Microsoft Hates OpenOffice

[nightfox1405241487 0]

Today I got my Maximum PC magazine and I found this in the Fun Size News section:

When questioned abiut the open-source office-suite rival OpenOffice.org, Microsoft execs recently said the free office suite was great - for someone living in 1996. "OpenOffice is really designed to solve the problems that Microsoft focused on 10 years ago," said Alan Yates of Microsoft. "OpenOffice is fine if you have very limited needs. Count us as folks with "limited needs" then; Editor in Chief Will Smith used OpenOffice exclusively for most of 2004.

I guess you can also count me as a person with "limited needs" too. OpenOffice is my primary office suite with Office XP as a secondary.

Wow... Microsoft sucks. I'm glad I primarly use Linux...

[N]F

[xboxrulz1405241485 0]

lol, I use mainly OpenOffice too. 100% OpenSource 100% freedom!xboxrulz

[CaptainRon 0]

I don't think Microsoft Office XP provides anything really revolutionary or the so called 2006 era features. OpenOffice is great for your day to day regular editing.

[iGuest 3]

I'm just hoping MS leans more towards using Open Document Formats for their documents instead of all this proprietary document means.I use OpenOffice, but for better portability I turn my documents into PDF, don't worry, with the compression techniques I use on it, it is sometimes comparably smaller than any MS Document, though that's not using compression techniques on the MS Document (if there is any?).OpenOffice does what I need it to do, if it didn't I wouldn't use it. I don't really care about the features MS Office has, I probably would have only used 10% of those features. I wonder how well MS knows their product and if they could tell the difference from an MS Office produced document and an OpenOffice produced document.Cheers,MC

[Dinesh Samant 0]

MSOffice is crammed with features that nobody uses or even bother to know about. I am using both openoffice and msoffice for last 2 years and didnt find any great advantage using msoffice. I have not used majority of the features in msofice and even dont know what they are for. Guess I too can count myself in limited needs catagory. Fortunately this catagory seems to be very large and more than 90 % of the office suite users will fall in this. What I dont understand is why microsoft is adding useless features and making it bulkier instead of focusing on making it leaner and faster. I think the same logic applies for windows OS too.

[abhiram 0]

I use Openoffice all the time (except when I have to submit a doc file, that's when I open it in MS-Office just to make sure the layout is fine). As far as my requirements go, it's just great. Of course, anyone who has used MS-Office will definitely have no problem using OpenOffice at all. Because, from the looks of it, both OpenOffice Write and Math have many features that are there in MS-Office and most of them in similar places. For example, if you've ever tried to sort data in Math according to a particular column, it looks just like MS-Office, even found under the same menu (Data -> Sort).But, I just feel that OpenOffice has quite some way to go before it gets accepted as anything other than a free (and very good) clone of MS-Office.

[pyost 0]

M$ hates it? I'm not suprised. It's in the human (or company) nature to hate rivals that stand out more. Microsoft Office is rather normal, but something that is good as M$ Office and free at the same time cannot be hidden. And this is a proof that more expensive doesn't always mean better.

[XIII 0]

WoW, you Didn't know before?, Microsoft hates even itself , it was noticed before from the behaviour of microsoft anti-spyware product and the new product windows defender, each one of them treats the other as a threat, lol, they hates eachother

 

I'm just hoping MS leans more towards using Open Document Formats for their documents instead of all this proprietary document means.

 

I use OpenOffice, but for better portability I turn my documents into PDF, don't worry, with the compression techniques I use on it, it is sometimes comparably smaller than any MS Document, though that's not using compression techniques on the MS Document (if there is any?).

 

Cheers,

MC

 

mastercomputers, what is compression techniques you use?, i'm creating pdf files using adobe acrobat pro 6, but always it creates a big file, how to compress it?, i always need to convert all my docs into pdf for better portabillity but this problem costs me so much space and bandwidth always.

[iGuest 3]

WoW, you Didn't know before?, Microsoft hates even itself , it was noticed before from the behaviour of microsoft anti-spyware product and the new product windows defender, each one of them treats the other as a threat, lol, they hates eachother

mastercomputers, what is compression techniques you use?, i'm creating pdf files using adobe acrobat pro 6, but always it creates a big file, how to compress it?, i always need to convert all my docs into pdf for better portabillity but this problem costs me so much space and bandwidth always.

 

Hey XIII,

 

Well I assume you use Windows, I use Linux myself and a tool called ps2pdf (I think it's available for Windows too), in which the file I write first, is a postscript file (.ps extension), then I convert to a pdf from their, the default values of ps2pdf is enough, e.g. UseFlateCompression=true and CompressPages=true. What ps2pdf is suppose to do is create compatible Adobe PDF files, it succeeds in my case.

