I interrupt the non-stop spite, snark, and general bitterness to announce that Open Office is so good, I do not know why anyone uses anything else.
Now go cling to your guns, you bitter sumbitches.
Open Office
by John Cole| 44 Comments
This post is in: Science & Technology, Did You Know John McCain Was A POW?
calipygian
I’d cling to my gun but I don’t know if I should put down my arugula and serrano ham sandwich or soy latte first.
Alex Knapp
You know, as someone who just a few years ago mocked the idea of open source, I am sometimes surprised to realize that now just about every tool I use is. Open Office is fantastic, as is WordPress and a million other tools.
Jon H
I can’t deal with a product shackled with that utter abortion of a name, “OpenOffice.Org”
Punchy
/commences uncontrollable and roiling guffaws…
Kirk
Loved OpenOffice on my M$ box. Ran into a frustration on my Mac – with the X11 requirement it runs a lot slower. And NeoOffice has some significant (for me) and frustrating flaws – not least, if you set print areas in the spreadsheet, they’re not retained.
But yes, I highly recommend OpenOffice for most folk.
ThymeZone
Welcome to the world of software. The fact that something actually works is cause for celebration. Which at BJ, given the technical history we are making here, is understandable.
It would be like buying a new car and saying, wow, this Zipmobile actually gets me to work and back every day. For a week now! And it only cost me twenty five grand!
Why we put up with shitty software is something I really don’t understand. Maybe the inventors of Word Press can explain it to me?
rachel
OpenOffice is all I use anymore. (OK, once in a while I use Gnumeric or KWrite.)
One suggestion I have for anyone opening an MS spreadsheet in OO: Don’t run the macros! They are not compatible, and you’ll get in trouble if you do.
rachel
Does OxygenOffice work for you? (It’s another version of OpenOffice that’s been spiffied up a bit.)
Observer
I do Microsoft .NET for a living. I use OpenOffice on all my home machines and it is the only productivity suite I’ll support for friends and family.
CrazyNewfie
I used OpenOffice to write my masters thesis, more for the hell of it than any other compelling reason. It was doable, but painful. The program had some really weird UI issues and some flaky bugs.
That said, this was in 2004, and I’ve heard a lot of things have been improved since then, so it isn’t too surprising to hear that people who use it now like it. I’m glad there’s a viable alternative to microsoft.
Richard
Last I checked, OpenOffice’s footnote feature sucked. OpenOffice also isn’t integrated with Zotero, so for research purposes, Word is the word.
Adam
Couldn’t manage Track Changes in OpenOffice. Maybe I just haven’t found it yet.
The Moar You Know
I’ve got a cross platform house; a Windows XP box, Server 2003 box, and two Linux boxes (one Xandros and one Ubuntu). OpenOffice is great on all of them.
Work requires the usage of MS Office (contractual obligation), but I’m hoping that sooner or later that won’t be the case.
Kirk
TZ, I have used WordPress in several places. None have had the problems I’ve seen here. I don’t know if it’s the computer it’s on or something in his configuration, but I really, really don’t think it’s WordPress causing these problems.
rachel
Edit > Changes > Record, Protect Records, Show, etc.
NonWonderDog
I tried OpenOffice about a year ago and hated every last bit of it. The worst part was the spreadsheet program–I’d finally figured out how to get to the menu to make the kind of chart I wanted, didn’t find the chart, and went over to the web help to find a nice “feature not implemented” message. I’m much more at home with my $50 school-subsidized copy of Office 2007 Enterprise. I don’t really want to give up VBA, either, and I don’t care to learn OpenOffice.org Basic (mostly because it’s got a really stupid name).
I prefer GIMP to Photoshop, though, and by a wide margin.
David Hunt
I tried out Open Office just last week in the vain hope that it would be able to read my old Quatro Pro files. Excell 2003 stubbornly refuses to read them and I have been unable to find a patch that will allow it to read them. Does anyone know of a way to get either Excel 2003 or OpenOffice Calc to read .wb2 files…without losing every f***ing formula?
Jim Henley
Open Office is shit. ESPECIALLY Calc. The word processor was pretty reasonable, admittedly.
LarryB
Kirk, Agree about Xll and NeoOffice. They finally got off their asses and ported OpenOffice to Aqua, though. It’s still in beta, but it works pretty well.
cleek
five of the top ten blogs on TruthLaidBear are running WordPress.
