All Things Microsoft > Microsoft as a Company

Word - we dropped the ball

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_ZeroBeta:

--- Quote from: reactosguy ---I hope Microsoft delays the fix... so far, Word is BS, and even the Ribbon is a large, distracting strip of tabs. It's nothing but eye candy designed to appeal to the clueless.
--- End quote ---
I must admit this: I managed to get hold of a genuine copy for about £35, bought only because uninstalling the trial version would have voided my netbook's warranty. This is the very reason I find Word 2007 to be a pain to use, since the ribbon gets in the way more than providing any useful functions or shortcuts. Sure, it looks rather nice and draws in the inexperienced bozo, but that's hardly a compliment. In light of this news, I can see many businesses who rely on MSOffice rushing to buy more licenses before the deadline looms over them. Switching to OpenOffice would likely cost them a lot in man-hours and training costs - not that they likely can't already afford it.

Calum:

--- Quote ---Wtf it's normally only about 200MB, if not less. The *NIX version always seems to be larger than the Windows version.
--- End quote ---
could be static compiling to blame, is my guess. I could be wrong though.

So, here are the two updates i found about this on El Reg, the second one describes the other shoe falling, quite anticlimactically actually, i think.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/22/microsoft_loses_word_patent_appeal/
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2009/12/23/word_xml_patch_oems/

There are still a lot of questions to be answered about how MS plans to handle this though and what it means in real terms.

Aloone_Jonez:
The real problem with switching is more about VBA script and format compatibility issues.

OpenOffice is very similar to MS Office 2003 interface-wise, in fact it's often criticised for trying to emulate MS Office too well.

How does MS Office 2007 compare speed wise with other versions?

I've always found OpenOffice.org to be slower, even with the pre-loader but I haven't used any MS Office after 2003.

Office suites have been over featured for years. MS Office 97 is still fine for most purposes, I was using it up until 2008 at work. OpenOffice 2.4.3 is good and 1.1.5 is too - I'd recommend an old OOo version over AbiWord and Gnumeric any day, for old hardware.

Refalm:

--- Quote from: Aloone_Jonez on 29 December 2009, 19:09 ---The real problem with switching is more about VBA script and format compatibility issues.

--- End quote ---
Go-OO (a number of 3rd party patches to OpenOffice.org) is supposed to fix that:
http://go-oo.org/discover/#vba-support

reactosguy:

--- Quote from: Refalm on 29 December 2009, 23:57 ---Go-OO (a number of 3rd party patches to OpenOffice.org) is supposed to fix that:
http://go-oo.org/discover/#vba-support

--- End quote ---

Didn't I tell you about that on MicrosoftSucks.org?

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