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IBM to launch MS Office for Linux


spinynorman
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There seem to be conflicting views in that article. IBM says it's working closely with M$, M$ denies it...

 

This is going to be very interesting to watch; but the article does make a good point, imo

 

The Office package is very good. If there's anything from Microsoft that shines, that's it.

 

OOo and StarOffice are both very good, but M$ Office seems to be the globally accepted standard.

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But which MS Office is the standard? I mean.. a document that opens fine in Office2k looks like a mess when opened in Office XP. And that is forward compatibility, not backward compatibility. Heck.. even Microsoft changes its standard with every iteration of Office.

 

Openoffice.org and StarOffice forever

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ms Office is good. It is as troublesome as any of their software. But, as far as a standard, it is a standard in the same way they made their windex system a standard-- by forcing customers to buy it with equipement. What would happen if customer choice drove the standard? How many ms office programs are actually purchased by choice, rather than forced on someone along with their hardware?

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Ms Office is about as good as giving away free crack!!!

Once you are addicted you pass it one to your friends and colleagues.

 

For an in depth analysis take Bill Gates's speech about the GPL.

Search and replace on GPL and replace with office and you have it. A cancer growing in society that infects everything it comes into contact with.

 

It has pervaded and perverted offices worldwide by a need to produce closed source binary documents that can be half opened in different versions. companies are forced to use it in order to 'send a word doc to a client' ... you are forced to stick your CV in it!! Office is the masterplan ... winBlows is just the pience of junk it runs on.

 

OpenOffice is marginally better.... but still suffers a few of the drawbacks to a lesser degree...

The stupid help wizards etc. and in particular its html editing.

If you use office to make your documents as saveAs HTML then you end up with very screwy websites. I can give 1001 examples of this but basically it boils down to one thing, if you ever want to edit them you'll need microShaft products to edit them. Mostly 95% of the autogenerated code is irrelevant. You don't see this until you come to try and edit the code then its a complete mess.

 

Open Office is much better, but still sticks irrelevant header info into it.

 

The worst examples have to be powerpoint slides.....

These are really badly handled....

 

Porting Office to *nix is akin to knowingly introducing a virus into the unix world...

Really, its planting the seeds whereby it will just trap more users which will then be discontinued in the future.

 

Anyone following the Win source code debackle will have read that the company thought to be repsosnble were the ones who ported internet explorer to Unix.

 

Just an example how this screws you over....

Our work proxy server uses a .ins file, not a .pac file for the configuration.

This only works with IE and at one point we added IE to our Unix portfolio as it was easier than getting the WinBlows people to change their ins to a .pac.

 

Later MS withdrew IE licensing for Unix (and Mac) , so now we are stuck with the same mess.

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I've been using M$ Office for over a decade, and I'm now using OOo since almost a year (even at the office where we do have M$ Office as a standard).

 

My experience is that both have pro's and con's. Compatibility is still not 100%. Some features are not there yet in OOo. In some areas M$ Office is behind to OOo.

 

What I do know however is the following:

A colleague of mine was not able to open a M$ Office 2000 doc with M$ Office 2003. I opened the doc in OOo and saved it again. My colleague was quite impressed that all of a sudden he could read the document.

M$ is turning users to install OOo, if they still want to read there old docs! So reverting to the post above from Gowater: if M$ Office is a virus, it seems that OOo is the virus cleaner.

 

Overall, I think both M$ Office and OOo are both very satisfying and powerfull application suites that give a quite decent user experience. So seen the difference in price, I see no reason to use M$ Office!

 

Ciao,

 

Sitor

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On that OpenOffice subject again;

 

There are often documents that have to be made available as PDF's (for distribution). We offer both a PDF version and a RTF-version. I know RTF isn't really a standard, but it is as close as it gets. A blessing for all consumers would be to agree between all parties to use SWX-files, or another OPEN format based on XML. But there you have Microsoft trying to lock people in and they won't budge an inch on this.

 

With OpenOffice, I can just receive the documents (usually Word) and export is as PDF, printer quality. Sure I have to fiddle with a few things (e.g. bullets and indents), but I have no need of another app for this. In fact, OpenOffice does an excellent job on it: clear, crisp and 'small' PDF files...

