[Gllug] Office Alternatives

[Stephen Nelson-Smith]

Hi there,

> I hope that this is not tool late, but I work in a company with 250 users of
> OpenOffice.

Too late for this purchase, but the issue will come up again I am sure.

> It's funny, but people will put up with problems when they're using MS, but not
> OOo: it took us about 6 months to overcome this friction.

Yes indeed.  And "demand a full refund" doesn't cut it.

> The real issues that we met were:

<snip very useful examples of problems>

> So everyone in the organisation has OOo, the 80 people in the Finance team
> have XL 2003 as well and we have no more support calls than we used to. In
> fact, we have slightly fewer because people don't corrupt spreadsheets as
> often.

Interesting.  What version are you running?

> I am not mentioning all of the benefits that our users have highlighted to us,
> nor the removal of the licencing burden that we used to suffer under: I am
> merely trying to detail the problems that we in IT have to acknowledge at my
> current employer.

Very useful it is too.

> 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.  Excel and Word forms
and tables don't import from Word/Excel - the formatting and spacing
comes out wrong and macros don't behave.  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".

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).

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.

S.
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