[jacquesm]

Open Office is after many years of hard work still not up to snuff when compared with Microsofts suit.

In part that's still due to the document formats not being really open (so there will always be implementation issues, some of the docs literally say 'do this like word 3 did it' or something to that effect).

Another part is that it is simply a huge undertaking.

The biggest advantage MS has over OO is Excel vs the Open Office spreadsheet, it's not even close.

In spite of all that I don't use Microsoft stuff any more. The amount of features that I use in these packages is small enough that I can get by with a lesser program and not being locked in is an advantage as well, what sealed the deal is that microsoft does not sell a version for linux ;)

Personally I think that the microsoft office suite has more to fear from things like Google Docs than from Open Office in the longer term.

[billybob]

I'm with you: I use OO, and I also think it's not great.

I use it because the document format is open (I've lost documents in the past to format extinction), and because the software is free.

I think it's not great because of tons of little bugs in the spreadsheet and presentation software. Like it doesn't remember my formatting for new cells in a column, even though I highlighted the whole column and applied it. Like I can't reliably move images around on a presentation screen.

Those kinds of frustrations really add up. If I had advice for the OO team, it would be "don't add features. Grind away at bug fixes and usability testing until everything behaves as expected."

If people said "OO doesn't have all the features of MS Office, but it works great for what it does," that would be a great milestone and would drive a lot of adoption, I think.

[katovatzschyn]

I use OO as well, because of Linux, but I dislike it very much. If I did not use LaTeX I would have switched back by now. I am nearly infinite calm person in general, but OO has cured me of this. It is the only program that has ever made me angry.

[rimantas]

  I'm with you: I use OO, and I also think it's not great.

I have tried to switch multiple times, but thad did not last for long. OO severely lacks polish. I am lucky not to have either MS Office or OO installed on my machines, my simple needs are fully met either by TextEdit or Google Docs. If I want something more fancy I have a copy of iWork—once again I am lucky I don't exchange document often. Frankly, I have little hope for OO.

[tokenadult]

The biggest advantage MS has over OO is Excel vs the Open Office spreadsheet, it's not even close.

Hear. Hear. The OpenOffice spreadsheet is very much of a kludge.

In spite of all that I don't use Microsoft stuff any more.

And despite of what you correctly said above, that is also my experience. I have been able to run OpenOffice for years now, and since it was updated to open .docx files and similar files from the newer generation of Microsoft products, I can get my work done with OpenOffice.

Personally I think that the microsoft office suite has more to fear from things like Google Docs than from Open Office in the longer term.

Yes, my collaborators and I are finding more users for Google Docs and related products from Google every day.

P.S. I expect to switch to Linux on my next personal computer, as my son the computer science major has long urged. All the younger generation in my household use various distributions of GNU/Linux.

[drinian]

How many people use the features in Excel that are missing from OO? Surely it's a small percentage of the total number of Office licenses out there.

[eli]

For home users, maybe true. Though I'd imagine many home users of Excel would be better served by Google Docs.

But it's a massive number of business users. Everyone at my company relies on at least one spreadsheet that has macros or complex pivot tables. It's a bit scary how much critical data is moving through Excel in the typical business. My understanding is that Wall Street relies pretty much runs on Excel.

[pasbesoin]

Speed, too. You run into some pretty hairy Excel constructs, and the Excel team's optimizations really pay off.

It's been a number of years, but I used to spend a good part of my days in Excel. It has its own quirks -- may its inaccessible underlying formatting constructs be damned [1] -- but hey, can that sucker eat spaghetti (code -- so to speak).

(BTW, it may help to understand that many financial constructions are politically driven and otherwise idiosyncratic, to the point where you will never be able to code them up in a formal, regularized, and consistent construct. The "pointy haired boss" (whichever one, on whatever day) is always having you either insert or compensate for another "x factor".)

[1] As one, but not the only, example, try formatting 999D9 as text with leading zeros, some time. You'll find an odd result you eventually realize is the value with D9 expanded as an exponent. Like Fortran (so I was eventually told while mentioning this behavior -- never used the language, myself), Excel treats not just "E" but also "D" as demarcating an exponent. (Besides, you're formatting as "text", so why is it interpreting the end as an exponent? Although I can see where the leading zeros specification may throw it into a different mode.)

[rbanffy]

> It's a bit scary how much critical data is moving through Excel in the typical business

It's scary that people may actually do and allow others to do it.

[btilly]

It's a bit scary how much critical data is moving through Excel in the typical business.

It is a lot scary that an average of 1 formula in 10 in Excel spreadsheets is wrong.

[AndyKelley]

Care to explain?

[gaius]

The customers for Excel are accounting firms buying 50,000 seats at a time. And the CFO probably uses it personally, so it needs to keep him happy. In contrast to most "enterprise" software, which is so bad because the people making the purchasing decision never have to actually use it themselves, they just get their PA to do it.

[flogic]

Managers love Excel. Some of them are really good with it. It's probably the wrong tool for their job, but it is a tool they know how to use. For managers it's the lingua franca of data manipulation. They view it the same way most of us view pipes and the Unix command line tools.

[bediger]

If you'd stopped at "Managers love Excel", I'd agree with you. Unlike the lucky duck up above, I've never seen a manager write a spreadsheet that included a single macro, active cell or calculation.

I've only seen managers use Excel to format columnar data, and then only because "Word" does such heinous things with text in the cells.

[danielnicollet]

This is so true. The other big item missing from OO for Windows is the outlook equivalent (with email but also calendar, exchange, etc.) Evolution doesn't come close even for small business usage.

[kierank]

I know of a very well known company that runs complex visualisation software on Linux workstations because it performs better but dual boots Windows only for Microsoft Office (and nothing else)