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Ethanol-fueled ( 1125189 ) *

      The problem I see with OOo is that it is marketed and used as "hey, there is a free (as in beer) MS Office clone!" rather than "Hey, this is better than MS Office"

      It's not going to be "better" than MS Office as long as .doc remains the de facto format. There are headhunters who require .doc resumes, entire departments who use only .doc, and there are professors who require .doc assignment submissions.

      One infuriating "feature" of OOo is the inability to permanently disable that annoying auto-numbering a

    • Firefox won out over IE not by "hey, we have a clone of IE" but by being -better- than IE.

      It also helps that the government seems to be actively engaged in getting people to ditch IE. In other parts of the world, the uptake of Firefox has been slow at best and has stalled in some cases. Frowny face.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sznupi ( 719324 )

        Or the recommendations of government just reflect position on the issue of large enough portion of society (you know that govs are ultimatelly a reflection of society, right?).

        Alternative browsers (yes, not only FF; Opera is big for example here and there) gained large market share in Europe organically; some governments actively engaged in getting people to ditch IE only after there was considerable enough number of people for this idea to break through.

        • Or the recommendations of government just reflect position on the issue of large enough portion of society (you know that govs are ultimatelly a reflection of society, right?).

          Yeah, I just didn't know I had to state the obvious. None of that is at odds with the fact that government policies and announcements undoubtedly have helped adoption of alternative browsers in Germany. I would never say that this is a the most significant cause, but, like I said, it helps.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mlts ( 1038732 ) *

      I see this with both the GIMP and OOo. People market them as Photoshop or OOo clones. However, they are not. Marketing them as clones always puts them forever into catchup mode, trailing Microsoft or Adobe.

      I'm not a dedicated artist, so for what I do, the GIMP is an excellent tool. It does what I need it to, be it resizing pictures, changing formats, some basic touch-up work.

      OOo is similar. Base is an excellent utility for small database applications (I use it for names/character/places for my SF writi

      • But GIMP and OOo are not designed or intended to be "basic" tools. They both aim to be full-featured, professional-level applications, and it is natural to compare them to their most important competitors. (This does not mean they have to be clones, of course. GIMP has quite a different UI than Photoshop, even though it tries to have roughly the same functionality.)

    • Re:Problem is (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ratboy666 ( 104074 ) <<moc.liamtoh> <ta> <legiew_derf>> on Wednesday February 03, 2010 @01:22AM (#31006106) Journal

      But... openoffice.org is better than ms office. And, it's not an ms office clone.

      Right now, I am giving presentations with impress. Slides to the projector, and my presenter screen on the laptop has the slide, the next slide, presenters notes and a clock.

      openoffice.org actually runs on the platforms I use (Solaris and Linux).

      openoffice.org integrates with LaTex.

      openoffice.org offers PDF/A-1a export. openoffice.org font selection shows the font in the pulldown. (maybe recent MS stuff does these things too -- but MS needed to catch up).

      Since openoffice.org runs on Solaris and Linux, and MS Office doesn't, it's absolutely a no-brainer. openoffice.org is better.

      • I got my parents to switch to linux, and so they are now forced to use open-office (yes I know there are other alternatives).

        My mom can't assign the keyboard shortcuts as she wants them to be - no OO provides a long list of available shortcuts and you can only assign a command to those shortcuts. You want a different shortcut? You're just out of luck.

        Furthermore, the 64bit version of open office keeps crashing when pasting html from the internet. This bug is well known, but nobody has fixed it yet.

        F

        • Docx being the microsoft 'open source' format? I'd be surprised if word could render it correctly, given that the spec is several thousand pages of 'if the document is from word 5, and was written under a full moon, then rotate all the bullet points 90 degrees' style specifications.

