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M$ not playing fair to OpenOffice

Posted by iveen on · 24 comments
LXer; By Iveen Duarte 		Mail this story
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I have been involved in a crusade, switching users at my workplace from Windows desktops to Ubuntu desktops, however, there have been a lot of complaints, and, people is requesting to go back to Windows, most of those complaints are regarding their office suite, and they are valid and justifiable complaints.

Linux has matured since I have started using it a few years ago, I remember I have started using Fedora, then, switched to OpenSUSE and finally, thanks to the recommendation of a friend of mine (former co-worker) I have landed on Ubuntu. I found it to be a very robust desktop and then I switched every computer at home to it.

I wanted to replicate the same effort at my workplace, and I started with IT Department, and of course, everything went smooth, then I moved to other departments, having a very moderate success, but, then when I moved to the power users, the complains started to roll in, to the point, that users are asking to be migrated back to Windows.

We did troubleshooting of so many things to make the switch smoother for our users, but, regardless of that, our enemy, was somewhat invincible, and nothing seems to overcome such an obstacle, but don't get me wrong, this enemy is cheating, and this is giving it the edge required to defeat us.

Our sworn enemy is M$ Office Suite which just refuses to read and display the documents created on OpenOffice properly, even though those documents are being saved as M$ native format (XP/2003 format), so this way, charts that display perfectly on OpenOffice are all distorted when opened with M$ Office, axis titles that appear below the chart, are shown above the chart on M$ Office, and this is just a tiny example, of so many other things that apparently "don't work".

This is completely unfair, I think M$ Office Suite should play with the same set of rules, with no advantages or edge positions, and if you the user are to choose between this software and open office should be because of its features, cost, etc., not because the supposed incompatibilities between both, Open Office has done a tremendous effort to read the files created on M$ Office, and M$ Office is not doing the same, even though, those files are like I said before, are saved in a native M$Office format.

This really is a Linux Breaker, and it shouldn't.

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Comments (24)

4 earlier comments in the full thread.

tuxchick ·
Rob Weir says it's mostly #2. He's a bit more clueful on this issue than most folks.
Sander_Marechal ·
tuxchick: That makes no sense. #1 is about writing binary MS-Office files (doc, xls, ppt) in OOo and opening them in MS-Office. #2 is about opening ODF files directly in MS-Office. The original article is clearly about #1

Quoting:Our sworn enemy is M$ Office Suite which just refuses to read and display the documents created on OpenOffice properly, even though those documents are being saved as M$ native format (XP/2003 format)


I'm pretty sure #2 is true, but it's not what is happening to the author of the article.
tuxchick ·
Thanks sander, my brain read it backwards. Sheesh. Must be a coffee deficit or something.
hkwint ·
Quoting:#2 is about opening ODF files directly in MS-Office.


As far as I understood it's about opening .doc / .xls files created by OOo in MS Office. Might it be the case that newer versions of MS Office deliberately børk MS-Office files created by OOo?
gus3 ·
Quoting:Might it be the case that newer versions of MS Office deliberately børk MS-Office files created by OOo?
If that is not the case, I'll eat my hat.
tracyanne ·
It's quite clear to me that Microsoft is deliberately sabotaging interoperability by being deliberately pedantic about standards specifications, when it suits them.
caitlyn ·
...and it ALWAYS suits them.
mdeguzis ·
Is this author brain dead, or does he not know what wine is , or the commericially support Crossover Office? It flawlessly runs M$ office 2007 and 2003, I mean COME ON, how does he not know about that.????

wow, see its people like this that give linux a bad name
Sander_Marechal ·
Ah yes, because shelling out for expensive MS-Office licenses makes sooo much sense when you're trying to convert away from Microsoft.
gus3 ·
Quoting:...and it ALWAYS suits them.
Except with ODF. The standard clearly dictates spreadsheet cell address format, and Microsoft did not follow the standard.

And let us not forget about their lack of PNG alpha layers, proprietary extensions to HTML and JavaScript, and their own internal incompatibilities with their published standards...

Quoting:Ah yes, because shelling out for expensive MS-Office licenses makes sooo much sense when you're trying to convert away from Microsoft.
When documents have a lot of scripting, as spreadsheets or text documents with some dialog forms, it may not be possible to ditch MSOffice. However, it can make a lot of sense to run MSOffice on an OS that is more stable and secure.
caitlyn ·
gus, let me rephrase. It always suits Microsoft to ignore and subvert standards. Customer lock-in is always good for business.
hkwint ·
Quoting:Customer lock-in is always good for business.


I guess you should add: "But only for Microsofts business, not for the users business."
techiem2 ·
Of course, because your typical user will create a spreadsheet in excel and save it as odf cuz their friend set them up with OO at home and showed them how, then when they open it at home and find it "broken" they'll determine that OO is obviously to blame because everyone knows that MSO is the "best" and therefore can't be to blame, unlike that free thing their friend installed for them.
caitlyn ·
hkwint: In the context of my original comment that should have been understood. Microsoft does what's good for Microsoft.
keithcu ·
The problem is that the MS Office formats are insanely complicated, and so the OpenOffice team needs to do more work on it to increase the compatibility.

I've seen problems, and so am not surprised that power users in enterprises who make complicated documents find things that are missing.
jdixon ·
> The problem is that the MS Office formats are insanely complicated,...

I'd say that's both a fair and absolutely accurate assessment. :)

They also apparently vary with the version of Office, and are not completely compatible between versions.
keithcu ·
> I'd say that's both a fair and absolutely accurate assessment. :)

It should be, I was a programmer in the Office team at MS ;-)

Yes, the formats change over time. Each new version of Office added new features, and so changed the file format to support reading / writing those new features. Several times, they would make major changes, like supporting Unicode in Office 97.

While OpenOffice does a quite good job with DOC, XLS, PPT, they still have bits to do there. And they have a lot to do in the Access format. And they should also support Publisher. Etc.

If I ran Sun / Oracle, I would double or triple the size of the OpenOffice engineering team. Last I heard Sun had only 30 programmers working on it. Microsoft has more than twice that much working on IE alone! It is almost like the people who fund OpenOffice don't appreciate the importance of it.

My biggest complain with free software is that many of the people who proclaim they support it don't invest very much. A big part of Microsoft's success is the incompetence of its competitors.
tracyanne ·
Quoting:Last I heard it had only 30 programmers. Microsoft has more than twice that much working on IE alone!


And IE is still a pigs ear, I'm impressed. But yes the OO team should be bigger, and there should be people working on interoperability with Publisher.
Arion ·
I'm not sure I get the issue here. If the entire company is switching over to OpenOffice.org then I fail to see the need for compatibility with MS Office.

If you need to share documents between multiple organisations then use PDF. OOo has a nice PDF export button, and other word processors have add-ons to export to PDF.

If however the is a legitimate need ( as opposed to familiarity-based-want ) for MS Office, then why not run it under Wine or Crossover?
Sander_Marechal ·
Arion: There isn't a legitimate need for MS-Office, but there may be a legitimate need to create documents in MS-Office's native binary formats. There's a difference.

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