Re: Openoffice disadvantages?


Batman wrote:
I was wondering: Are many people switching to Openoffice? At first glance it seems good but it sure would be good to hear from people regarding its deficiencies compared to Bean and MS Word. That would help beginning users like myself choose wisely before investing mammoth amounts of time in the wrong processor. I never print but I realize that is not common for most people. I'm looking for something whereby I can control text size easily and has lots of keyboard shortcuts like Word has. And especially, interfaces with the outside world well, both in Mac word processors and the PC world, which I suppose is dominated by Microsoft Word, WordPad and Notepad included in Windows 2000/XP/Vista.

Well... First, - Bean is a good and fast little program, but it also is all too small for complex writing and editing. Alone the fonts handling is a mess. No built-in fonts menu/fonts list, but only the ability to use the built-in FontBook list in the OS X systems. Changing styles and rulers are something 'out in the wilderness' - i.e. non existing. The best with Bean is that is is screamingly fast and fully supports ODF format.

When it comes to OpenOffice. - I've been using it from time to time since the ver. 1.1 along with X11, and since the very first developer version of the native oS X 3.0 just more and more. and now with the final release of the ver. 3.0.0 I've only been using that program for nearly any kind of writing.

OOo 3.0 is so fast and reliable that it very well can replace MSOffice 2004/2008. I have the MsO2008 too, but since OOo 3.0.0rc3 I've only used Word ONE time! - and that on both my main machines - a MacPro with the Intel ver. 3.0.0 and on a MDD with the 3.0.0rc4PPC.

Editing and managing text, fonts, sizes and colors are just as easy as in Word 2004/2008. Hotkeys are for nearly any action, but not all. here it could be better.

Drag&drop editing inside same doc also could be somewhat easier. - You have to ensure yourself that spaces are correctly where a dropped text is inserted. sometimes it misses a space before the insertion, sometimes not.

Fonts handling is quite a lot better than in MSO. Fx. you can use sizes made in half points - fx. instead of 12p, you can set it to 12,5p.

There was a problem in the rc2 and rc3/Intel versions, where line apcaing was larger than the original. I.e. if the original document has a line height of 15p (fx. Appleworks standard setting), an inserted text part would give a line height of 17,5p, and instead of the original font size of fx. 12p, the inserted text would be 13,5p. It seems as if fonts are sized like the Windows handling, where fx. arial 12p on a Mac is the same as 11p in windows or said visa-versa - if you copy text from a virtual run Windows with a font size of 11p, this text inserted into a Mac document will be 12p. This problem was fixed with the 3.0.0rc4 release and also isn't present in the final releases I've tried.

OOo 3.0 has two irritating problems. The small 'boxes' in the buttom border are static and not dynamic. this means that these small boxes don't get smaller or 'compressed' on the line, if / when you resize the window. and if you resize to just fit A4 in width, the box with teh zoomfactor is gone. The other problem is that just opening a new document always open this in screen-centered mode and with the application background of size of 2 A4 docs if zoomfactor is set to 100%. so that means that there is no 'Remember windows position' feature.

Formatting. Well... when using OOo on both Macs and Windows based computers, there are no problems with a document opened on one or the other platform. Also opening Mac-made .odt docs in Staroffice on windows is just as the original or visa-versa - opening starOffice .odt documents in Openoffice on a Mac is perfect.

Opening .rtf files from MSWord 97/2000 can give some formatting problems like loosing italics and bolds, and if a doc is written with more fonts, font substitution must be enabled on the Mac side, if a doc comes from a win based machine or visa-versa

Open/Save & export/Import. Until now I haven't found any problems in saving and/or exporting to/from any of the available formats in OOo 3.0 - neither to or from a windows version of MSWord, staroffice or OpenOffice. The only smaller thing here is that Openoffice has chosen to use the 'export' feature for saving into PDF and not a direct 'save as' function.

The other day, our national TV made a test on how easy and cheap one could buy or get free software for their computers. They chose three test persons - all dedicated MSOffice users and replaced their original computers with models set up only with Openoffice. All three of them said afterwards that the use of Openoffice was quite similar to MsOffice, and all of them said that it was easier to get used to OpenOffice. - they found it more logically built than MSoffice. Also they sadi that they probably wouldn't upgrade their existing MsOffice package, but instead switch to only use the Openoffice instead. They also found that patching and updating was far much easier than with the MSO...

After this 'test' the TV host had the Danish Microsoft CEO in a crossfire. - He was simply angry. - he tried to tear down both the package and the developers behind, claiming that M$ spent more than 20 billion [$20.000.000.000!!!] dollars a year on developing '...the world's best program package for *any* platform'... - a lie so thick and obvious that you can carve it with a timberman's axe! - His opponent in the crossfire, the leader of the Danish Openoffice group simply shook his head saying nothing....

A fact is that more and more Danish local county administrations are switching to only use the OpenOffice package. The same also now in other European countries like Norway, Sweden, Finland, Germany, France etc.etc..

So I think that you should give it a try for yourself, though there of course will be a learning period. But if you already know the MSOffice the switching and learning curve won't be too steep. Most of the shortcuts are the same as in MsO.

cheers, Erik Richard

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Erik Richard Sørensen, Member of ADC, <mac-manNOSP@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
NisusWriter - The Future In Multilingual Text Processing - www.nisus.com
OpenOffice.org - The Modern Productivity Solution - www.openoffice.org
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