Is MS Office Really More Capable than OpenOffice/LibreOffice?

[InvisibleJim]

Why open office refuses to follow the advice of several international standards setting bodies is baffling.

I think someone once said "The nice thing about standards is there are so many to choose from."

It sounds like this may be a case in point. They've implemented some sort of standard for the SA locale but it is at odds with the standards you need to use and you can't change it.

 

[DrJohnZoidberg]

LibreOffice is okay for most simple tasks, but Excel just feels cleaner and has excellent pivot table support.

Recently moved my office machine to Ubuntu (going to give it a bash again), one of the first things I did:

 

[InvisibleJim]

I used it pretty extensively recently for my project; and the things we implemented will become organisation-wide standards. Again we're talking about how capable one suite is over another. The other side of Word that I came to appreciate is the deep level of XML integration. But as with VBA, I don't know how or if OO/LO works with XML so it's just an observation; I was able to achieve some quite powerful results with straightforward XML schema work.

I'm not sure that it relates much to what you're describing but there is an XML sub project

http://www.openoffice.org/xml/

I also found a couple of sections in the OOO User guides ref customisation of menus etc.

As I'm looking for info in the user guides in reference to the comments here, I am getting re-impressed by what a great achievment OO (and by extension LO) actually is by the people who have contributed to it over the years. It may have shortcomings in some contexts but overall it is pretty damned good.