[plug] Word97 vs Openoffice

[Bernd Felsche]

On Saturday 28 August 2004 15:56, Brad Campbell wrote:
> Bernd Felsche wrote:
> > Word97 will invariably crash if the memory image is corrupted.
> > OOo will simply chug along and do the best it can with what's
> > recognizable.

> While I do realise this, for 99.9% of documents what the end user
> sees is that Word loads the document in 5 seconds and OOo takes
> 30. For that .1% of corrupt documents Word crashes, but this is
> also an expected behaviour in the minds of most users and they
> simply swear at it and try something else. Trying to get them to
> swallow an extra 25 seconds of response lag to justify not
> crashing that .1% is bloody hard.

Remind them of that when they corrupt a document on which they've
spent a week; and all it does is throw a protection fault whenever
they try to open it. It's _only_ 0.1% of the time. :-)

> Early last year I had a "spreadsheet" which was really a horrid
> bloated mess that some lunatic within the company created that
> Excel used to load in about 10 seconds. It took OOo nearly 15
> minutes to load the same spreadsheet. Now granted it never
> crashed, but then in the time I had to use this spreadsheet,
> neither did Excel97.

That would have been an old version of OOo. 1.1.x seems to be much,
much better.

> I also concur with Camerons point that the OOo UI is appallingly
> slow (on my laptop anyway). I still use it when I can, but it is
> not the quickest beast in the world.

OOo is still a memory hog. 1.1.2 is definitely snappier than 1.1.1,
so there's been work on that front.

> I'm not trying to bash OpenOffice. I use it and love it. My last
> company used it exclusively for 5 years (Well we started with Star
> Office 5.1 anyway) and I got to make the policy so we only used
> Microsoft as an OS to run Protel and AutoCAD, other than that we
> were completely MS free.

Now you could use CADsoft Eagle and VariCAD.

> This time around it's a different kettle of fish and prompting
> change is far more difficult.

Yes. I understand that changing the way people do things is always
difficult. I've recently brought email to a branch office and I was
asked why they weren't using Outlook like head office. I replied by
email with a few CERT and TheRegister URLs and quoted from various
IBM published documents. Head office manager is now asking why
they're still using Outlook. :-) [It's because they're still using
an Exchange mail sewer.]

Companies love to "standardise". With that, they think that they
have to restrict what applications are actually available for a
particular job. IT "departments" are often to blame for that; not
making it clear that the restriction is only to minimise the work
and expertise required to support the applications by the department.

Monoculture is monoculture; even if you're Open Source. A variety of
applications increases the likelihood of something going wrong but
increases your probability of surviving *when* something goes wrong.

Nevertheless; the choice of applications to do a particular job
often _stuns_ people; but that's mainly because of Microsoft's
domination of the desktop.  Nobody but Microsoft writes software, do
they? :-)

-- 
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