i like openoffice much better than ms office, what do you think?
After having to use ms word 2007 and other products under the ms office package and vista OS, i started to like non-microsoft products.
Thanks to these crap(i dont remember it can be crab), i even started to like c++ language and Java. the only thing remained that i liked about microsoft is the .net framework and c#. there must be seperate groups that are coding .net and the rest of the products in microsoft.
what do you think?
Jump to PostMicrosoft Office always seems to have a slight edge over OpenOffice in terms of functionality and performance. But despite a few rough edges, OpenOffice works just fine for my needs.
An annoyance with early versions of OpenOffice centered around compatibility with Microsoft Office documents. Thankfully no longer the issue it …
Jump to PostDid MS ever officially implement the open doc format? If so, was it a "real" implementation or was it their typical "our version of ODF" which means "incompatible with real ODF"?
Jump to PostWriting a file format that is forward and backward compatible is very easy, and there are many formats that are structured like that. I've dealt and created many file formats like that, and from a programming perspective, creating such formats is actually easier than any other kind of formats.
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Jump to PostDefining a file format that is forward and backward compatible may be easy, writing a parser for it is harder than writing one that only has to take a single version into account (though it may not be much harder depending on what you want to do with unrecognised elements) …
Jump to PostThe default option could be to report "this file contains features that are not implemented in your version of Word" and optionally display as much of the document as can be rendered. This would happen only if the person who created the document has used one of the new features. …
And also i forgot to add, i hate ms internet explorer 7 and above. it is too slow and crashes all the time. i started to use google chrome, and i am pretty fond of it. it is incredibly fast and never crashes. i also tried firefox but i didnt like it because of its limited javascript and css support. but google chrome supports everything quite well.
>i also tried firefox but i didnt like it because of its limited javascript and
>css support
Wha..? Oh, you are joking, right?
>i also tried firefox but i didnt like it because of its limited javascript and
>css supportWha..? Oh, you are joking, right?
no i had always experiences like being able to run some scripts on ms explorer but not on firefox. the same thing never happened with google chrome.
but i will tell you that LibreOffice is Much better than OpenOffice!! just try it ...
LibreOffice is a derived version of OpenOffice Office suite, is freeware and open source as well (compared with the expensive MS Office, this is absolutely its biggest advantage), but in comparison wih OpenOffice, it has increased a lot of notable features (just because of LibreOffice, the OpenOffice.org official support has stopped).
I have not used anything other than MS Office...got used to it.
I have tried Openoffice, but decided it would have to be an emergency solution only. Especially after Office 2007, where Excel and Access go seriously better (although I can't figure out what is where in Access nowadays, but I haven't used it that much).
I think that Excel can't be compared to anything. It got better, more user friendly and supports a lot more rows/columns.
It could be that I got so much used to it, that I don't like everything else.
I agree with you on the price, it is expensive but it makes up for it in productivity in a work environment. It sure doesn't worth buying Office to track your monthly expenses or your milage.
The problem with OpenOffice is that it is written in Java and that makes it rather slow.
I agree with you on the price, it is expensive but it makes up for it in productivity in a work environment. It sure doesn't worth buying Office to track your monthly expenses or your milage.
I have both, OpenOffice and Microsoft Office 365. I rarely use OpenOffice because M$ Office is so much better. And Office 365 lets you store data either on your local computer or on the cloud so that you can easily access the files from other computers or from mobile devices. It's kind of nice to create a shopping list on my computer then access it with my smart phone while in the store shopping.
And the price of Office 365 is probably about a third of what it was for previous editions because it's now an annual subscription so you get upgrades for free every year or whenever Microsoft issued one. With one license I'm allowed to install it on 5 devices (computers, tables, and/or shart phones running Windows 8).
Microsoft Office always seems to have a slight edge over OpenOffice in terms of functionality and performance. But despite a few rough edges, OpenOffice works just fine for my needs.
