Miscellaneous > Applications

Why MS Office still rules over OpenOffice.org

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Refalm:
I've installed OpenOffice.org on many PC's. They all say the same: "It kicks ass, except for the spell checker. You can't quickly switch from one language to another like MS Office can."

That's it. If they'd (OpenOffice.org) implemented that, then more people would use it over MS Office.

slave:
Maybe, but what's keeping back adoption in the US, where most people only write in English?

anphanax:
There's a MUCH greater obstacle for me, and it's called compatibility    

The school I go to uses Office 2003. I've tried opening documents in OpenOffice.Org from newer office products and i've had problems. It ignores my powerpoint color schemes, objects in my presentation seem to have shifted positions, the object precedence\order has been changed for some reason, the margins can be screwy, and spacing is different. With OpenOffice.Org, a double-spaced paper in the same font requires more text to fill a page by default (one of those "WTF" things). People just want stuff to work. I would save in the OpenOffice format, but I can't read those files virtually anywhere else. I would save in the HTML format too, except it doesn't support Autoshapes and some other stuff that's useful in non-formal papers.

I've even heard people bring OpenOffice.Org up at school, but they still wont use it. Office suites are one of those things where ease of usage, the used-to-ness factor and productivity (other two factors weigh in here) defeat openness. As for security, the general public hasn't really found any reason to worry with Office (haven't heard a single thing about Macro viruses lately).

OpenOffice.Org is dissapointing to me, but part of that is probably based off it's relationship with Sun Microsystems. (That's not an attack at the people who work there, but MadHatter and Java haven't inspired me to use or adopt them at my workstation)

[ November 19, 2003: Message edited by: anphanax ]

suselinux:
MS just released there XML schemas so 2003 won't be a compatability problem for long.

Refalm:
Yes, but it's Microsoft XML. I heard that it is very different from W3C XML, so it's kinda incompatible with the rest of the world.

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