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Open Office
It’s not often that I think good thoughts about Microsoft, but today’s experience with OpenOffice is making me think that perhaps Mr Gates and his pals have actually got it right. Let me explain…
I’m thinking of changing my ageing laptop for a nice, shiny new iMac - I’ve wanted to have one for a while now, ever since I borrowed a friend’s MacBook, and I’ve been saving up (and waiting for Leopard). Most of my laptop apps are Microsoft and, being Windows-based, won’t work on the iMac. So, rather than shell out hundreds of pounds to buy all the Mac versions, I thought I’d experiment with open source software.
I’ve been using Firefox for quite a while as my browser, and I wish I’d started using it earlier. It’s great. I’ve also just started using Thunderbird to deal with the email; also good. Coupled with my Palm Desktop software, for task and calendar functions, that gets rid of Outlook.
So, I’m looking for an office system, but which doesn’t have to have any sort of contact management, calendar, etc. OpenOffice seemed like the perfect candidate. Went to the site, downloaded it, installed it. Nice and easy; so far, so good.
Started to use it; it apparently opens Microsoft file formats - that’s good, don’t need to recreate all my documents - and also saves them - even better, don’t have to worry about swapping files between home and work. All looking good.
First file I needed to open was a simple spreadsheet, created in Excel, which I use to keep track of my personal budget. Opened it fine, saved it fine, kept it firmly in Excel format. Lovely. Looking good, still.
Next file was a one page letter, created in Word. Again opened, saved, kept the format. Job done! This is going to be easy.
But that was yesterday. Today is a different story. Today I needed to open and alter some files created at work. The first was an Excel file. This particular file keeps track of product sales on a month-by-month basis, with graphs for each product as well as data. There are 13 pages in the spreadsheet, each page has 28 products on it - so 28 graphs and data per page. This file - which opens in about 20 seconds normally - took 20 minutes to open. 20 MINUTES!!!
I could get it to open quicker, if (after it finally opened) I then saved it as an OpenOffice format file. Opening then took about 20 seconds. But I can’t have it in that format, because we use Excel at work and it’s a work file. So, OK, I do what I need to do and re-save it back into Excel format; then it opens it more quickly - but without any of the graphs. I’ve looked at the settings and I can’t find anything that tells it to do that.
So I gave up on that one. The work I had managed to do had indicated that the data I was using was possibly not correct, so I needed to check its source. That source is an Access database. Again, I thought that’s OK, the Base program will deal with that.
Well, sort of. I had to first convert it to an OpenOffice format, but at least it did it quickly. Now, in Access what I needed to do would have gone like this:
Open the correct table
Apply a filter to narrow down dates and product codes
Export the data to Excel
Use Excel to determine sub-totals and totals, to check against doubtful data
With OpenOffice, I could open the correct table, but couldn’t find a filter function. Help says I need to create a query. OK, create a query and run it. Does odd things with some of the data, adds a column that I don’t need and don’t know where it came from. But it gives me the important stuff; so let’s export it to Calc to get the totals. But you can’t - I couldn’t find an export function anywhere and that’s where I gave up.
I wanted OpenOffice to be good enough that I could dump my reliance on Microsoft. I wanted to be able to continue my great open source experiment, knowing that I could still work with all my existing files without too much hassle. I needed it to be good enough to at least be able to do what I can already do. But it’s not and I’m so disappointed. I’m going to persevere for a little while longer, but anymore days like today and it’s bye-bye OpenOffice.
I hope that the problems I’ve encountered are just because I’ve done something wrong, not looked in the right place, whatever. I know that there are loads of people out there who use OpenOffice - perhaps you could give me some pointers.
Or perhaps OpenOffice isn’t the one to have - is there another open source office suite out there that will also work on Windows and Mac, and do everything that Microsoft Office can do? Let me know and save me from pulling the rest of my hair out.
Comments
5 Responses to “Open Office”
I think you know what to do....
Wolfs Stuff
Wolfs Helpers
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You might want to take a look at http://documentation.openoffice.org/ or ask on users.openoffice.org
There are problems with the M$ formats due to the fact that their files are not open standards.
I did come across a quote some years ago where M$ had said that they would NOT port M$ Access to the Mac since it wasn’t good enough for the Mac platform, and that there were better alternatives out there such as Filemaker Pro.
The OpenOffice.org compatibility works with M$ office works well for simple documents, however more complex documents, such as those that grab data from M$ Access databases don’t work.
Some of the problems you mention require to think differently to solve the problem.
You might want to take a look into CrossOver for the Mac to get M$ office running.
Nah. Bill and his pals don’t have it right.
What Shaun McDonald said about closed file formats is really the problem. Basically, MS hasn’t told anyone how their office file-system works, so the clever guys at Sun and OpenOffice had to reverse engineer it so that OpenOffice could open read and write the files.
Because they’ve done some guess-work, it doesn’t always work properly. This isn’t OpenOffice’s fault. It’s more to do with Microsoft being all cagey about how their files work.
OpenOffice is quite capable of doing just about everything MS Office can, as long as you start from scratch in OpenOffice’s native file format, or are willing to spend the time to fix up the things that converting the MS Office file breaks.
Of course, that’s a royal pain in the butt, especially if you have many complex documents you need in MS formats. And so, Microsoft maintains its stranglehold on the market.
As an aside, in my opinion, Excel does a better job than Calc with graphs. To draw graphs in Calc all of the data fields need to be in adjacent columns — with Excel you can take data from anywhere in the spreadsheet. The data columns don’t need to be next to each other.
This is why your graphs all borked out. It’s easy enough to work around when you are creating the graph, but a pain to fix if you’ve imported something from Excel.
The problems I’ve had with OpenOffice won’t be an issue for my personal use, so I can see me staying with it - especially once I move over to the iMac. I had hoped, though, that we could move over to it at work as well, and the problems I’ve encountered in the last couple of days probably mean that we won’t be able to.
From what you’ve said about MS file formats, I imagine that the situation won’t get better anytime soon which is a shame. I don’t think MS Office is necessarily worth the huge amount of money they want for it, but as you say they lock you in.
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