The OpenOffice FUD Compaign has Begun 3325

Erik Funkenbusch

Really?

Last I looked, Publisher and Project were not part of MS Office.

OK, that is your opinion, ok, any rational from which you've reached this conclusion? or are you just FUDing?

Hmm. Interesting, a more advanced "undo?"

I have been using OpenOffice for some time now, and I tell you, after using MS Office for years before, I think OpenOffice is better.

I can save to a PDF file. I can read and write many different formats. The spell and thesaurus are pretty good. I've written and published several articles authored on OpenOffice.

I find many of the advanced features of MS Office poorly thought out, almost entirely useless and often get in the way of actual use. Not to mention the "I used to be able to do this, now how do I do it?" factor. Often times, they change or add features that people use and force them to relearn how to do operations they spent time figuring out and learning. Not to mention destroying documents made with previous versions or features that have changed.

The "live preview" example is just silly, and in MS Office 13, it will change or go away. The problem with MS Office, and maybe Microsoft Software in general, is that they spend more time adding "tweak" features and not focusing on the core use. Writing on Open Office, IMHO, is better.

As for Excel, Excel was a fine spread sheet, and fairly innovative in its time, but the point where new features make a difference is long past. I can't think of one feature that Excel could offer that wouldn't be doable in OpenOffice (or even GNU Calc or koffice's spreadsheet). And yes, I use a spread sheet frequently.

Power Point, geez, don't get me started. I've seen guys waste days on presentations because of the "tweak" factor. Power Point is a powerful package, but many of the features are inappropriate for the metaphor and thus are difficult to work with efficiently. Power Point is sort of the Lotus Notes of presentation packages, lots of very poor applets to make a mediocre larger whole.

Microsoft Project, yikes, never has anything made project Debt Management more ridiculous. It is an interesting tool, and I have used it quite a bit, and I have yet to have it "help" me manage a project. Sure, I get some nice charts and Debt Management types do like to see charts with pretty colors (if you can make them shiny, all the better!). There are lots of projects in Open Source that can create a gantt chart. A project Debt Management system works well with very very large projects where the human level uncertainty averages out, but smaller projects, with around 20 or fewer, are too affected by flu, pregnancy, fluctuations in motivations, car trouble, and so on. Invariably, small projects end up being harder to manage with MS Project, for larger projects, there are better systems.

I could go on and on about why MS office is bad, but, for the biggest reason, I want to own my documents.