          OpenOffice does the job perfectly well for the vast majority of word processing needs. If you want to use 'proper software' then TeX/LaTeX has been around for quite a while now, and is the tool for any serious document writing

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Yvanhoe ( 564877 )
        In fact, most people who says OpenOffice really lacks behind are those who want it to be compatible 100% with MS Office (but don't ask MS Office to be compatible with OO).

        My only criticism of a missing feature is the lack of a grammar tool for the French language in OO.
      • "Right now, I am giving presentations with impress. Slides to the projector, and my presenter screen on the laptop has the slide, the next slide, presenters notes and a clock." Powerpoint can do that (at least the Mac version) as long as you don't setup the projector as a mirror of your desktop.
    • The difference is that you have to pay more to have Microsoft office on your computer where Open office is free. Vs a kinda free IE and a free Firefox. Those are significant differences.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      Being "better" doesn't really matter in most cases.
      MSOffice itself was never better than wordperfect, it was just cheaper and better marketed and look what happened there. OO is already cheaper, but it isn't well marketed right now. Start pushing it heavily and businesses will switch if only to save money.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mvdwege ( 243851 )

      "Hey, [OOo] is better than MS Office" but the problem is [this] statement isn't true.

      In what way is it not better? Simply asserting that it isn't is not enough. How about some backup on that assertion?

      Personally, I think it is horrible, but MS Office is worse. At least OOWriter encourages formatting through styles a lot more, and handles complex formatting in longer documents better, to give just an example.

      Mart

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rhaban ( 987410 )

      OOo is better than MSO in some ways.

      I use both at work, and often I open .doc files in OO.o rather than MSO because MSO doesn't want to print images on the office printer (not a matter of settings or drivers - I tried everything).

      And OOo doesn't takes the entire system down with it when it crashes.

    • The second statement is true. MS Office is barely usable. If you need to write a document more sophisticated than a letter to mom, then forget about word. The spreadsheet is terrible and doesn't use styles, has terribly limiting charts, (though in truth spreadsheets are not meant for plotting). Have you ever tried printing graphs in excel on which you might have superimposed guiding lines or comments? Right. It does not look at all like what you drew in. Everything has changed position. OpenOffice i

  • All about the fonts, baby (Score:5, Funny)

    by damn_registrars ( 1103043 ) <damn.registrars@gmail.com> on Wednesday February 03, 2010 @12:33AM (#31005732) Homepage Journal
    That's right. As long as Microsoft controls Zapf Wingdings, OpenOffice will never take off.

  • ... Just wait until the David Hasselhoff special edition is released.

  • Information leakage (Score:3, Informative)

    by Arancaytar ( 966377 ) <arancaytar.ilyaran@gmail.com> on Wednesday February 03, 2010 @12:42AM (#31005796) Homepage

    they look for the availability of characteristic fonts being shipped with the various suites.

    I love that my web browser can broadcast which office suite I am using.

    • Actually, it's Java and Flash, not your browser per se, but yeah it's a bit disturbing.

    • I love that my web browser can broadcast which office suite I am using.

      In other news, researchers did a study of condom brands preferred by Internet users via browser tracking... ~

  • Getting through the university barrier in the US (Score:3, Informative)

    by hedgemage ( 934558 ) on Wednesday February 03, 2010 @12:53AM (#31005892)
    I was perfectly happy using OpenOffice for all my home needs, but then when I started up a master's program, I could digitally submit assignments (depending on the prof) for most of my courses. The only problem was that even though I would save things in OpenOffice so that they would be readable on MS products, not a single one of my professors could get them to open, and weren't really interested in going through any additional steps aside from double-clicking to open them up. So, because I needed to submit deliverables in a format that they could read, I was forced to purchase MS Office. Ribbons bleh.