An annoyance with early versions of OpenOffice centered around compatibility with Microsoft Office documents. Thankfully no longer the issue it once was. My only gripe today is the documentation, which needs expanding. Whenever I walk into a library (yes, they still exist) all I see is shelves and shelves of Microsoft Office manuals. Where's the competition?
just because of LibreOffice, the OpenOffice.org official support has stopped
Actually, this is not true. Although Oracle had ceased development after the LibreOffice fork, the OpenOffice project was passed to Apache Software Foundation in June 2011.
If you are looking for a basic office suite solution then libreoffice and Apache open office are both okay. I have used MS office for years but I have explored these two other open source platforms and they adequately provide the basics. If you have used MS for a good while you might miss some of the finer features.
Beginning with Office 365 (released 2013) it is subscription based, about $150.00 USD per year for 5 licenses and includes all Office programs. Previous versions of MS Office are not compatible with Windows 8/8.1. And it no longer is available on DVD -- download only from MS web site.
Although OpenOffice and LibreOffice are free their features aren't nearly as good as MS Office 365, and the files aren't compatible.
hmm, I've Office 2010 installed on Win 8.1 and it runs just fine :)
I am still working with linux O.S
hmm, I've Office 2010 installed on Win 8.1 and it runs just fine :)
I wanted to use Office 2012 but it wouldn't run on Windows 8. Never tried it on 8.1 because I already got Office 365.
Other products, be them free products, try to accomplish what Office does but cannot imo. I will say that I like Word least of all because I find it's formats a little too static and rigid in their use. As for Excel, I've tried Libre's version and the Google's version and they don't even compare to Excel. I like Excel because I can program the hell out of it (for the most part) whereas the others I cannot. There are too many perks that come with Office Professional too which I really like and I don't feel other (free) software can touch it!
my 12.2 pennies.
Did MS ever officially implement the open doc format? If so, was it a "real" implementation or was it their typical "our version of ODF" which means "incompatible with real ODF"?
Not likely -- each new version of Word has it's own doc format which is incompatible with previous versions.
Here are my 2 cents (that is, 2 Canadian cents, and because pennies have been put out of circulation and prices are rounded to the nearest 5 cents, I guess my opinion is really worth nothing ;) ).
I haven't used MS Office in years, but not really in favor of LibreOffice (or OpenOffice). For writing documents, as the saying goes, once you start using LaTeX, you never look back. I could no longer imagine writing anything serious with MS Word or an open-source equivalent. The flexibility, speed and ease with which I can do things in LaTeX just makes a WYSIWYG-style word-processor program extremely unattractive. The same goes, but to a lesser extent, for presentations (e.g., power-point) through LaTeX/Beamer. I only miss the ability to create fancy animations, but if I really need that, I find LibreOffice's alternative good enough. The hassle-free, STEM-friendly nature of LaTeX and the picture-ready documents it creates is just unparalleled (btw, STEM: Science, Tech., Eng., Math.).
As for Excel, I do find myself using the LibreOffice Calc once in a while for very small tasks (because it can't really handle large data anyways, neither can Excel, of course). I do have to be careful when using it, because if any colleague saw me using it, it would be quite embarrassing. Engineers don't use Excel, unless they want to attract ridicule. We mostly use Matlab or Octave, which are both much more powerful and flexible than Excel. That is, if not using more specialized tools. And for larger data-sets, you have to go for a database servers anyways, like MySQL and stuff, I don't use those much, but I think that neither MS Office nor LibreOffice are particularly good in that realm.
One MS Office pseudo-part that I do miss a bit is Visio. I mostly use Inkscape now for that kind of simple diagram-drawing. And I have tried a while to use the LibreOffice Draw. Both of those are not really as good as Visio, they both have lots of annoying quirks and bizarre GUI choices. But, since I rarely ever work in Windows, I have to live with Inkscape, which is adequate, but not great.
Not likely -- each new version of Word has it's own doc format which is incompatible with previous versions.
