Openoffice vs Microsoft Office

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OO Reliable for Critical Data?

Hi Paul,

both at my company and at home we are using both MS Office and OO. In particular at home I consciously decided to primarily use OO since I don't have to worry about any licensing issues.

And in order to be able to form an opinion I have had installed both OO and MS Office for several months now and use them in parallel.

For most of the day to day jobs I find that it doesn't really matter which of the two bundles I use, and so I use whatever I feel like.

There is however one thing that I had to learn the hard way. I use spreadsheets for my managing my personal finance. I have developed a spreadsheet for over 10 years, and early this year I decided to convert it to the OO format. I used it for several weeks under OO.

However, when I noticed that OO screwed up a different spreadsheet (inserting a row would crash it with no way to recover the file). I checked whether my financial spreadsheet was screwed up as well. I can't afford to loose that information.

And although the file was fine, I couldn't get it back into MS Office. All graphics were gone regardless of whether there were created with MS Office or OO. And most of formulas were gone, too, in particular when they referred to cells or ranges on different worksheets. I was lucky enough to salvage most of the data.

Bottom line from my personal experience: conversion from MS Office to OO generally works quite fine. Converting back from OO to MS Office is coincidence. And most important: I know that for the foreseeable future I will not use any critical data in an OO file. I love to have the choice but at present I don't see it. I'm sure others have different experiences and that's fine. Maybe I just hit the one case out of a million that destroyed my file. But I cannot remember that MS Office destroyed any of my files in the last 10 years. This, too, might have been just pure coincidence, though, and others might have experince the opposite of what I observed.

So all in all it boils down to trust and personal preference. I think most of the day-to-day jobs can be done with both. For me, personally, OO has lost its credibility with regards to not destroying my data.

Kind regards,
Manfred.

p.s. I'm not a shareholder or an employee of MS!
---
Manfred Lange.
Agile Utilities NZ Ltd.
http://www.agileutilities.com

Posted by: mlange   Posted on: 06/11/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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