[rodh257]

The video is pretty cringeworthy, but everything in it is true from my experience. Open Office as it is just isn't viable in a corporate environment. Staff members will despise it, poorly formatted documents from others won't display properly, training costs go up, it's a mess.

Sure, most of it may be Microsofts fault for their .doc format or whatever, but fact remains, Microsoft Office is king in the corporate world. Not sure that this video was really necessary, but I guess it could be good for I.T. guys to show to their boss when he decides they should swap to Open Office.

[arethuza]

I think that should be Excel is king - I suspect you could probably replace Word and PowerPoint for most users and they wouldn't notice that much.

[matwood]

I'm going to agree with you 100%. Word and PPT do not matter if the format changes a bit or whatnot (this already happens between different versions of Office). If you need to create a document that keeps perfect formatting, then you need to output in something like PDF.

Excel is a completely different beast that has so many features it's very hard to cover them all for all users. A big one we use is using Excel as the front end to MSAS. Normally we would have had to design some user/reporting interface, but instead we were able to use Excel pivot tables to access the data directly on the server. Since all of the analysts are already familiar with Excel and its pivot table interface I just had to show them how to to point it to our MSAS instance.

[Sherlock]

Warning: user perspective ahead:

I have to agree with this. I work as an analyst in an investment bank, and my tools include MsWord, Excel, PP and rarely a python script. MSWord and PP are completely interchangeable with they OO or google docs equivalents, but Excel is just another story, and its not just the learning curve, the software has a lot of features and capabilities that their competitors simply don't have (even for my less technically versed coworkers)

[pasbesoin]

What I've found interesting recently is working a bit with a very non-technical user, and finding that after a bit of introduction, Google Docs word processor is actually easier for them to use than Word.

They don't need a ton of options and mostly just get confused by them. They just need some basic controls and good looking results, and Google Docs is beginning to realize this surprisingly well.

Plus, they never "lose their file".

[thwarted]

poorly formatted documents from others won't display properly

What is the proper method to display a document that has been poorly formatted? A poorly formatted document looks like crap no matter how you display it. (I've found a correlation between the quality of the formatting the author did and the meaningfulness of the filename).

[nodata]

One by one:

> Staff members will despise it,

This isn't a point on its own.

> poorly formatted documents from others won't display properly

What is a "poorly formatted document"?

> training costs go up

Training costs only go up if you compare it against people already trained with Microsoft Office.

> it's a mess.

How? None of your points really said how, apart from the one below talking about .doc

[ErrantX]

I use OO on Mint Linux here at work where everyone else uses Word '07 + Win 7. So here is my experience:

> What is a "poorly formatted document"?

Had an issue with this today in a word document with tables, OO has serious trouble displaying full page tables properly.

There are lots of other subtle things, but I can't reliably produce documents in OO and send them to, say, a client as a word document without checking them directly in Word.

> Training costs only go up if you compare it against people already trained with Microsoft Office.

This is a non-trivial issue. And the same reason Linux is struggling to reach the corporate desktop. Re-training is, for an organisation, a quite complex business. Because of pay, contracts, organisation, finding the expertise, ticking all the legal/legislative boxes.

Another way to consider this is that a lot of people now are doing computer literacy certificates (I think some are even internationally recognised qualifications now). Employers can accept these as saying "this person can use Word fine" which saves them the cost of training and support etc. If they switch to OO this goes away (at least for a while).

>> it's a mess. >How? None of your points really said how, apart from the one below talking about .doc

This was some MS brilliance at work; because while the Ribbon bar was initially hated you will generally find that within a corporate environment employees find it quite productive and usable (at least in my experience). The look is so radically difference OO feels awkward (or so I am told by someone who tried it).

Generally speaking, looks, GUI and layout are the things that "turn users on" the most. a) they are familiar with the Word way of doing things and b) it has a really fancy looking GUI. This stacks up against OO.

>> Staff members will despise it, >This isn't a point on its own.

And yet, it is probably the main reason most organisations won't bother. Even if it takes just a few months for your staff to stop grumbling it probably doesn't feel worth it. And don't forget that the people signing off on such a swap (management) are "staff members" in this context - they will irrationally dislike it too.

I like using OO, and find it a competitive piece of software. I even convinced my parents to use, and like, it!

But I don't think it will break the corporate barrier for a while yet :)

[Create]

> Had an issue with this today in a word document with tables

Please be kind and file an issue and provide the test-case. thank you.

[ErrantX]

It has been open for a while: http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=7911 (but looks like it may be fixed soon)

EDIT: there seems no need to download Create (at this point he is on 0), it was a fair point!

[polynomial]

Fix my software without me having to tell you what's wrong, darn it!

[eitally]

Those actually are valid points, but he could have clarified it a bit. If people despise it and either A) start publicly berating the IT organization or escalating to the C-suite or B) stop being productive because they can't stand the software, it's a problem.

Formatting is a problem, especially when collaborating on complex Word or PowerPoint documents. Excel & Calc are the most interoperable. Also interestingly, OO.o (I'm basing this post on the OO.o v3.3 beta) is more compatible with MS Office 2007 than MS Office 2003 is, so your mileage may vary depending on the status quo.

Training is a problem, period. A lot of the menus -- and menu icons -- in OO.o are not logical, and it is extremely obvious that Microsoft invested mountains of cash in UX research. Not that MS Office is perfect, but since most people have been using it for a decade or more the incremental changes across versions make it much easier for them to familiarize themselves with subsequent updates. In a lot of ways, I'd compare the UX of the two like this: OO.o:MS Office::GIMP:Photoshop. The GIMP works great but is missing some functionality that a small subset of users find critical, and the multi-window UI is confusing.

I could go on....

[brudgers]

> and it is extremely obvious that Microsoft invested mountains of cash in UX research

Story of the Ribbon.

http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX08/UX09

[dhimes]

extremely obvious that Microsoft invested mountains of cash in UX research

Maybe, but they also benefitted from being there first. When organizations made the switch, they realized they were going to have to train everybody (I was with a huge organization in the '90s when all of this went down). They were only going to train on one system. In our case, we picked MS Office. Thus, good UX or bad UX, that's the UX that everybody learned. Organizations were dumping huge resources just into training, and all of that went into learning how to use MS Office.

They had a huge head start.

[jasonlotito]

> What is a "poorly formatted document"?

I just wanted to touch on this from another angle. I use OO here at work on my Linux machine. My main issue with OO is it's styles support is incomplete, to the point where it's impossible for me to keep my documents style appropriately. It seems like a small thing, but I'd much rather handle styling via style sheets then have to manually edit the items.

Here's the basic thing I discovered: OO gives you 80% of what you need from Office, but you still need that final 20%, and that's what Office gives you.

[rbanffy]

Care to list the missing 20%? OOo developers may find the list useful.

[jasonlotito]

Obviously the 80/20 numbers are pulled out of my rear, but I feel it's an accurate description. That 20% is different for each person, too.

For example, the last feature missing from OOo that I needed (and it's been reported, too) is styling for tables. Working with Internal API Docs, we use tables for parameter listings, and trying to make the tables readable and easier to use is difficult when you have to style each table individually.

[rbanffy]

Is that the Table/Autoformat thing?

[jasonlotito]

No. When I first saw it, I thought "Yes, I found styling for tables!" but no, it's not. Basically, you are still setting each table an individual style. And if you are dealing with a lot of tables, this can be a lot of updates.

Here is the open bug report: http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=11121