[Gllug] Office Alternatives

[TreeBoy]

On Thursday 22 May 2008 22:56:39 Stephen Nelson-Smith wrote:
>
> Interesting.  What version are you running?

When we first rolled out we were using 2.1.0 and we've upgraded every version 
since. This may sound like a nightmare, but we use wpkg to handle our 
installs/upgrades. We also use AutoIt to do our builds.

We are now running OOo 2.4.0. I use debian sid (32 bit) and at work everyone 
uses XP SP2.

We use an externally supplied accounts system which runs exclusively on MS 
platform: Windows Server, SQL Server and interacts directly with Excel. This 
is one of only two Windows servers that we run.: the other is for HR.


>
> Very useful it is too.

Glad to offer some more info.

>
> > I would be intrigued to know what particular problems you are meeting.
>
> Sure.  Well, the auto numbering and bulleting just doesn't work.  Or
> at least is almost unuseable compared with Word.  

Auto-numbering has been an issue to us too. We have overcome a lot of the 
issues by producing little videos explaining to people how to get things to 
work. (DebugMode's Wink is excellent for this, although our training team 
suggest that it is unusable and so need something from Adobe.) But getting 
something conceptual like this across is rather difficult in a video.

Having said that, I discovered that there were different issues with 
numbering/indentation that people were getting when using Word too, but 
people just persevered with it.

The key piece of info for people was explaining that numbering operates 
outside the normal style paradigm. I found this particularly 
frustrating/daft, but once I got it I was able to explain it  little more 
clearly to our users.  It took me about two days of solid investigation to 
get it right and be able to explain it to others who do not now how word 
processors work. Thankfully I had some very eager guinea pigs who acted as 
editors. It then took me another day to get the documentation into a usable 
state.


> Excel and Word forms 

Forms have caused us problems too, but we were able to assign me to rewrite 
them in Calc natively. This was not cheap, obviously, but it did get over the 
hurdle and now people merely modify the ones that we have already produced. 
There was some significant resistance to this, because people did have to 
learn new techniques, but this was merely a hurdle. After three months, we 
discovered that generally only one or two new forms were being created per 6 
months, so the transition was heavy, but the subsequent work was not 
significant and people always went to the same people to get them done 
anyway, so I just provide support to those specific people. They need help on 
about one in six forms. These are *VERY* simple forms, although the users 
think that they are complex because they cover more than one page. Individual 
form elements do *not* change others. (In fact our users did not understand 
the difference between a radio button and a check box: They perceive it as a 
style choice.)

Some style issues are commonly solved by saving stuff as ODF as well. This is 
not easy if you have to send things outside for completion though.

As an aside: all of our external correspondents that use Office 2007 (less 
than 1% of the docs that we receive) have no qualms about expecting us to 
install the relevant Office Viewer but would not install OOo themselves. This 
does make my blood boil when we are their customers!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (I'm 
talking especially about eternal auditors!!!!!!!!!!!!)

> and tables don't import from Word/Excel - the formatting and spacing
> comes out wrong 

I feel your pain. I really don't get why they don't fix this bug. Anyway, we 
have only one style of tables in our org, so I have written a macro that 
people use to re-apply the style once it has been pasted/imported.

We do not have issues with pasting Word tables into Writer, so I'm hoping that 
does work for you.

> and macros don't behave.  

Now that we are running 2.4.0, VBA support has improved markedly: We have 
issues with about 15% of our in-house macros, About 50% run unaltered, 35% 
needed minor tweaks (that were beyond the skill level of the original 
producers in the Accounts team) and the rest were just not changeable because 
no-one understood what they were supposed to be doing. This is one reason why 
accounts run XL 2003. We still had to remove the security errors that 2003 
had compared with 97: you would not believe how much self-modifying code had 
been produced; Nor how much of it could have been done by using *VARIABLES*!


> Specifically with oocalc, on  
> even a small spreadsheet, the computer runs slower and slower until
> ooo eventually hangs and has to be restarted.  We mentioned this to
> the guys at Fosdem and they just said: "yeah, we need to improve".

Finally,the speed of Calc is painful, but I've only met this on "large" 
spreadsheets. i.e. ones with more than 1500 rows. I appreciate that this is 
very vague, but I cannot really be more specific. Some workbooks with 5 
sheets with 500 rows each are _generally_ quicker that one sheet with 1500 
rows. The number of cols and calculated fields appears to be irrelevant.

We are lucky in that our main in-house app produces most summary data, so our 
users are saved having to deal with this much.

>
> To be fair, this isn't on Windows.  We've had our worst experiences on
> Ubuntu 7.10.  I've run ooo on Centos 5 for some time and it only
> crashes once a week or so.  Which is too many.  I never had Office 97
> crash under windows.  We have an Ubuntu 8.04 machine, and so far ooo
> hasn't crashed, but the functionality still doesn't match.  For other
> examples, I'd need to ask my users, but two or three who were made to
> use ooo while their machines were being fixed cried and wept bitterly
> about missing functionality, especially in excel (I note with interest
> that your finance people still use excel).

I can't speak with regard to any of the Linuxes that you've used, but I can 
say that we have no stability issues on Windows at all and I do not on Debian 
Sid. I appreciate that this is not scientific, but it is true.

As for the comment about MS Office 97, I've seen some marvellous spreadsheets 
that caused XL to hang on launch, or to crash on running macros. Funnily 
enough, the crash on launch was *ALWAYS* fixed by opening in OOo 1.x and 
saving the file again. (I used to get the same 6MB spreadsheet from the 
Finance Director at a previous job at the start of every month prior to the 
monthly sales review and have to do this process. I was an external 
consultant at the time and saw some things that I really should not have.)

I have found that nowhere is the functionality lacking, except for the Solver, 
but only one person apart from me in my org knows how to use that. In one or 
two places it is found via a different method such as PivotTable->DataPilot. 
And some is not as robust: especially support for "large" workbooks.

The crying and weeping happened here too until we explained to the Chief Exec 
that we would be saving at least £100 a seat, not run the risk of an early 
morning raid by the police if we fluffed up our licencing and that the 
functionality really is there, but that these people were being intransigent. 
We spent two days going through some of his stuff with him and he agreed that 
there were no issues. Having him on our side, finally made people feel much 
more positive about OOo. Funny that.

Our accounts team have to use XL for two reasons:

   * They use an externally supplied Accounting system that talks directly via 
OLE to XL: we have no choice.

   * They have about 15% of their spreadsheet macros that they cannot rewrite 
as they do not have the staff for this.

   * The key writer of their macros does not have the time/desire to rewrite 
all of the old stuff and learn new stuff and write new stuff at the same 
time. I understand this as he is really very hard pressed.

>
> Anyway, I think my question's been answered.  There isn't a better
> alternative to ooo for Windows, really.  I admire your bravery in
> taking the plunge.  Maybe I'll try again with a different user.

I can only agree with your conclusion for your situation, but I would say that 
many teams within my employer felt the same way and they kept on whingeing at 
management meetings for almost 6 months,. But, with the CEO on our side, they 
were eventually persuaded that it was wrong to cry on and I do believe that 
we have no outstanding negativity now. The biggest gain as that in OOo you 
can always select "Edit|Repeat last action" which is what about 90% of our 
users use macros for in XL!!!!!!!!!!

>
> S.

Cheers,
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