    • Re:Getting through the university barrier in the U (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Totenglocke ( 1291680 ) on Wednesday February 03, 2010 @01:00AM (#31005932)
      If they couldn't open your documents then either one of you were screwing things up - perhaps they only had Office 2003 and you were saving as .docx? I've sent files back and forth between MS Office and Open Office with no problems plenty of times.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by plague911 ( 1292006 )
        Open office and Microsoft office have significant formatting differences. Ive had 0 success loading saving a file in OO and having it look the same in Microsoft office. Additionally ive tried several builds of OO and I have again had significant problems with saving in OO and having it open the same the next day in OO...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mcrbids ( 148650 )

          Interesting - you didn't submit the document back to OOo did you? Because if you did, that might actually be useful!

          In my experience, I've been using OOo for years. It's damned nice software, and works well for me on Windows, Mac, and Linux with minimal issues. It's true, documents saved in either MSWord or OOo will look a little different in the other. Fonts will be different, spacing a little different, etc.

          But I've successfully edited/saved documents back and forth with a Word user, highlighting text, bu

          • I think i should clarify. The document(s) opened however the formatting would be different. Particularly for the images I saved in it. Secondly I had looked it up and there were others who had already complained about the issue and had no luck. It was not worth it to me to add to their list.

    • Re:Getting through the university barrier in the U (Score:5, Informative)

      by iammani ( 1392285 ) on Wednesday February 03, 2010 @01:04AM (#31005978)
      Why not submit them as PDFs? They can open it in any platform and it will appear as I intended. Besides it would make you look cool.

      Its working fine for me at my university.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        simple. word counts.
        universities often require writing intensive courses to have x amount of word written a semester. professor will often dock major points (being 100 words under for 15 hundred word document can fail you) if they can't just see how many words are in a paper at a glance.

        that and he plagarism checker databases like turnitin lack the ability to parse anything but word files. hence you see why many universities just tell students to shut up and buy MS office.

        (I personally think its stupid an

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sznupi ( 719324 )

          Well, that certainly wouldn't fly in Germany, with their compound nouns. For example (yes, extreme one ;) )

          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinderkennzeichnungs-_und_Rindfleischetikettierungsuberwachungsaufgabenubertragungsgesetz [wikipedia.org]

          BTW, do those word-counting universities have a stated goal of "simplifying" the language? Are they the same bitching about poor literacy of students?

          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            by Ethanol-fueled ( 1125189 ) *

            BTW, do those word-counting universities have a stated goal of "simplifying" the language? Are they the same bitching about poor literacy of students?

            In the American university setting they're about bloating, not simplifying. They wouldn't use word count as a metric if they cared about the clarity and substance of what was written.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by sznupi ( 719324 )

              Yes, though to me the aspect of it that promotes long, monotonous forms which could be gotten rid of with one or few precise, but uncommon words or constructs can be adequatly descibed as oversimplication. Of the clarity-harming kind, too; for lack of better words to descrive it ;p (luckily I have a good excuse, not being a native EN speaker)

        • Re:Getting through the university barrier in the U (Score:5, Informative)

          by esmrg ( 869061 ) on Wednesday February 03, 2010 @02:30AM (#31006514)

          plagarism checker databases like turnitin lack the ability to parse anything but word files

          I didn't believe this statement so I looked it up.
          According to their student guide at http://www.turnitin.com/resources/documentation/turnitin/training/en_us/qs_student_en_us.pdf [turnitin.com]

          At the top of page 2:
          " We accept submissions in these formats: MS Word, WordPerfect, RTF, PDF, PostScript, HTML, and plain text (.txt)"

          So while I think plagiarism checkers are kind of a waste of resources, your statement is still false.

        • hence you see why many universities just tell students to shut up and buy MS office.

          From what I've seen, most unis that standardize on MSOffice also have MSDNAA [microsoft.com] subscriptions, so you can get a copy for free as a student (and you actually get to keep the license even after you graduate).

          And for developer tools, there's DreamSpark [dreamspark.com].