 

Needless to say it's quite a blessing. As is the auto-complete feature when typing and the navigator for long documents (e.g. your paper).

 

And I hear a lot of talk about those mythical 'killer apps'.

This might not be a killer app, but it IS a killer feature. Put together a few more of these features, and you HAVE got yourself a killer app.

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I'm required to do lots of writing in my job -- small wonder, I'm a tech writer cum marketeer. ;) I've been more or less forced to use Microsoft Office at my current job for over 4 years, now, and: it sucks. The problem isn't really the applications included, but how other people use them -- Word in particular. Every document I'm given for review, every paper that's handed in by partners and customers, uses "hard" styling (i.e. bold, italics, switch fonts and sizes) rather than style sheets. Results: huge documents, hard to convert, say for document management systems, lots of overhead we can't really bill our customers for.

 

Enter OpenOffice. If you refuse to use style sheets and proper style definitions, you're in for a hard time. Results: People using OO.org usually USE proper styling for their documents, which means less work for me, much less work for the tech guys who can simply strip the XML document format to add it to document management tools, web applications and the like, less overhead.

 

It's not as if you couldn't do that with Word, but--it's just so damn easy to highlight text and hit the "make font larger" button until it looks like a title. Then, there's the proprietary file formats that make it a chore to import a WordXP document even with Word97. Microsoft more or less forces its users to update their applications even if they don't need the extra functionalities. Or does document exchange count as "killer function" nowadays? OO.org isn't the be all, end all of office suits, not by a long shot. But at least it works and is far more "open" towards third party applications and environments than MS-Office.

 

Anyway, this all said, I am still looking forward to a (possible) MS-Office for Linux app suite. It will make double-checking of documents easier (right now, I need a windows box zu check whether Word renders my documents properly), and might also speed up adoptation of Linux as a desktop environment, both good things, IMO. And if Microsoft lets this happen, companies such as Adobe have one argument less to say "no" to Linux ports of their "big" applications.

 

93,

-Sascha.rb

Edited by nggalai
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I'm required to do lots of writing in my job -- small wonder, I'm a tech writer cum marketeer. ;) I've been more or less forced to use Microsoft Office at my current job for over 4 years, now, and: it sucks. The problem isn't really the applications included, but how other people use them -- Word in particular. Every document I'm given for review, every paper that's handed in by partners and customers, uses "hard" styling (i.e. bold, italics, switch fonts and sizes) rather than style sheets. Results: huge documents, hard to convert, say for document management systems, lots of overhead we can't really bill our customers for.

 

Enter OpenOffice. If you refuse to use style sheets and proper style definitions, you're in for a hard time. Results: People using OO.org usually USE proper styling for their documents, which means less work for me, much less work for the tech guys who can simply strip the XML document format to add it to document management tools, web applications and the like, less overhead.

 

It's not as if you couldn't do that with Word, but--it's just so damn easy to highlight text and hit the "make font larger" button until it looks like a title. Then, there's the proprietary file formats that make it a chore to import a WordXP document even with Word97. Microsoft more or less forces its users to update their applications even if they don't need the extra functionalities. Or does document exchange count as "killer function" nowadays? OO.org isn't the be all, end all of office suits, not by a long shot. But at least it works and is far more "open" towards third party applications and environments than MS-Office.

 

Anyway, this all said, I am still looking forward to a (possible) MS-Office for Linux app suite. It will make double-checking of documents easier (right now, I need a windows box zu check whether Word renders my documents properly), and might also speed up adoptation of Linux as a desktop environment, both good things, IMO. And if Microsoft lets this happen, companies such as Adobe have one argument less to say "no" to Linux ports of their "big" applications.

 

93,

-Sascha.rb

All very good points!!!!

I'll even extend what you said.

The next stage of an EDMS is having the documents on line and indexed/searchable.

 

Plus many technical ref documents find there way onto the intranet of companies.

Other than PDF (which is sometimes overkill) word makes a terrible hash of this.

