[Gllug] the guardian on the attack (again)

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Sat, 2005-12-10 at 11:49 +0000, Craig Millar wrote:
> What is it with the so called 'experts' at the Guardian? You'd think that
> the open source philosophy would ducktail nicely with their socialist, red
> sock wearing values. Alas, time and time again they seek to piss us off with
> this sort of nonsense:
> 
> http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,16376,1660763,00.html

The guy who wrote it has had some experience of OOo, and has even
written and posted some of his own macros, so he's not totally clueless.
You can (and I do) disagree with some of his points, but I don't think
they're just trying to piss us off, and I do think that in the case of
OOo specifically, the hype about how good it is as a replacement for MS
Office is unjustified, and in fact damaging to the image of Open Source
in general.

<snip two well made points which I agree with entirely>

> Why are these morons so consistently clueless? And I'm not just talking
> technology either!

To relate a personal story with OpenOffice - I recently (July) bought
all new kit for the office. Upgraded everyone from ancient boxes running
WinNT4 to XP SP2, 2.8Ghz P4 machines. We also replaced MS Office 97 with
OpenOffice 2.0 (a beta at that stage, but that's largely irrelevant to
this discussion). I had made the case that this was a reasonable cost
saving for us, and had read many stories of large organisations moving
to it. I'd also done some testing, and had had some users using previous
versions of OOo for several months.

About 6 weeks after rolling it out, we bought MS Office 2k3. OOo is
quite simply an inadequate replacement, even for Office 97. Really basic
features just don't work properly, and where equivalent features are
present, the UI is often more awkward than in MS Office. A few examples
(by no means the only ones):-

Mail merge - there is no catalogue/list merge option at all, merging to
a new document generates blank pages, as OOo insists on a right/left
page metaphor, there is no option to suppress blank lines, mailing
labels are tortuous, and having to register a data source for everything
is a pain.

Calc - filtering doesn't show the number of records selected in the
status bar (surprisingly important, as it happened). Creating a pie
chart with thin slices you end up with the text labels overlapping, and
they can't be moved independently of the chart. Trying to do a graph of
index prices was interesting - Excel put data points (all with 1999 in
the X axis) in sequence, OOo didn't. Mathematically speaking, Excel was
wrong, but it did what the user expected. OOo behaved correctly, but
confused the hell out of the user, and they ended up needing half an
hour help from IT to achieve what they wanted.

Impress - Powerpoint compatibility isn't good enough - users often do a
presentation, then take it with them and display it on someone else's
laptop. After a few compatibility issues, this generated some concern
over whether their presentation would look the same when it got where it
was going.

Base - too unstable to use at the moment. Not bad for views onto MySQL
or similar, but forget trying to do access-like forms/reports.

General - it's pretty sluggish compared to MS Office, and the stability
isn't that great with complex documents where there are lots of embedded
OLE objects.

For much of this sort of stuff, there are ways to work around it. I can
usually make OOo do what I want it to, and I do use it regularly - it's
a vital part of a Linux desktop. For average users though, who just want
to get their work done, it's not good enough. I couldn't recommend it as
a replacement for MS Office for a business unless a very careful study
had been carried out of the requirements first. I think OO will get
there, but I personally wouldn't want to look at it again for a business
until after version 3. Some of the issues mentioned above have bugs
filed on them with a milestone of version 3.0.

Mike

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