Open Office REALLY is Better
A few months ago, I wrote an article on OpenOffice, a free office suite comparable to Microsoft's Office software. It contains programs such as a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation maker, etc...
This week I found myself implementing a spreadsheet for a somewhat complicated electrical engineering problem. It involved writing some computer program code in a language called BASIC, which essentially allows a user to create their own functions. Since the company where I work uses MS Office, I wrote my initial draft of the spreadsheet in Excel.
After a few hours of work, I came across something strange. My new functions were appearing to work correctly, but my final numbers were way off. After hours of debugging with another co-worker, we finally found out that MS Office was not allowing me to use the number pi, even though using pi works just fine when you type it straight into the Excel sheet. Ugh...
Later that week, I decided to re-create the spreadsheet in OpenOffice's Calc (the equivalent of Excel). To my surprise, many of the functions that I had to create myself were already included in OpenOffice! I tried using Pi, and it worked perfectly.
Now, anyone who tells you that OpenOffice is inferior to Microsoft's Office is badly mistaken. I know this from experience in dealing with both of them at a very deep level. If you are still paying hundreds of dollars for MS Office, you're wasting your money. Get OpenOffice for free, tell your friends to get OpenOffice for free, save hundreds of dollars, and support the open standards that OpenOffice provides.
5 comments:
I must admit that I have noticed that excel does do some funny things. I have never written new functions, but even on more basic levels I always double check to make sure the calculation look accurate as I have had them be completely off before. I used Open Office on my PC (and loved it) and wished I would have thought about it before purchasing Office for the Mac.
Nice writeup. Thanks for sharing...
I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. While there are some things that I prefer in Open Office, I think that your hatred of MS products jades and inhibits your ability of giving unbiased reviews of any of these products. The functionality of the MS Office Suite is still heads and shoulders above that of Open Office - write this review again in a few years.
tysqui, Could you point out exactly what MS Office functionality you believe is "head and shoulders" above OpenOffice? The only thing that I can think of is the grammar checker, which Open Office does not yet include. This will be added in upcoming versions of it, however. I mentioned this in my original OpenOffice post.
For the record, I have no unfair bias against Microsoft. I have used Windows/MS Office for years (until now), and my experience with both products puts me in an position to write an educated review on the topic.
Ok, I'll take back most of what I said earlier. In the past I have had trouble with Open Office importing documents correctly. Things such as tab stops and tab formatting, tables (mainly embedded tables), kerning and a few other formatting problems would crop up between software suites. After looking into it a little more, it seems that the newest version of Open Office has corrected many of these problems and few remain. Word still outpaces Writer with the most advanced editing tasks (but it should because it is expensive).
If you were trying to import documents that were created in MS Word, then of course there are going to some hiccups. The reason for this is that Microsoft has chosen to keep their file formats proprietary, making it impossible for OpenOffice or any other software to read the files 100% correctly. Given the fact that MS tries to keep the format hidden, OpenOffice does an incredibly good job at getting it right.
This is a key benefit of OpenOffice. MS has chosen not to support the "Open Document Format (ODF)" in their newer versions of Office, even though ODF is a certified international (ISO) standard. OpenOffice file formats are 100% open, and anyone out there can write software that will read the files correctly. That means that users control their own data, and software for editing their data becomes better and more compatible.
I look forward to the day when we don't have to worry about which software other people use, because the file formats for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations are standardized. OpenOffice is making that day arrive quickly.
tysqui, I appreciate your thoughts, but I still disagree that MS Office is better than OpenOffice (even for the advanced functions). If someone offered me both for free, I'd honestly choose OpenOffice.
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