I spent months once in wordpad editing the damned MS Word created HTML files.

 

It's pretty unbeleivable that 20 lines of code can become 1000 when using word but its true.

 

For all those with MSOffioce, try this...

Create a NEW webdoc. Add a couple of pictures, include the same one twice... and a few external links etc. etc. then add a few bolds's, italics and generally make it look reasonable... then save as HTML and open the file in wordpad or an editor.

 

Its incredible ...... you have to do it to believe how bad it is!!!! This is like another virus... you create the documents and then your only way of ever editing them again is MS word.... (Powerpoint is even worse)

StarOffice example.....

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
<HTML>

<HEAD>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="CONTENT-TYPE" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

<TITLE></TITLE>

<META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="OpenOffice.org 1.0  (Linux)">

<STYLE>
<!--
 @page { margin: 2cm }
-->
</STYLE>

</HEAD>

<BODY LANG="en-US">
<P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">This is a sample webpage created in 
StarOffice</P>

<P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">It contains some text with formatting
and some changes of <FONT FACE="Palatino, serif">fonts</FONT> 
and
style to add a little complexity.  
</P>

<P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm"><BR>
</P>
<P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">A link to an image is included here: 
</P>

<P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm"><MAP NAME="MAP1"><AREA SHAPE=RECT COORDS="0,19,84,98" 
HREF="http://www.ratp.fr/" TARGET="_self" ALT="Pressing here will take you to rarp.fr"></MAP>
<IMG SRC="./rer.gif" NAME="Graphic1" ALIGN=LEFT WIDTH=515 HEIGHT=547 BORDER=0 USEMAP="#MAP1"><BR CLEAR=LEFT><BR>
</P>
<P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">
<BR>
</P>
<P STYLE="margin-bottom: 0cm">The image is imagemapped using CERN
mapping, the default</P>
</BODY>
</HTML>

 

WORD example

<html xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml"
xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office"
xmlns:w="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40">

<head>
<meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<meta name=ProgId content=Word.Document>
<meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 9">
<meta name=Originator content="Microsoft Word 9">
<link rel=File-List
href="./This%20is%20a%20sample%20webpage%20in%20MS%20Word_files/filelist.xml">
<link rel=Edit-Time-Data
href="./This%20is%20a%20sample%20webpage%20in%20MS%20Word_files/editdata.mso">
<!--[if !mso]>
<style>
v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);}
o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);}
w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);}
.shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);}
</style>
<![endif]-->
<title>WordTest</title>
<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:DocumentProperties>
 <o:Author>gb17549</o:Author>
 <o:LastAuthor>gb17549</o:LastAuthor>
 <o:Revision>1</o:Revision>
 <o:TotalTime>3</o:TotalTime>
 <o:Created>2002-08-21T11:21:00Z</o:Created>
 <o:LastSaved>2002-08-21T11:24:00Z</o:LastSaved>
 <o:Pages>1</o:Pages>
 <o:Company>total</o:Company>
 <o:Lines>1</o:Lines>
 <o:Paragraphs>1</o:Paragraphs>
 <o:Version>9.3821</o:Version>
</o:DocumentProperties>
</xml><![endif]-->
<style>
<!--
/* Font Definitions */
@font-face
{font-family:"Arial Black";
panose-1:2 11 10 4 2 1 2 2 2 4;
mso-font-charset:0;
mso-generic-font-family:swiss;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:647 0 0 0 159 0;}
/* Style Definitions */
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{mso-style-parent:"";
margin:0cm;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";}
h1
{mso-style-update:auto;
mso-style-next:"Body Text";
margin-top:0cm;
margin-right:0cm;
margin-bottom:12.0pt;
margin-left:0cm;
mso-line-height-alt:12.0pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan lines-together;
page-break-after:avoid;
mso-outline-level:1;
background:black;
mso-shading:windowtext;
mso-pattern:solid auto;
border:none;
mso-border-top-alt:solid white 4.5pt;
mso-border-left-alt:solid white .75pt;
mso-border-bottom-alt:solid white .75pt;
padding:0cm;
mso-padding-alt:3.0pt 0cm 3.0pt 3.0pt;
font-size:22.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";
color:white;
letter-spacing:-.5pt;
mso-font-kerning:10.0pt;
mso-bidi-font-weight:normal;
vertical-align:super;}
p.MsoBodyText, li.MsoBodyText, div.MsoBodyText
{margin-top:0cm;
margin-right:0cm;
margin-bottom:6.0pt;
margin-left:0cm;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";}
@page Section1
{size:612.0pt 792.0pt;
margin:72.0pt 90.0pt 72.0pt 90.0pt;
mso-header-margin:36.0pt;
mso-footer-margin:36.0pt;
mso-paper-source:0;}
div.Section1
{page:Section1;}
-->
</style>
<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:shapedefaults v:ext="edit" spidmax="1027"/>
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:shapelayout v:ext="edit">
 <o:idmap v:ext="edit" data="1"/>
</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]-->
</head>