Another reason I hate Microsoft. Our control centre had to exchange documents with several other control centres in the central and northern states. All it took was once group to upgrade to a new version of MS Office to screw up everyone else.
New versions of Word can always save in older version formats, so it wasn't really necessary for everyone to upgrade unless there were other reasons to do so.
Not likely -- each new version of Word has it's own doc format which is incompatible with previous versions
Another reason I hate Microsoft. Our control centre had to exchange documents with several other control centres in the central and northern states. All it took was once group to upgrade to a new version of MS Office to screw up everyone else.
you could just have set a corporate policy to use the old format for all communications.
Works wonders.
And why not change file formats (which btw isn't done with every version) to support new functionality? Or would you want everyone to still use a 20+ year old file format from WordPerfect 1.0 for everything, doing away with everything that's been added over that time that required changes to the file format to persist?
you could just have set a corporate policy to use the old format for all communications.
Corporate policies mean bugger all to anyone outside the corporation and the control centres we dealt with were not only not in the same company, they were not even in the same country.
Several major Amiga software companies used a format called IFF (Interchange File Format). As an example, the two leading image editing programs (I do not recall their names) each had some functionality that the other lacked. Each was able to manipulate one feature of the image file that was unique to that program. Each feature was represented by a named "chunk" in the file. The program that did not support that feature would still load the data, but ignore it, then save it back out unaltered. In this way, both programs could be used on the same file while maintaining compatible formats.
Once you upgrade to a newer version of Microsoft Word you end up saving in the newer format by default, even if you do not use any of the new features. If Microsoft had used a tagged format then they could have maintained backward compatibility. It is my opinion that many of the new "features" that are used as justification for an upgrade are in most cases "features" that nobody asked for and that most people will not (in general) use.
Writing a file format that is forward and backward compatible is very easy, and there are many formats that are structured like that. I've dealt and created many file formats like that, and from a programming perspective, creating such formats is actually easier than any other kind of formats.
If Microsoft had used a tagged format then they could have maintained backward compatibility.
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that incompatible formats are always deliberately made to be. There is a clear economic advantage in creating incompatible formats with each new version of the software, it's part of planned obsolescence.
The worse offenders in my field are CAD software, especially Pro/Engineer and SolidWorks. Every version, and every different license (student, individual, company) comes with a mutually incompatible file format, and really terrible options for exporting to other formats. Basically, once a company commits to a particular CAD software, they have to use it forever, and they have to update everyone's software every year or so. This is a huge and well-known racket.
Defining a file format that is forward and backward compatible may be easy, writing a parser for it is harder than writing one that only has to take a single version into account (though it may not be much harder depending on what you want to do with unrecognised elements) :)
But consider this in case of a word processor. You've typed a paragraph of text, then added some modifier to it that an older version of that word processor doesn't support.
What should it do with your paragraph? Output it in plain text, delete it entirely (that's the easiest option, but I doubt your end users will be very happy), or mark it in some way as being not shown as intended by the creator (the hardest option)?
And with modern XML parsers all being validating parsers, and automatically rejecting documents containing data not matching their given XSD as invalid, what do you think the default operation for a word processor written using an XML based document format will be when presented with a document created in a later version of that same software that has enhanced its definitions?
The default option could be to report "this file contains features that are not implemented in your version of Word" and optionally display as much of the document as can be rendered. This would happen only if the person who created the document has used one of the new features. In my experience this is unlikely because most users use only a small subset of the available features and the documents we received were simple text with minimal formatting. I would guess that most, if not all of the documents we routinely received (daily load reports, sales confirmations) would have easily rendered in the version of Word that we were running.
Let's say you rent a movie and there is one line of dialog in the movie which is spoken in a foreign language. Would you rather
Yes, it is a contrived example but to take it even further, what if all movies from that point on were deemed unwatchable because of that one line of dialog which was unlikely to appear in any other movies? That is basically what Microsoft does everytime they release a new version of Word. Even if the new document uses none of the new features, Microsoft changes the file format so that you must upgrade to view it.
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