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

[Fred Moore]

On Monday 06 November 2006 2:46 pm, Derek Konigsberg wrote:

Dam if you can jack the thread I can top post..  Now you have my threading 
reader screwed up..  you select "NEW" then you address it then you compose it 
then you send it.. Fred


> 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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