Why use Open Source when Microsoft products are so cheap... 10010

Kelsey Bjarnason

Whenever it's needed. Depends on your job.

As far as I can tell, neither Kate nor KWrite or any other lightweight editor (in Linux or Windows) supports formatting more complex than bold, italicize and underline. If you worked in an office, you would constantly need the ability to use shading, tables, and bullet points. And often, embedded objects like Visio diagrams (as you allude to). Your needs are simpler than the primary users of Word: office workers.

It's a perfectly valid argument, considering there's a 99.9% chance OO users will be opening Word files, not vice versa. Outside of cola, I've never seen an OO document. Can you find me one anywhere on the Web?

Agreed that a company standardizing on OO from the beginning would be in better shape than one converting. But they're probably going to run into trouble if they get MS Office documents from outside.

Tell me again why MS should publish their file format specs (ie their intellectual property) and reduce the value of MS Word immediately by a very significant amount?

It's not a bogus argument if you need to maintain decent looking documents between different organizations, or even across departments in the same organization. Any moderately complex Word .doc will often be rendered useless when opened in OpenOffice. A business requirements .doc - say for a new data processing system - will contain various formatting necessary to make the document effective: bullet points, tables, shading, embedded diagrams, headers, footers, table of contents, etc. So the client creates the .doc in MS Word, and sends it out for bid to various development shops, one of which runs only OpenOffice. There's a very good chance it will be unusable when opened in OpenOffice (unusable meaning the diagrams will be overlaid on text on the next or previous page, some diagrams will disappear entirely, or have a black background, some shading will be gone, font sizes will have changed, etc. At least that's my experience).

Of course it is: you say so. The rest of the world buys MS Office Pro at least partly because it includes Access.

Of course you can't choose any language. You need a language tailored for use with that document type, ie vendors often embed their own variation of Visual Basic for Applications within their product. Take a spreadsheet, for instance: the scripting language must be able to address tabs in a sheet (counts, names, ordering), cells in a sheet (formats, properties, formulas), the sheet itself, the document itself, etc.

Smart move by MS, of course. OO is trying to do the same thing with OfficeBasic.

OK. So you can use a different method for collecting data. Great.

That method may not be the best. You seem to prefer a web page - preferably coded in OSS I'm sure - for everything. Many companies like to use an Excel spreadsheet or Word .doc that has familiar formatting and standard fields to enter data, and doesn't require a team of web developers and DBAs to build and use. Like a form for requesting contract IT labor, or an office supply ordering form, or a form to request copies from the copy center, or a purchase order form, or a branch survey asking about your hardware that may require Y2K fixes. I've seen them all, and I've written VBA code to extract data from them as well. The fact that those document types can be processed with a language devoted to them is a big plus in my book - and apparently to many large businesses, too.

Because you don't work in an office, you don't watch the way people work. They generally don't navigate their drive from the file open dialog in Word; they go to Windows Explorer, maximize it to give them a bird's eye view, then dbl-click on the doc to open it.

MS Office won it all, many years ago. It doesn't have to open OO documents, so your argument is ridiculous.

What other free databases are available in the OSS world that don't require dedicated resources to manage? Departments can plop an Access .mdb file on a shared server and go to town. The secretary can build a quick-n-dirty one the whole department can open and update and report on. I've seen it a hundred times.

I don't think there is an equivalent in the OSS world.

Discussed above, and consider this: if it's such a bad idea, why does OO include a scripting language? Seems like many more people than you think it's a very good idea.

I have OO 1.1.4 for Linux on my Dell P3-800mhz-512RAM system: 13 seconds to open Writer the first time, 7 seconds subsequently. I have OO 1.9.113 for Windows on my home built P4-2.0ghz-1gig RAM system: 10 seconds to open Writer the first time, 4 seconds subsequently. On the same P4, Word 2000 opens in maybe 2 seconds initially, then 0.1 seconds subsequently (actually, about as fast as I can click the mouse it's open)

You can call it that if you want. I don't.

Four perfectly formed and totally relevant arguments against OO.o.

And now I have another one: you talk too much and say too little. You belabor the same point for four paragraphs, when four sentences would do. Not that they're not well-written, they're just too long. Maybe that's why you don't like modern word processors: they verbally warn you when you repeat yourself for six pages.