[Gllug] Voluntary work

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Thu, 2003-11-13 at 16:34, Harry Mantheakis wrote:

> Yes, that is my pre-conception, having slaved over Word and Excel for more
> hours than I care to think of.
> 
> I do not know OpenOffice, but my impression is that if it even came *close*
> to being a reasonable alternative to Word and Excel, companies would start
> migrating in their droves.

Why? I (as many on this list probably know) am keen on free software,
but at work we run Office 97. It was paid for years before OpenOffice
was viable, and the staff are all familiar with it. There is *no*
incentive for us to change at this point.

Given a greenfields site, I'd install OpenOffice in a heartbeat, and I'm
none too keen on spending any of my employers money on more MS Office
licenses, but these days there's really no such thing as a greenfields
site in the UK, and there's usually no good argument for chaging from
one already paid for Office suite to a similar free Office suite.

Being a viable alternative is a necessary precursor to getting
OpenOffice a bigger market share, but doesn't provide the impetus to
switch unless and until companies are considering paying for new
licenses. If they are just using already paid for commercial software,
there's no reason to move. The PDF support in OpenOffice 1.1 is a big
draw - we need more features like that. That said, I have a lot of users
who generate PDF output, so I was hoping I could introduce them to
OpenOffice. It doesn't do hyperlinks in the PDFs though, so that went
out of the window :-(. To persuade companies to make the switch en
masse, open source has to produce better products. *Almost* all the
features of the Windows equivalent doesn't cut it.

I was also recently saddened to see that MS do a better job (for the
average business) at providing a portable office suite than OpenOffice
does. Want MS Office on Windows and Mac - no problem. Want OO - 1.1 for
Windows, 1.0.3 only for Mac OS X. Oh, and it needs X11, and you have to
start it by running a script from a terminal. I bought a new Mac laptop
for someone in my office recently. I installed OpenOffice on it. When
I'd finished, I gace up in disgust and went and paid 300+ quid for MS
Office for OS X. It wasn't even close to being viable for that user.

As a tecnically proficient user, I can make nice noises over OpenOffice.
As someone whose job it is to provide useable systems to people whose
job is not playing with machines, I have to judge things on their (non
philosophical merits). It wasn't even close. On Windows (or linux) it's
much better, but it's a shame the open source community can't do a
better job at crossplatform support than MS.

> I haven't got Linux yet, but I was playing with a Redhat installation
> yesterday - with a Gnome desktop I believe - and I was really impressed with
> the general design, functionality, ease of use, and speed of the thing.
> 
> It's all there, except for Word and Excel - especially Excel.

We have *almost* all the features of Excel. But then see above.....

Mike.



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