Posted on 02/09/2010 6:00:53 AM PST by ShadowAce
Regular readers of this blog will know that I'm a big fan of OpenOffice.org, and that I think it has the potential to break through into the mainstream. Maybe it's already begun, judging by these figures from webmasterpro.de:
The numbers were collected using a novel methodology: Over two hundred thousand international visitors where analysed by the web statistics service FlashCounter. By checking (using Javascript) which fonts where installed on the system, we could identify the installed Office suites.
Spread around the world, those 200,000 users aren't a huge number, so I'd take the numbers quoted with large doses of NaCl. But even in their general indications, they are pretty remarkable. For example, Poland clocks up 22% for OpenOffice.org against Microsoft Office's 68%; the Czech Republic also had 22%, against 76%; while Germany did well with 21% and 72%. Nations in descending order thereafter were France, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Belgium, Sweden and Austria.
The UK, almost needless to say, turned in a miserable 9% - the same as the US – alongside a massive and sheeplike 80% use of Microsoft Office (75% in the US). Shame.
What's interesting about these figures – particularly the high numbers in certain countries – is that it takes OpenOffice.org into the same kind of market-share territory that Firefox occupied a few years back. Which raises two interesting questions. First, are we seeing the start of the same kind of growth trajectory, and secondly, how can the open source community help propel it along that graph more rapidly?
As Simon Phipps rightly pointed out on Twitter, this development would make now a spectacularly bad time for Ubuntu to drop OpenOffice.org from its Netbook edition: on the contrary, it should go all-out to promote it as broadly as possible if it cares about the larger free software ecosystem. Maybe something for the incoming COO, Matt Asay, to think about in his first week at Canonical....
Microsoft has been going downhill ever since it decided to FIX Windows 3.11
I think Ghostscript is a xNIX tool that should work for you:
PDF Creator uses Ghostscript under the hood.
There were one or two deal breakers and one or two serious annoyances each for me in Calc and Writer. Can’t remember all of them but one example was searching on non-printing characters (paragraph mark is ^p in Word, tab is ^t, and there are numerous others). Plus, I couldn’t get it to print on envelopes to save my life. In Calc, one issue had to do with Drag-and-Fill or Cut-and-Pasting cells. Can’t remember what exactly.
Now bear in mind I can’t stand Word 03 or 07 either. I actually went out and bought a copy of Office ‘97 which is the one I’ve liked best so far (although I never used 2k).
Another good (free) suite is NeoOffice
Hello Mr. Ballmer, nice to meet you.
MS Office quit improving at about MS Word version 3. Everything since then has been bloatware. But I’ve put up basically because I have to - it’s what most companies, including those I’ve worked for, have standardized on.
But version 2007’s insane user interface is what drove me to OO for use at home.
Slightly off topic, but can anyone recommend a good word processor...JUST a word processor?
I didn’t mind MS Word 2003 at the office, but didn’t like Word 2007. OpenOffice takes way too long to load up when I double click on a file. I don’t mind paying for a decent, fast word processor, but I don’t want to buy all of MSOffice.
I don’t use spreadsheets and I use web mail at home.
Do what I did -- upgrade to Office '97 "The Bess Office Yet (tm)"
Oops! My #23 and #24 were my personal experiences to answer your question at least as respects the features I use. Another item I remembered is that all the OO apps share a common recent file list, so you only have 10 entries or so, and half of them are wasted on files from other apps. Stupid.
Word apparently has some interactive forms that OO could not do. Would not work for me anyways.
First think I did when I got a new computer was put OpenOffice on it.
I have three free office programs on my machine: Open Office, Lotus Symphony, and MS Office 2010 beta. All three are great. I don’t know why anyone pays $300 for an office suite.
How, in good conscience, can you starve Clippy and all his little paper clip children?
I have two Dell laptops, an 05 vintage 810 and an 08 1721. Ubuntu 9.10 wireless works with the 810, but not the 1721 and wireless is all I have available.
What a freakin' nerd.
I used the little Einstein guy!
Tell me. Office 07? Lets rearrange the interface to make it easier to use.
I’ve never cussed so much in my life.
“no real company is going to switch over to some open source program that might not be around in a year.”
I’m not sure I understand this as well as I would like to. Are you saying that the OO software will magically disappear from my computers in 12 months? I figure that since it reads and writes .doc and .xls files that it doesn’t really matter if it evaporates, but I suspect it won’t.
I think the newer versions are able to deal with .docx and .xlsx files already, making upgrades unnecessary for the next several years, assuming that the xml format becomes an industry standard.
Office also went to an XML-based file store for Excel files, which takes much longer to load larger files. Of course it does take care of the old 256-column limitation on previous versions.
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