WP isn’t the problem
Don McArthur
Even worse, the use of of Microsoft Office perpetuates a scam involving expensive and never-ending updates that you force upon everyone you share those products with. Congratulations on seeing the light – now go get an Ubuntu LiveCD and see if you can free yourself from the bloated, spyware-and-virus infested, crapware operating system you’re probably using.
RSA
“But it’s really great shit, Mrs. Presky!”
I don’t use OpenOffice, but I do love me some TeXShop.
reid
You’ll be using linux and no longer showering soon enough. (Happened to me years ago; started with linux in ’96.)
Billy K
I’m going to continue to bitterly cling to my guns, religion and Word.
Nate W.
An open letter to John COle, et al.,
Your website is T3h Sux0r! Not your blog, which I enjoy reading, but I am unable to half the time because the Intertronz hate you and your site is full of fail. I don’t know if someone flushed a hand towel down the series of tubes at Balloon Juice but for the love of the Flying Spaghetti Monster call Roto-Rooter and get that shit snaked out or something. I mean, I’d hate for your spot on my RSS feed to get replaced by someone who posts his readers mediocre pictures of what is obviously not their view from their window, but desperate times…
liberal
I like Linux, hate collectors of economic rents like Microsoft, and so on, but I’m not all that impressed with OpenOffice.
xyzzy
For reals. TeX/LaTeX are where it’s at.
Although OpenOffice is a nice free way to modify those irritating .doc things that one’s M$-bound peers send around. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay real money just to edit a memo.
b-psycho
I’d considered OpenOffice. But only because for some reason Word takes FOR-EV-ER to load, especially when double-clicking a document file. Also, I dunno if it’s something with the 2000 version in particular, but if I try to open multiple doc files by clicking it opens multiple windows of Word, even though I remember past versions opening one copy and then everything else in tabs. But I hesitate to install it because of compatibility concerns.
Foxit PDF Reader is a nice replacement for Adobe though. No more frozen windows and component loading, I just double-click the file and it immediately opens. If only everything worked that fast…
If this shows up multiple times, fire the gerbil that runs your webspace. He can always get a job up some dude’s ass.
Mike D.
Oh, they quit trying to run an office suite under Java? Well, they must have figured out a way to get the “write once, run everywhere” thing actually _to work_ without a list of caveats longer than a Microsoft EULA? Interoperability doesn’t come with a dependency hell that involves learning the Kanji of Java protocols JQZ-001 through JQZ-999 — pointlessly, because if you want to do anything interesting you might as well download and install all of them and save time and irritation? Well at least it isn’t slow as hell anymore, I assume. Or at the very least it’s 99.9999% invisibly compatible with MS Office, which is as eternal and ubiquitous as nitrogen gas?
To sum up — has every last trace of Java been hunted down and destroyed? “Give people a choice between a work-alike office suite and the real article and they’ll go for the real thing every time.”
Sorry, I’m still a little bitter over a J2ME Internet application project that blew up like cellophane noodles in less than a week. Finally the Man with the Plan said, “Jesus Christ, Java is a jealous god, isn’t it? Do the neologisms ever end? This is like Jehovah’s Witnesses who also go door-to-door selling Amway.”
“It’s actually worse than GNU,” one guy said. “Sun just invented, check it, a little Java Mindstorm dingus the size of a bar of soap. It has these snap-in modules, you can put them on the network, you can do D/A and A/D, take pictures, all kinds of stuff. They’re open source and cost about as much as an Asus Eee. I hear Amtel is shitting their pants — imagine a 16-bit microbrain that could interface with anything with copper wire or semiconductors, including grab-bag surplus displays and all eighteen wireless networking protocols… pick your development language and IDE… even cowboy up and scratch ASM on the metal. Total pipe dream, though.”
“At any rate, fuck Java. And unfortunately fuck our project. Supporting this thing would be a fate worse than death.” We contemplated the intended user base and shuddered.
“Well hell. There are Java gurus out there, you know, you could always –”
“Whoa, jump back! You want me to _hire_ JWs who go around with iPods full of Amway motivational tapes? Kiss my ass.”
