Comments on: 5 reasons why Microsoft Office 2007 is better than OpenOffice

By: Sergey

Sergey — Wed, 12 May 2010 11:08:50 +0000

Recently, I’ve been fighting some Visio diagrams inside a Word document (all 2003). And I wanted to scream. Call me uneducated but for doc editing I turned to Office 2004:mac and there I saw that some of paragraph ended not with a “reversed P” symbol, but with “enter” sign (shift+enter). And I was not drunk when I typed those on a PC! Clearly, PC Word 2003 would not “see” the difference, but Mac version did! I could see and change the formatting difference, effectively “debugging” the doc.
As for Visio, I could not simply find the orthogonal connectors and I switched to OmniGraffle on a Mac, OG allows to easily add junction point to connector, has “intellect” to correlate the distances you’re drawing etc – and is much much more usable and effective tool.
As for Wintel, I don’t know. If I only had to have a PC, I would use Ubuntu+OOo+Dia (for diagrams). All free. Dia is nice but I could not find how to add more connection points to boxes.
BTW That new “Lynx” Ubuntu Linux is styled after Apple Leopard, and is uber-nice.

By: Paul

Paul — Sat, 16 May 2009 10:24:50 +0000

Its interesting to see the comments continue to roll in on this fairly old post.

@Rick, you happen to mention features which not one of the Office users I’ve ever met has ever wanted, needed, or cared about. And yet the things I mentioned in my post are things that regular folk love about Microsoft Office 2007.

OpenOffice.org won’t capture a big slice of the market if it can’t match Microsoft Office in the eyes of the average user.

By: Rick

Rick — Wed, 13 May 2009 10:11:45 +0000

Nothing more but FUD. There is more to editor than nice GUI (which of course it important).
There are things like standards, platform-independence,proper regular expression support, extension system. Check those in Microsoft Office.

P.S. please first do a proper review. If you would do so you would know that the proper name is OpenOffice.org

By: Brandon

Brandon — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 22:20:07 +0000

Ms Office 2007 Is far better than opeoffice it templates are ugly it slow and buttons are small while office 2007 ribbon make useing it a lot easier.

By: Linux-user

Linux-user — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 00:21:21 +0000

@John…Open Source means the code is available and free for you to change it.
It does not necessarily mean free of charge as in gratis product.
There is plenty open source software that I have bought.

Where I live the office 2007 costs over 140 euro but personally I dont spend a dime on microsoft products. I dont like any monopoly so I wont support it.

Shiny buttons dont make a good product, they just make it shiny.
Saying OO lacks a massive amount of usability and features only tells me, you haven’t worked with it properly, if at all.

By: pete bateman

pete bateman — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 16:01:27 +0000

Anyone who blindly hands over their cash to Microsoft without taking a serious look at free alternatives needs their head looking at.

Anyone who chooses MSOffice over OOo on the basis that it looks pretty or has some arcane functionality that they will likely never use, clearly has more money than sense.

By: OOo user

OOo user — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 01:59:33 +0000

“End users that prefer open source software can be summed up in one word, CHEAP. They probably also make their kids eat house brand Cocoa Puffs. Using Open Office is free but it lacks a massive amount of usability and features.”

Based on that comment, the poster named ‘John’ can probably be summed up in one word too. But I digress.

I am not a POWER user of office apps, and I find that OpenOffice is perfect for me. It would be stupid and wasteful of me to drop money on M$ Office when OOo can do everything I need and then some. If that makes me “cheap”, so be it. I’d prefer to think of it as LOGICAL.

As for the comment “Open source projects are great for tinkerers” – this is more lunacy. Does John realise that OOo is backed by a company worth billions of dollars and is effectively the free and slightly detuned version of a commercial office suite? We’re not talking about software put together in a suburban bedroom here, so quit with the ridiculous FUD already.

Long story short, OpenOffice.org is perfect for the majority of average office suite users. I would suggest that MOST people have no reason to buy Office – other than perhaps being afraid they’ll be seen as “cheap” by John if they don’t.

What I took from your five reasons was…
1) The interface is prettier in Office
2) The Help is prettier in Office
3) The tables interface is prettier in Office and maybe slightly quicker to use (although that may not be the case according to a commenter above)
4) The templates are prettier in Office
5) Office has Smart Art

While that’s all great I’m not about to pay good money based on those five phenomenal advantages, and nor should any average user feel the need to. I’d simply recommend everybody try OOo before committing to Office, because there’s every chance it will do everything they need of it.

By: John

John — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 06:49:27 +0000

I agree with the Assassin, Office 2007 features are by far superiour to Open Office.

Open source projects are great for tinkerers that like to work on programs like car guys like to work on classics. This is fantastic but it doesn’t make the program more useful or better.

End users that prefer open source software can be summed up in one word, CHEAP. They probably also make their kids eat house brand Cocoa Puffs. Using Open Office is free but it lacks a massive amount of usability and features.

The old adage is true, “You get what you pay for.”

By: Henry

Henry — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 23:51:35 +0000

To insert a table in OpenOffice 2.3 Click on the drop down arrow next to the table icon in the toolbar.Left click drag to the required size. Done. Floating toolbar appears to apply formatting. So how is 2007 better? Anyway it wouldn’t run on my 667Mhz P111. But GNU/Linux does. So no point in the comparison really. You pays your money and you makes your choice. Or don’t pay money but contribute to bug fixing, documentation or whatever you can do. I like that.

By: Jeus

Jeus — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 21:14:00 +0000

I have worked a lot with office xp, 2003, 2007 and openoffice. Well, openoffice is better, far better:

1. Much easier to use and better menus

2. Better documentation, thousands of pages [for free] about every feature and online wiki

3. It never crashes, while MS Office sometimes refuses to open large files

4. Easier to recover a lost or corrupted file

5. Higher rate of development

6. A lot of useful add-ons

7. Much more powerful in writing math symbols

8. LaTeX compatibility

9. Better styles and formatting

10. Spellcheck for every language

11. MS Office is very poor in drawing (flowcharts etc.) compared to OO