[Gllug] Office Alternatives

TreeBoy gllug at petethetree.co.uk
Thu May 22 19:13:57 UTC 2008


On Wednesday 21 May 2008 12:14:46 Stephen Nelson-Smith wrote:
> <rant>
>
> /me weeps! £350.00 fscking pounds for *one* copy of Microsoft Office!
>
> Openoffice is crap - unstable, not feature complete - the users just
> hate it - it isn't fit for purpose either as a wordprocessor or a
> spreadsheet.
>
> </rant>
>
> Surely there has to be an alternative?
>
> S.

Hello, S.

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

They were previously using MS Office 97 and had been confused by the upgrade 
to Office 2003, so we bit the bullet and transitioned to OOo in May of last 
year. (We had to wait until after the financial year end as that time is too 
busy for us as we are a Finance house with over £5bn of client portfolio.)

We had an initial hurdle where the training and HR departments suddenly 
discovered how little people actually knew how to use a spreadsheet or a word 
processor. (You would not believe the number of people that inserted page 
numbers manually AND by hitting return to get to the end of the page!). 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.

The real issues that we met were:

   * In Writer, to specify the format of a page (e.g. orientation, margins...) 
you use the Format menu instead of the File menu like you do in Word. This 
made people think it was unusable.

   * Mail merging more than 600 form letters is exponentially slower than 
doing 500. We have to break them down into batches of 500.

   * Mail merging sets up a database which is a snapshot of your source data, 
so you have to start the wizard again if you want to redo. Not too laborious, 
but definitely silly.

   * Sending documents outside for external editing. We may be able to do this 
via PDF forms, but that is definitely an IT training issue with only 5 IT 
staff, we cannot afford that time at this moment. failing that, we have to 
remind them to "Save As".

   * Saving in XL or Word format, can cause layout problems when re-opening in 
OOo after editing with either MS or OOo software. This is always solved by 
saving in ODF, which is fine internally. Bullet markers are the biggest 
culprit here but only in <5% of the documents.

   * Spreadsheets with large number of rows take forever to launch. One with 
12,000 rows was eventually killed 2 hours later.

   * Spreadsheets that interact with third party software. Accountants like 
buying these packages.

   * Data Pilots instead of Pivot Tables made people think that they couldn't 
use them anymore.

   * Pivot Tables with more than 8 data fields. Soon found the plugin that 
allows up to 32, but it was a shock at first and it does work significantly 
differently.

   * Lots of macros that were written for Excel by people that have left and 
so it is not known what they really do. We in IT do not have time to 
investigate, but I'm hoping we're not doing a "Moody Credit Rating" on this.

   * Auto-save does not exist in OOo - it was removed in about 2.1. You can 
save recover info for the event of a crash, but not something that saves 
regularly. I don't understand a requirement for this as you run the risk of 
saving something you didn't mean to, but our staff do not know how to 
frequently press Ctrl-S or click the relevant button.

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.

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.

I would be intrigued to know what particular problems you are meeting.

Regards,
TreeBoy
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