Open Office Shortcomings

I've been using open office for about a month now. In general it works very well, but I am experiencing three problems:

Gradient fills in Impress (the PowerPoint equivalent) do not display correctly. When I open a file previously created in PowerPoint, rectangles that contain gradient fills display in the wrong direction. For example a rectangle that contains a gradient of white to grey that goes left to right will display as grey to white. I can make the changes and save them, but when I reopen the file the problem comes back. I have not found a way to work around this.

Connectors in Impress diagrams re-route themselves in awkward ways. If I draw diagrams with connecting lines it seems to work exactly as in PowerPoint. When I

save, close and then reopen the file, the connectors are often moved into rather strange configurations. After I move them back and resave the file, the program still re-routes the lines when I open the file again.
I cannot seem to find the data analysis tools in Calc (the Open Office equivalent of Excel). By default the data analysis tools are not installed in Excel and it is not commonly used by most people. This module is used for statistical work such as regression, histograms, calculating standard deviation and so on. Unfortunately I have to revert to Excel to get these tasks done!

These three issues should not be critical for most people and I believe that the Open Office package would work well for the majority of users - and chance are the existing short comings will soon be addressed.

Open Office Excel & Calc

So far so good. I have been using the open source equivalent of Excel: 'Calc'. I have used it to update a rather complex financial model originally built in Excel. This workbook has several inter-related spreadsheets and complex calculations. I put some care into the layout. I've also used some more advanced features such as conditional formatting and I have several charts. The workbook was created in Excel 2007 and saved down to Excel 97-2003 format.

In Calc, the document opens and displays fine. Even the conditional formatting survives. Some of the charts are formatted awkwardly but they are still meaningful. Editing and updating the file went very well. Menus and buttons work almost exactly the same way as in Excel 2003.

Once my changes were made, I was able to save the file back to the Excel 97-2003 format. When I shared the file, it opened and displayed without any problems on Excel 2003 and on Excel 2000. However - and this is a big catch - when I opened the file in Excel 2007, it did not go so well. I got this message:

(It says: "Excel found unreadable content in [file name]. Do you want to recover the contents of this Workbook? If you trust the source of this workbook, click Yes.")

After clicking yes, the file opens but all of the formatting has been lost and the charts have disappeared!

Interesting… If OpenOffice is able to save a file that can be opened in Excel 2000 and Excel 2003 why would this compatibility not work in the 2007 version? You do not have to be a conspiracy theorist to see that it is not in Microsoft's interest in to allow OpenOffice to freely exchange data with MS Office products. So for the time being if you need to open an OpenOffice in Excel 2007, you will have to open it in an earlier version of Excel first, save it and then open it in Excel 2007!

Living With Open Office

Microsoft Office is by far the most popular set of business applications in use today. By 'most popular' I mean most commonly used rather than 'most liked'. I believe it has become a standard for two reasons. First, there are what's called Network Effects. The value to me as a user of using Office increases based on the number of other people that are using Office. There is a great deal of value to being on the same platform as the people that I work with and exchange data with. The second reason that MS Office is so ubiquitous is due to learning. Once people are familiar with a way of doing things, it is difficult to change. Microsoft has historically benefited from the fact that users are familiar with their tools and have invested in learning how to use them.

I've got the new version of Office and it looks like Microsoft has abandoned the second reason for their success. The interface is not familiar and everything is in a different place! The suite requires a learning period that can be frustrating. The concept of tool-bars has been replaced by the 'ribbon'. In many ways it is an improvement on the interface but it can be frustrating to try and find the tool you need. We have not deployed this to anyone else in the office as I am worried about getting inundated with calls for help and I worry about the wasted productivity as users struggle through the learning period.

The cost of using MS Office is high. Not only is it several hundred dollars for each machine, but it will also be expensive in lost productivity if we are forced to upgrade to the new interface.

So what are the alternatives? There are two that I will be investigating. The first is Google Docs - a free web based suite of programs. The other is Open Office - a free open source set of applications. For the next while I will try to set aside my MS Office and use only these free tools. I will report back here!