OpenOffice makes government inroads

TalkBack 44 of 113:

Next »

« Previous

• Thread View
• Flat View

I can only speak of our use...

Hard to judge what other users need or to rate it high or low, all I can talk about is our situation really. Please keep in mind that we have one young fellow that is a huge open source advocate. Even has a "Linux Geek" T-shirt he wears. When it comes to open source he is well ahead of anyone else in the company and we defer to him when it comes to setting up and using open source products.

Writer:

We found that it lacked the ability to deal with (import) RTF files effectively. It really didn't matter what application created the RTF files, all of them lost formatting during the import operation.

Fonts have been a real problem. Open source fonts are available to replace proprietary fonts but they simply do not look as good, and we find that spacing of characters gets bumped around quite a bit during the replacement operation. This leads to text wrap being changed and changing the overall appearance of the <ocument.

We tested openoffice on both a Windows (XP) system and a Linux (RedHat 9 Ximian2 desktop). After several days of tinkering he could not get the spell checker to work properly on the Linux box. It missed many misspellings and falsely report misspellings when there were none. (In fairness our guy said he needed to change the dictionary but hadn't done it yet.)

We were never able to get the mail merge feature to query our data base effectively and generate form letters in the way we wanted. (I am certain that if I wanted to have him spend more time on it he would be able to sort it out but time is expensive.)

While it won't effect some users, we use collaboration extensively with both our clients and our remote locations. There simply is no feature like this available in openoffice. No, we will not go back to playing tag by mailing documents back and forth and not knowing which is the latest version or if Joe Bob even seen the changes.

While we did get it to work, page numbering was a real pain to use. Especially when the document had multiple starting points. An example is our contract that has attachments or exhibits and each has a different starting number. Intuitive and easy to use it isn't!

We also found the export to PDF to be very limited when compared to other applications with the same ability.

Impress:

We use PowerPoint to create a lot of sales, demo, and general presentation information. Bluntly, Impress simply doesn't. We were never able to get it to use multiple monitors correctly. This is a key feature when giving presentations where the person giving the presentation wants to see his notes on his screen while the audience sees the presentation. (By the way, we never got Writer to use multiple monitors either. Something that we really like when creating technical manuals and want to see opposing pages in the manual.)

It's ability to use multimedia (video) is EXTREMELY limited. If you can get it to work at all. It seems to require plug ins that may or may not be available.

We also found a number of problems when exporting a presentation to a flash file. Transitions and animations were simply dropped. May as well have simply used some jpeg images and done it by hand.

We were unable to play a narration across multiple slides or during a slide transition. That's a big show stopper in self running presentations.

In general we found that Impress didn't have the features or functions found in PowerPoint had in it's 95 version, much less anything newer.


Those are the things I can think of off the top of my head but there were a number of other issue that we ran into before I finally pulled the plug on the "experiment". This was after say 20 hours of work spread out over a weeks time frame by our open source guy. Even he finally admitted that openoffice was in many ways very limited and at this time could not meet our needs. Perhaps one day it will, but for now I'm afraid not...

Posted by: No_Ax_to_Grind   Posted on: 12/18/03 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

Alert moderator to an offensive message

Subscribe to this discussion via Email or RSS

SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads

• Reducing Server Total Cost of Ownership with VMware Virtualization Software VMware VMware virtualization enables customers to reduce their server TCO and ... Download Now
• The True Costs of Virtual Server Solutions VMware In an economic environment that is repeatedly heralding the message "do ... Download Now
• Building the Virtualized Enterprise with VMware Iinfrastructure VMware VMware virtualization software has been adopted by over 120,000 enterprise ... Download Now