Is MS Office Really More Capable than OpenOffice/LibreOffice?

InvisibleJim

InvisibleJim

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Lots of news about MS Office today. I was struck by a post in one of the other threads along the lines that Libre Office wasn't enterprise ready as it was less powerful than MS Office.

I'm interested in whether anyone has had any concrete examples (as opposed to perceptions) of things that MS Office can do that aren't possible in OpenOffice/Libre Office or where one works better than the other.

What sort of experiences have you had of MS Office verses Open Office/Libre Office?
 
Frankly there isn't any other Office type program that can hold a patch to MS Office (that I know of at least). I'm in the midst of a big organisation-wide template project involving VBA scripts and ribbon customisations. Just Word in itself is an immensely powerful suite when you get onto the development side of it.
 
Enterprise services, which include custom built/configured software used in companies can not work with Open Office. I've tested it a few times and it's a no go zone. These dev houses rather stick to the devil they know and expand their offerings to suit.

Also, I have a personal peeve with Open/Libre office. It sucks. It's slow and non responsive, especially on older hardware. Whereas MS Office comes in 32 + 64 bit versions so you can have a great performance boost whilst using it as well.
 
Thanks Cerebus.

That sounds like a pretty advanced example. Obviously the FOSS suites don't support VBA but they do have scripting in there own version of basic, javascript and Python as well as an extension/plugin system. Plus the actual source code is available so that could be modified by suitably skilled developers

Given an equivilent level of expertise in the relevent technologies, would your task be impossible in OpenOffice, harder or doable with simlar effort do you think?
 
teraside said:
Enterprise services, which include custom built/configured software used in companies can not work with Open Office. I've tested it a few times and it's a no go zone. These dev houses rather stick to the devil they know and expand their offerings to suit.

Also, I have a personal peeve with Open/Libre office. It sucks. It's slow and non responsive, especially on older hardware. Whereas MS Office comes in 32 + 64 bit versions so you can have a great performance boost whilst using it as well.
Click to expand...


One of the reasons that we are quite tied to MS Office at my work is that our ERP system has certain funtionality that is only designed to work with directly with the MS software. That is more a function of design choices made by the ERP software than a shortcoming of the FOSS software.

I also have experienced some areas where the OOO is slow on performance but I don't feel as strongly about it as you do. My wife agrees with your sentiment though (which is why we now have MS Office at home.)

Thanks for your comment
 
InvisibleJim said:
Thanks Cerebus.

That sounds like a pretty advanced example. Obviously the FOSS suites don't support VBA but they do have scripting in there own version of basic, javascript and Python as well as an extension/plugin system. Plus the actual source code is available so that could be modified by suitably skilled developers

Given an equivilent level of expertise in the relevent technologies, would your task be impossible in OpenOffice, harder or doable with simlar effort do you think?
Click to expand...

When it comes to open source... the number of times i've heard people say "It's open source so you can change it" really grates my apple.

Is it possible? Yes. Is it worth trying to become an OpenOffice specialist, learning the complete ins and outs of
A) The programming language and development tools used to build it...
B) The architecture of the software, and what the hell the developers (the many many developers over the years) were thinking when they implemented feature X

Not to mention:
1. how do you deploy your patch / update?
2. Where will it be accepted?
3. Do you need to redeploy for your client's machines.
4. What happens if they don't want to install your version?
5. How kindly will they take to a new user interface?
6. How do you merge changes from other users - or what if you want to take it into a different direction from the core development team?

There is just so much wrong with the concept, other than branching to create a new project (like OpenOffice / LibreOffice).

OpenOffice / LibreOffice is great for simple stuff, but in my opinion it comes a distant distant second behind MS Office in terms of design, user friendliness and functionality.
 
shogun said:
When it comes to open source... the number of times i've heard people say "It's open source so you can change it" really grates my apple.

Is it possible? Yes. Is it worth trying to become an OpenOffice specialist, learning the complete ins and outs of
A) The programming language and development tools used to build it...
B) The architecture of the software, and what the hell the developers (the many many developers over the years) were thinking when they implemented feature X

Not to mention:
1. how do you deploy your patch / update?
2. Where will it be accepted?
3. Do you need to redeploy for your client's machines.
4. What happens if they don't want to install your version?
5. How kindly will they take to a new user interface?
6. How do you merge changes from other users - or what if you want to take it into a different direction from the core development team?

There is just so much wrong with the concept, other than branching to create a new project (like OpenOffice / LibreOffice).

OpenOffice / LibreOffice is great for simple stuff, but in my opinion it comes a distant distant second behind MS Office in terms of design, user friendliness and functionality.
Click to expand...

That's exactly why they offer scripting.

Unfortunately MS is the standard, and Openoffice isn't always compatible.
 
Apologies for grating your apple Shogun. Open source gives you the right to modify the code but of course that doesn't mean you necessarily should or could. I think the free as in free speech aspect of open source is important though.

Setting aside my source code comment for the time being, both MS and the FOSS software have mechanisms for plugins, add ons, extensions and other means of customisation. The VBA Features of MS are probably more feature rich but by the same token, javascript and python scripting are quite powerful capabilities.