<body lang=EN-GB style='tab-interval:36.0pt'>

<div class=Section1>

<p class=MsoNormal>This is a sample webpage in MS Word, <span style='font-family:
"Arial Black"'>fonts</span> have been used for a little complexity. <span
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal>It is interesting to see how much information is stuck into
the html file.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes">  </span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><![if !supportEmptyParas]> <![endif]><o:p></o:p></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><!--[if gte vml 1]><v:rect id="_x0000_s1026"
href="http://www.ratp.fr/" style='position:absolute;margin-left:-3.45pt;
margin-top:6.2pt;width:1in;height:1in;z-index:1' o:button="t" filled="f"
stroked="f">
<v:fill o:detectmouseclick="t"/>
</v:rect><![endif]--><![if !vml]><span style='mso-ignore:vglayout;position:
absolute;z-index:0;margin-left:-5px;margin-top:8px;width:96px;height:96px'><a
href="http://www.ratp.fr/"><img border=0 width=96 height=96
src="./This%20is%20a%20sample%20webpage%20in%20MS%20Word_files/image001.gif"
v:shapes="_x0000_s1026"></a></span><![endif]><!--[if gte vml 1]><v:shapetype
id="_x0000_t75" coordsize="21600,21600" o:spt="75" o:preferrelative="t"
path="m@4@5l@4@11@9@11@9@5xe" filled="f" stroked="f">
<v:stroke joinstyle="miter"/>
<v:formulas>
 <v:f eqn="if lineDrawn pixelLineWidth 0"/>
 <v:f eqn="sum @0 1 0"/>
 <v:f eqn="sum 0 0 @1"/>
 <v:f eqn="prod @2 1 2"/>
 <v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelWidth"/>
 <v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelHeight"/>
 <v:f eqn="sum @0 0 1"/>
 <v:f eqn="prod @6 1 2"/>
 <v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelWidth"/>
 <v:f eqn="sum @8 21600 0"/>
 <v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelHeight"/>
 <v:f eqn="sum @10 21600 0"/>
</v:formulas>
<v:path o:extrusionok="f" gradientshapeok="t" o:connecttype="rect"/>
<o:lock v:ext="edit" aspectratio="t"/>
</v:shapetype><v:shape id="_x0000_i1025" type="#_x0000_t75" style='width:6in;
height:6in'>
<v:imagedata src="./This%20is%20a%20sample%20webpage%20in%20MS%20Word_files/image002.gif"
 o:title="rer"/>
</v:shape><![endif]--><![if !vml]><img width=576 height=576
src="./This%20is%20a%20sample%20webpage%20in%20MS%20Word_files/image003.gif"
v:shapes="_x0000_i1025"><![endif]></p>

</div>

</body>

</html>

 

Not forgetting the word one creates a new directroy with the images and makes a new image for every representation of the same image....

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Sheesh.. no wonder everytime I re-save a word document to oo.o native format, the size just drops down considerably.

Good point there. Did a comparison @ work, last week. Looked like this:

 

Document: 14 pages, 2 images.

 

MS Word original: 680KB

OO.org Word export: 520KB

OO.org sxw: 320KB

 

I rest my case.

 

93,

-Sascha.rb

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