It's sad being neutral. Neither side recognizes you as their own. In the case of OSS vs Proprietary I tend to use the best tool for the job, regardless of price. After all I find that they tend to cost pretty much the same. The issue with this is that OSS followers think I'm an Microsoft shill, and the proponents of proprietary software think that I'm an OSS biatch.
Anyway, I just saw
a comparison of OpenOffice.org vs Microsoft Office 2007 on Slashdot. Granted it's posted on linux.com I didn't really expect it to be objective, much like Microsoft's marketing material isn't. What I did expect though is that just like MS's own stuff which isn't pushed by others, the respective propaganda from linux.com wouldn't be pushed by anyone.
Ok to the points. I will quote some things and then clip my screen or comment to show why I disagree.
The interfaces: The writer suggests that the ribbon is a big departure from older interfaces and this alienates users. I happen to appreciate the ribbon although I find it lacks a tab with the most recently used controls. I will agree however that this is a valid point.
I'm not at all fond of his closing comment though "Microsoft Word's changes seem pointless and upset users for no good reason" . You either push forward and progress the product or remain with the mess that it used to be. I find no middle solution to this.
Styles: Seriously, only business documenters and scientific writers care about proper styles. OpenOffice forces you to keep these proper and create a new style each time you change something. Word gets out of your way.
He also points out that "in 2007, its developers opted for placing styles in the right half of the Home tab's ribbon" which is not try as you can see below. You can bring up the old menu anytime.
He also writes "These styles are further subdivided into style sets reminiscent of those used for templates in early Word versions, such as Elegant, Formal," . Not really, this is actually reminiscent of document stylesheets in TEX.
You could always change the style of the page layout and you still can.
Page layout: He then goes on to suggest that a document editor should also be a publishing solution. I .. no I won't comment on this.
Templates: OMG he writes "Previous versions of Word lured users to corrupt their documents by applying multiple templates to them" . Templates are not applied, they are simple documents with placeholders for extra text.
These make sense in corporate environments where they are really indispensible. The only reason why common users would want them is to take advantage of cute calendars, todo lists, shopping lists etc. . I still don't think they are important.
Outlining: He thinks that Word's outlining tools are better, and he is right. He neglects to mention that the mapping tools are pretty much equivalent in both products. Yet another unimportant comparison.
Bulleted and numbered lists: "lists in Word 2007 remain prone to corruption when you start editing them unless you set up SEQ fields for numbering and design macros to apply them automatically" WTF is he smoking. I don't even know how to approach the problem with macros, and I'm proficient with VBA !
"Nor does Word allow fine-tuning of such details as the space between a bullet and text" , see below
Tables: The paragraph is just full of FUD. He also says "Although some users like Word's tool for drawing a table, it is hardly an efficient tool" , which sounds plausible until you start using it. Face it drawing tables is the same things you would do on paper.
Headers and footers: "Writer allows for a greater variety of headers and footers with less effort" , which is not even close to this
Footnotes and endnotes: "Word's functionality is only basic by comparison" in reality the functionality is identical, feature to feature.
Cross-references: He acknowledges that Word's support for this is better, though I don't remember Writer lacking in comparison to Word 2003. Word 2007 though is ridiculously better at both.
Indexes, tables of content, and bibliographies: Same as previous.
He also writes "Word's designers never seem to have considered the possibility of more than one order in table of content entries" . Below are 5 different indexes. One for tables, images, references, etc.
Master documents: "Word needs master documents, since it cannot reliably handle documents longer than about 40 pages" . This leaves me wondering how I got my bachelor thesis which is loaded with several megs of images and running at 85 pages currently. I have not experienced a single crash.
The equivalent of Master Documents in office is the binder. Noone liked it, since you could just as easily dump everything in one really big Word file. That's right, Word not Publisher.
Drawing tools: "With the release of version 2.0, Writer gained equality with Microsoft Word's tools for manipulating basic shapes, charts, and graphical text. Nothing has changed in the two applications' most recent versions." . You have to be blind to miss autoshapes. The following 4 visualizations are literally one click away from each other, and you can convert between them the same way.
Same applies for a great breadth of other structures
Special features: He mentions the grammar checker in Word as a plus, which I disable first thing while setting up the suite. He also neglects to mention that unless you want support, OpenOffice is free.
Bottom line, the author is seriously uninformed or intentionally lying. Granted he sometimes downplays Writer too, it's probably the former. Oh and I got tired reading about features noone really cares about very much.
While I strongly believe that OpenOffice has an important position and can undercut most Microsoft Office licenses sold annually, the problem lies with what isn't mentioned. That is :
- The great integration of Office applications with Sharepoint and the rest of collaborative functionality. Even if Writer catches up with Word,
- The unbelievably better user experience that Office offers. Much less crashing, near perfect document recovery and repair.
- The great breadth of converters. While you may not have WordStar lying around anymore, Word will open those documents for you just fine. This also trumps the whole argument about document formats.
- The new equation system. If he's so bitched about scientific tables and references, that's a curious omission.