openoffice.org and pdfcreator
OpenOffice.org recently released its 1.1 version. In the past, ooo has been funcitonal but clunky, so even though I’ve wanted to like it, I’ve usually ended up using Word on MS or Abiword on linux. The latest ooo release has won me over. The interface is slicker, the start time is drastically reduced, and it just feels a lot smoother. In short, it’s not clunky any more. The MS filters also seem to be much improved, and they were pretty good in the previous version. I feel very comfortable recommending that non-geek folks use this release as an MS Office replacement.
I’m even optimistic that the product will take significant market share away from MS, and if it doesn’t, it will be plain proof that MS’s dominance in the office apps world is a result of its monopoly. Free or $79 for the supported version vs. ~$500 for MS’s product is just too big of a difference to be justified by the very small difference in functionality.
Ooo also has a nifty export to pdf feature, which is quite handy for us, since we have had to buy acrobat for a lot of folks who like to create pdf versions of their word files. However, I’ve recently found another free (speech and beer) program called PDF Creator that provides the same print-to-pdf functionality that we’ve been buying Acrobat for. Even though it’s long been possible to create pdfs for free by printing to postscript and then using the free ghostscript tools to convert the postscript files to pdf, this process is way too burdensome to expect non-geek users to navigate it. PDF Creator uses ghostscript to provide the same ease of use of Acrobat without the difficult process.
Matt
October 17, 2003 @ 2:38 pm
Interesting, I’ll give it a try. It would be one less windows-specific program I would have to use, and as that list dwindles more every day (thanks to Mozilla, Thunderbird, et al) there is less and less keeping me on Windows.
Stan Krute
October 17, 2003 @ 4:18 pm
Hi Hal
I’ve been impressed by OOo 1.1
It’s a nice solution for offices
that need to deal with .doc and
.xl* files, but don’t own a copy
of Office for each machine.
I’ve had no problems so far installing
it on XP, but have had some failures
on some 9x systems.
Stan
Stan Krute
October 17, 2003 @ 4:19 pm
Oh, forget to mention:
I have lots of real-world
fairly complex .doc and .xl*
files. OOo 1.1 reads them
wonderfully. I was surprised
and impressed.
Stan
Prasenjeet Dutta
October 17, 2003 @ 4:32 pm
One point about the $500 price tag. Most home users can buy Office 2003 Student and Teacher edition for $110 street and install it on upto three PCs in their home. It’s hard to beat free, of course, but Office 2003 at that price definitely makes more sense than the supported $79 Star Office.
Michael Will
October 17, 2003 @ 4:52 pm
One point about the $79 price tag. Most home users can just use the free OpenOffice, and install it on as many PCs as they want in their home, and they are not restricted which OS to run on it. You don’t even get that for $500 from MS.
Chris
October 17, 2003 @ 5:59 pm
You really think its better than Abiword? I’ve been using Abi on my Linux box now for quite a while. I like that it can import Word files but is also much lighter in memory footprint and load times compared to older editions of Open Office. I might have to check out 1.1 though to see…though I’ll miss Abi if I change 🙂
Philip Miseldine
October 17, 2003 @ 6:23 pm
A little point about the MS filters: Word 2003, and Excel 2003 now can save to XML meaning anyone can code software to read and write fully formatted Office files. (Here’s what a Word file looks like in XML: http://www.miseldine.com/files/modifiedstate.xml).
And whilst OpenOffice is great as its free, it still feels a world away from the productivity of the latest Office 2003, which after a few less-than-important iterations since version 95, is finally feeling like a finished product. OpenOffice IMHO has a long, long way to go before its near the same quality.
Perhaps that’s because of the investment Microsoft puts into Office which OpenOffice just can’t achieve because of the revenue it brings in. I expect the next version to include many of the new features of Office 2003…without MS making the breakthroughs through their cash, would the other survive?
mpt
October 20, 2003 @ 1:25 am
I work at an Internet cafe which has MS Office installed on 3 computers, and OpenOffice (dot org) on the other 40 or so.
The most important improvement I have noticed from OpenOffice (dot org) version 1.1 is that the QuickStarter doesn’t hang any more. (Sometimes the hanging in version 1.0 would prevent any other program from launching, which was lots of fun.) The second-most important improvement is that the splash screen now has a progress meter, making customers much less anxious about whether anything is happening after they launch it. (Even so, the fact we’re still waiting longer than a second for a word processor to launch, in the 21st century, is truly shameful.)
Unfortunately in version 1.1, OpenOffice (dot org) Writer’s “Edit” menu is too long to drop down properly in an 800*600 display (using the standard Windows UI font). In comparison, all the menus in Microsoft Word 2000 are simple enough to fit easily into a 640*480 display, so such overcomplicated and thoughtless design by the OpenOffice (dot org) team is appalling. Yes, I could customize it, but since most computer users are running at 800*600, I shouldn’t have to, and I certainly don’t want to on 40-plus machines.
Other things which haven’t improved include the crappy initial setup of Writer (you have to close a useless “Paragraph Styles” window before beginning work, the default zoom level is too large to see the entire width of the page, there’s no Zoom control on the toolbar to fix it, adding one means navigating through a ridiculously complicated dialog, and after all that it’s a Zoom button rather than MS Office’s more useful menu), and the misleading application icons (which look like documents rather than applications).
If the OpenOfice (dot org) team had spent as much time improving the UI as they spent renaming their bug database from Bugzilla to IssueZilla, the software would be much nicer to use.
Alex Chejlyk
October 26, 2003 @ 1:32 am
OpenOffice 1.1 is very nice. The load time is much improved, although it still doesn’t start as fast as Word or TextMaker. I like the stability thus far, I never had any issues with OOorg 1.0, although I didn’t use the quick launcher. I gave up on MS Office, because it crashes. I’ve also fully switched to Linux, because MS Windows and many apps under it crash too often. I consider an “Illegal Operation or “Send an Error Report” as a crash.
Miguel
November 13, 2003 @ 9:16 am
Hal — when will the Berkman Center be moving to the clear choice of Internet civil libertarians everywhere and begin sporting some Macs? Printing documents to PDF? Built into the system. Bitchin’ command line tools, Perl, Apache, etc., and you can use the god-forsaken MS Office. What’s the hold up?
Nate
December 17, 2003 @ 10:56 am
OOo is great, but lacks a piece of functionality for academic use that will keep it from being part of the academic market until its next release. There isn’t sufficient support for bibliographic tools. It doesn’t work too well with Endnote (the most popular software in the humanities and social sciences) or with BibTeX. Yes, you can do an RTF conversion with OOo, but you have to redo the whole thing each time you change a reference or change the reference style, so you end up having several documents for several styles. They’re not intending to “fix” this with the integrated database (which is minimally functional, but only minimally) until OOo 2.0.
So I use OOo 1.1, I encourage others to use it, and I hope it continues to develop well. but for my dissertation, I’ll likely have to use Word or (huge groan!) learn LaTeX in order make sure I can cite sources and have the use of bibliographic features.
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