29 August 2005
The passion of the office
Over at /. they're tearing up on OpenOffice. At first I felt bad for the little office that could: raked over the coals in the one place it could find fellow travellers. Then I was happy that it didn't get a free pass--too much praise of anything at /. usually makes me suspicious. The problems:
- Slow load time,
- Too many crashes,
- Featues not equal to MS Office yet (the main article is an MS/Open office comparison),
- File formats not interchangeable with MS Office
Others pointed out the incredible savings from using OpenOffice if you can. All agree that it's a best fit only for single-office/home-office (SOHO). I've been using OpenOffice for a while and have generally been happy with my low-impact use. It fits my simple word processing and graphics needs as it would for any home user. I'm not the activist type, but I'm really close to removing MS Office from all of the machines on the home network just as a symbolic purgation. Still, as with browsers, there are some situations that you need that other product because of some proprietary design or somesuchthing.
Side note: What I appreciated the most from the /. thread was the no one brought up the spurious argument that you can't/shouldn't criticize something that's free. Whether it's open-source, Google, blog articles, or art, too many people think the object is somehow above examination. Most on the OpenOffice thread correctly argued the intent and whether and how much that intent was acheived.
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