Andrew J. Lazarus
OO3 beta 2 for Mac runs just fine. I find the word processor just as good as MS Word. The spreadsheet is not as good as Excel and in particular its charts are dreadful and limited. Since I’m not fond of Excel charts, that’s pretty damning.
cyntax
As long as you leave me WordPress errors,* you cnatake everything else.
*Obligatory Disclaimer: This statement in no way asserts that WP is the cause of the errors but simply that it is the observable correlation of whatever plot RedState has hatched to take revenge on John for his ongoing apostasy.
ThymeZone
Ah, the Panglossian Sofware Company brochure:
“Except for the shitty reliablity and performance, it really is the best software money can buy.”
LarryB
Have to agree with that one. I still use it for business, but then I’m a backroom engineer, not a sales rep.
Equal Opportunity Cynic
/commences uncontrollable and roiling guffaws…
/me avoids guffawing, but smiles at the fact that people will ALWAYS blame the program whose name is biggest on the error message instead of the one that’s actually down.
(You’d think WP developers would have learned that they’ll get blamed if their name is in 48-point type on the error message when MySQL can’t be reached.)
Equal Opportunity Cynic
TZ, I have used WordPress in several places. None have had the problems I’ve seen here. I don’t know if it’s the computer it’s on or something in his configuration, but I really, really don’t think it’s WordPress causing these problems.
Kirk, you really don’t get it.
The message telling us MySQL is down has a REALLY BIG header that says WordPress. Therefore WordPress is to blame, ldo.
Neil H
Zotero claims to have an OpenOffice extension for download. Admittedly, they say it’ a beta version…
I don’t know about footnotes since real men use a reference style that doesn’t require them, like Harvard referencing.
Karl Steel
OpenOffice also isn’t integrated with Zotero.
Incorrect. You just need to install the appropriate script. Easy enough.
I’m doing all my projects now with OO (on a Dell Inspiron 1420 with Ubuntu preloaded) and doing my cites with Zotero. Footnotes aren’t giving me any problem. Is Zotero better than Endnote? In many ways, yes, and not only because it’s free. But, yes, I’ve found it a little buggy when I’m tracking changes in a 40-page document with 120+ footnotes.
seeker6079
Word. Have you ever looked at your Processes Memory Usage and compared Adobe and Foxit? The latter uses only about a third or so of the memory that Adobe does. The Air Force is lucky that Adobe didn’t design the software for the navigation system: turn it on and every other %^#$^#$$%#$% system in the plane would shut down.
BTW&FYI, Firefox has an excellent add-on for Foxit Reader.
g-rant
Kinda true. But if you’re graphically representing data on a regular basis and are using excel to do that (or god-forbid doing stats with it)… well you’re wasting a shit-ton of time and effort. I’ll hold my tongue from here on out.
McMartin
You push a button, the components you checked are installed, the software is there and runs. Welcome to, like, 2003. Implementation language is irrelevant. I haven’t had to worry about package dependency bullshit in any language since I gave up on gentoo.
grendelkhan
Someone actually wrote a thesis in a word processor? I can’t imagine that; I’ve written a few short papers with only a handful of references in Word or OpenOffice.org, and it drove me up the wall. After using LaTeX with BibTeX, I couldn’t believe anyone ever used a different system.
michael
research stuff in openoffice/word with zotero/endnote? crikey. well I guess it’s OK if you like pain .. me, I’d use LaTeX/bibtex any time. But then I’m in a field where that is the norm anyway, so I guess I’m lucky.
grendelkhan
Additionally, as to whether OO.o uses Java or not, basic functionality is there without it; you can run OpenOffice.org without having Java installed.
Mike D.
“Basic functionality” and “office suite” don’t really belong in the same brochure, do they?
Anyway, shout out to my homies in 2003. 2008 is in the house up in this mufuh. Apple turned loose a pretty spiffy “it just works, life is too short for HOWTO syndrome” Unix on the market, and they’re still pwning the low-single-digit market-share ‘hood, which is pretty surprising frankly; and if you ain’t rollin’ with the latest release of Microsoft Cubicle, you’re just making things complicated for yourself and everyone around you.
Oh yeah, ’03 kinfolk: _sell your stock and real estate and DO NOT buy any at any price._ Might want to pick up some gold and drop your silver like a bad habit, too. Much love!