 

If I'm using OpenOffice, I export the document as a PDF, open it in a PostScript editor then save it as a ps, then use the ps2pdf command. It turned my 500KB file into ~50KB compressing it 90%, I even tested it by emailing it to people and seeing how it would look on their computers, it appeared exactly how it should have, though I must admit I don't splash documents around with too many fonts that would not be available across different systems otherwise embedding fonts would increase the filesize but it did have borders and font formatting, which remained perfect.

 

The reason I came about this, is exactly why I don't like MS Documents, because I use OpenOffice, I knew how portable PDF files are, but discovered the large size that the files became, so I needed to find a way to compress them, and the above is what I came up with, but there could be even simpler methods out there, this was the first thing I had done that worked for me, if I discover any other ways, I'll keep everyone informed here.

 

The other alternative to ps2pdf is Acrobat Distiller, which might even produce smaller again, though it's not as robust as ps2pdf. You would have to look into how to use Distiller, as I have not use it in a long time and can't remember the exact process to do such a thing.

 

Cheers,

 

 

MC

[Jeigh1405241495 0]

I too use open office 90% of the time, I only use M$ Office on campus computers and when I too need to check formatting for submitting work in M$ filetypes.I must add though, it shouldn't be shocking that they would say something like this... I mean come on. If they were asked about OO.o and they replied "Actually it does everything Office does... AND FOR FREE!!!" It wouldn't make much business sense They won't exactly sell alot of copies of an expensive program suite by telling people there is a great free alternative haha.

[XIII 0]

Hey XIII,

 

Well I assume you use Windows, I use Linux myself and a tool called ps2pdf (I think it's available for Windows too), in which the file I write first, is a postscript file (.ps extension), then I convert to a pdf from their, the default values of ps2pdf is enough, e.g. UseFlateCompression=true and CompressPages=true. What ps2pdf is suppose to do is create compatible Adobe PDF files, it succeeds in my case.

 

I use liux as a primary os but sometimes i need to use windows, some programs i can't use on linux like the software i use to follow the stock market live and some others.

 

If I'm using OpenOffice, I export the document as a PDF, open it in a PostScript editor then save it as a ps, then use the ps2pdf command. It turned my 500KB file into ~50KB compressing it 90%, I even tested it by emailing it to people and seeing how it would look on their computers, it appeared exactly how it should have, though I must admit I don't splash documents around with too many fonts that would not be available across different systems otherwise embedding fonts would increase the filesize but it did have borders and font formatting, which remained perfect.

 

is there any PostScript editor to work on windows?, if i find something like that i will be able to convert files to pdf by ps2pdf as you do even on windows, now i think i could do it on linux, but what is the best PostScript do you recommend as i didn't use one before.

[iGuest 3]

 

I use liux as a primary os but sometimes i need to use windows, some programs i can't use on linux like the software i use to follow the stock market live and some others.

is there any PostScript editor to work on windows?, if i find something like that i will be able to convert files to pdf by ps2pdf as you do even on windows, now i think i could do it on linux, but what is the best PostScript do you recommend as i didn't use one before.

 

Check if Adobe can save as Postscript files.

 

On Linux you can use any of the Postscript Editors, like KPDF or KGhostView or better yet, just use the other tool that GhostScript gives you which is pdf2ps. The reason I used the editor was so when I viewed it, I could see if it looked any different, and then when I saved it as .ps, I opened it to make sure it still looked the same.

 

Maybe I should write a full on tutorial on this with screenshots, etc and step by step process of what I did. I should try and find more information on this though and see if there's any better techniques than this.

 

 

Cheers,

 

 

MC

[Quatrux 4]

Well, I don't care if MS hates or likes OO, but I use OpenOffice as my Office, but I rarely need a lot of those functions and features it offers, usually just to print documents and write stuff. Its main feature is that it is free. On Windows I also have OfficeXP and for sometime now I need to use it, because my IT exam is coming and it won't have Linux or Open Office, so I need to get used to it (Windows and Office (Word/Excel/etc.) ) but it will be quite easy, there is nothing fancy there. Pascal is what I need to get deeper, they require to write quite hard programs. But do you sometimes feel that OO is slow ? this is the only downside I feel about it, maybe because it is written in java, or maybe not.

[kalyan1405241522 0]

ofcourse i use most of the times OO onlynow the OpenOffice 2.0 is lot improved than it ie earlier version... and ofcourse but more to be done in this...

[paranoya90 0]

Openoffice is pretty good, but not as good as microsoft office..