I agree that OpenOffice / LibreOffice are great for simple stuff and that is kind of where my initial question is coming from. I don't think there's that much that MS can do that is impossible in OO or Libre Office and I'm curious about where people have actually hit snags. I hadn't initially considered a developer's point of view before Cerebus' reply (I was more thinking operational/end user) so thankyou for your response.
 
alf101 said:
I haven't seen any ads for Libre Office training before.

Haven't heard of anyone using it.
Click to expand...

I have seen ads for Open Office training but I can't remember if it was SA or international. Parts of the French government were publicised as adopting Kubuntu and open office a couple of years back but I've never seen any info on how that worked out for them. Libre Office being a pretty recent fork I'm not sure how big a following it has garnered (but replaced OO in a lot of linux distros as I'm sure you're aware.) I suspect that Oracle donated OpenOffice to the Apache Foundation mainly to pi$$ in the Libre Office Dev team's riccicles.
 
ave said:
That's exactly why they offer scripting.

Unfortunately MS is the standard, and Openoffice isn't always compatible.
Click to expand...

I think compatibility is a bigger stumbling block to wider OpenOffice/Libre Office adoption than functionality. They are "compatible" rather than Compatible with MS.
 
InvisibleJim said:
I have seen ads for Open Office training but I can't remember if it was SA or international. Parts of the French government were publicised as adopting Kubuntu and open office a couple of years back but I've never seen any info on how that worked out for them. Libre Office being a pretty recent fork I'm not sure how big a following it has garnered (but replaced OO in a lot of linux distros as I'm sure you're aware.)
Click to expand...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_adopters
France's national police force, the National Gendarmerie started moving their 90,000 desktops from Windows XP to Ubuntu in 2007 over concerns about the additional training costs of moving to Windows Vista, and following the success of OpenOffice.org roll-outs. The migration should be completed by 2015. The force has saved about €50 million on software licensing between 2004 and 2008.
Click to expand...
 
As an editor working online for overseas publications, I find that my clients insist on MS Office because of its superior capabilities with vital features like Track Changes, reviewing and commenting, text merging etc. Unless OpenOffice has improved since the last time I tried it, unfortunately it cannot hold a candle to MS Office in these features. We are also forced into using MS Office by the corporate world, which has adopted it as the gold standard, and there is not yet full compatibility between this and the open-source suites for those of us who have to share documents.
 
InvisibleJim said:
Thanks Cerebus.

That sounds like a pretty advanced example. Obviously the FOSS suites don't support VBA but they do have scripting in there own version of basic, javascript and Python as well as an extension/plugin system. Plus the actual source code is available so that could be modified by suitably skilled developers

Given an equivilent level of expertise in the relevent technologies, would your task be impossible in OpenOffice, harder or doable with simlar effort do you think?
Click to expand...

You can certainly go into the scripting side of OpenOffice, but my impression is that you'll be creating new functionality where it doesn't exist, rather than working within a robust toolset that is already integrated. And that in turn means the level of support you'll find online when you want to do something unfamiliar is going to be much greater. All of the scripts I ended up using were adapted from online resources for instance; and the XML tools I used for the ribbon were straightforward and well documented by Microsoft. So the overhead is going to be much higher to achieve the same end.

It also depends greatly on the end users of the documentation, and their level of personal expertise. If you're dealing with tech-averse academic types as I do, or HR admin staff, you'll encounter a lot of kickback if you try to implement something that forces them to acquire some new expertise just to do something that you think is a cool idea.
 
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cerebus said:
Y

It also depends greatly on the end users of the documentation, and their level of personal expertise. If you're dealing with tech-averse academic types as I do, or HR admin staff, you'll encounter a lot of kickback if you try to implement something that forces them to acquire some new expertise just to do something that you think is a cool idea.
Click to expand...

I deployed a limited number of OpenOffice installations a few years ago when I inherited a situation where we were short on MS licenses and there was resistance from certain users ref the OpenOffice. This was mostly from middle managers who just didn't like being given something free instead of MS. They mainly complained about the functionality but when I offered to help with the problems, they tended to clam up. My user base mainly doesn't do very advanced things with Office. Interestingly, the less computer literate individuals who were given OpenOffice mostly pretty much got on with it with very little issues.

One of the more advanced things that we do a lot of is pull data from SQL Server into Excel reports and MS does seem to do this better than the open source offerings
 
Terencek said:
As an editor working online for overseas publications, I find that my clients insist on MS Office because of its superior capabilities with vital features like Track Changes, reviewing and commenting, text merging etc. Unless OpenOffice has improved since the last time I tried it, unfortunately it cannot hold a candle to MS Office in these features. We are also forced into using MS Office by the corporate world, which has adopted it as the gold standard, and there is not yet full compatibility between this and the open-source suites for those of us who have to share documents.
Click to expand...

I'll have to look at a recent version to see if they have the track changes etc. That would clearly be an important feature to a lot of users in business. Again the degree of compatibility with the de facto standard rears its head.
 
I've remembered something that I've used Open Office for that I don't think you can do in Office - Open a pdf document for editing. There is a Sun pdf import plugin that imports a pdf as an Open Office Draw Document. It's only really useful for small changes (unless you have a lot of time on your hands) but this is mainly because of the way information is stored in pdf format. It has helped out a couple of my users with leagacy documents that they only had in pdf though.
 
Office 2013 also allows it now, IINM it wasn't until they opened the PDF spec that either apps could do it without paying royalties to Adobe.
 
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