MS Office vs. OpenOffice (Re: [Leaplist] microsoft / novell -- Can I get a STFU?)

[Derek Konigsberg]

I hate to say it folks, but while OpenOffice *is* a suitable alternative 
to MS Office, it is *NOT* a suitable replacement for MS Office.

The moment you get outside the SOHO environment, you'll find that MS 
Office is a deeply entrenched de-facto standard for everything.  Whatever 
you choose to use yourself, you likely need 100% perfect MS Office 
compatability.  I'm sorry, but OpenOffice does *not* offer this.  It is 
good enough for the basics, and does the job in my home environment, but 
just isn't an acceptable substitute at work.  At work, I *need* MS Office, 
no ifs, ands, or buts.  (right now that means MS Office 2004 for Mac, 
which is a 99.9% solution given my usage needs, but even that isn't 100%)

At home, of course I managed to get by using OpenOffice for everything. 
Thats because my interoperability needs are very different.  Like I said 
above, OpenOffice makes a great MS Office alternative, but does not make a 
great MS Office replacement.

-Derek


On Mon, 6 Nov 2006, Chris wrote:

> Damien McKenna wrote:
>
>> On 11/6/06 11:09 AM, William Warren
>> <hescominsoon at emmanuelcomputerconsulting.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> actually I don't have any clients that embed other office apps inside
>>> other office apps.
>>> 
>> 
>> You don't need to be embedding apps within each other, there are other
>> limitations.
>>
>> 
> Which don't apply to 90+% of the stuff I see office used for.
> Honestly, when it comes to SOHO, I swear all of the documents
> I've seen could have been produced as effectively in RTF
> using Wordpad. And much of the Excel work I see is pure
> abuse of use of a spreadsheet as a database, which kind of
> needs to be discouraged anyway.
>
>>> The only hangup is access on my clients.  Once i can get access
>>> compatibility then ms office is gone..:)
>>> 
>> 
>> You'll never get Access compatibility.  Rewrite the apps using 
>> Ruby-on-Rails
>> or something similar.
>> 
>
> Thank goodness I'll never got Access compatability. That's
> kind of like one of those relationship breakups where the
> other person screams, "You'll never find anyone else like me!",
> And you're thinking, "Gee, I sure hope not." Dunno
> about Ruby, but I know from experience that Python and
> ODBC can be your friend in that migration.
>
> The catch is - re-writing the apps, depending on their
> complexity can require deep pockets. And an organization
> with pockets deep enough to afford that is probably also
> big enough to have one or two MS Office power users whose
> carefully crafted empires are part of the corporate infrastructure.
>
> The best you can hope for there is to nibble around the edges
> of the cheese. Fortunately, those are pretty big edges, and if
> you play your cards right, you may even be able to seduce
> the MS Office "power users" over to the dark side of the force.
> After all, they're geeks at heart - they just don't know any
> better ;-)
>
> Cheers,
>
> Chris
>
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