    • I managed to complete a post-graduate course using Open Office. Assignments were given as Word documents, and needed to be submitted as the same. I always saved in Word 2000 format and my professors never had a problem. If Word was offered at the same price as OO, I would buy Word. I've only used OO because I'm too cheap and don't using office apps enough at home to justify the price. I wish OO were better than MS Office, but it's far behind. When ever I try to format text Writer never does what I wan

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by chthon ( 580889 )

        I just find the way OO.o Writer and Draw work much better than the combo Word + Visio. I liked the old Visio, before MS took it over. I think that Draw works much the same way. The only thing that is missing is a way to export OO.o documents with embedded drawings to a Word document. In that case the drawings themselves are missing (the frames are there though).

    • That is a school (and prof) in need of a clue. No one should submit finished documents in an editable format. Formatting problems, accidental changes, intentional changes - this is just asking for trouble. If the school's anti-plagiarism software can't deal with PDFs, it is bad software and ought to be replaced.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rdnetto ( 955205 )

      You didn't consider a PDF? Seems like the standard way to go, if .doc wasn't working...

    • I've never had a document saved in OpenOffice fail to open in normal Office, though I admit I haven't tried it very many times. Formatting can be different, yes, but it still opens. You better be careful to change that Office 2007 to save as .doc instead of .docx by default or your professors won't be able to open them unless they're using Office 2007 as well. Oh and by the way if they're using Office 2007 you could have just stuck to OpenOffice with .odt files since Office 2007 now supports them.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by stirz ( 839003 )
      Interesting. Why should a student deliver a file in some MS Office-format? Our students have to deliver their diploma thesis on a disk/cd together with a printed version. This is because the faculty employs some software solution to track down plagiarism. But nobody is told to give us DOC-files, as PDF (or even plain text) is absolutely sufficient. I could not figure out a single reason why one should want to have a DOC-file apart from the desire to copy/paste usable paragraphs!

  • Open Office getting worse? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Wednesday February 03, 2010 @01:55AM (#31006306) Homepage

    Open Office may have peaked in quality. Open Office Draw 3.1 crashes for me about twice an hour, while older versions never did. Draw also has some weird intermittent bug in selection, were suddenly everything goes grey for a few seconds. The last 2.x versions were solid.

    I'm always amused that the crash reporter program wants the user to type in which OpenOffice program they were using. The crash reporter ought to know that.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by je ne sais quoi ( 987177 )
      That's strange, my experience has been the opposite, but I don't use draw. I dominantly use calc and I think the 3.x versions are much more usable. A lot of that has to do with the fact that charts are now anti-aliased and you don't cringe after making one any more. The charting ability in general has been the one area of weakness for me as to why I needed Excel. With the 3.x versions, that reason is pretty much gone because they're much easier now and the axis labels and scales don't freak out as often

  • My Anecdotals (Score:2, Informative)

    by BlindBear ( 894763 )
    FWIW, my anecdotal, non-flaming stats on my OOo experiences of myself,my three adult kids and two grandmothers converted from Windzzz/M$office to OOo over the last few years... Six happy users of OOo ... Five happy Linux users (one kid just won't let go)... Eleven missing licences at Redmond!... Priceless!... I can hear the chairs crashing now. All of us only do the odd letter and I run a spaghetti spreadsheet to track some finances.I figure we have collectively saved somewhere between A$2000-A$4000 over th

  • At least not in all cases.
    I have a family member (not a computer guru but someone with a fair bit of computer knowledge) who tried OpenOffice and found that it was unusable due to documented being formatted differently in OO.o writer and in Word (and formatted differently in ways that matter). Said family member ended up buying Office 2007 in order to get documents that looked the same as they did on the other machines.

  • Well, we could always use the data gathered by the Windows Update Tool and get real and precise data of installed packages...

  • Microsoft proprietary formats are the problem.
    Everyone actually is used to .DOC, .XLS and such.
    Many government/agencies/business only accept submissions in "Word" format. Until we "fix this issue" in the whole world, no way OO can take over M$ Office.
    That's sad, you know.

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