Dell Chooses Ubuntu

[chicane]

B0L0CKS, I’m using Office 2003 and Open Office and I have just tested the above, both works and can be opened by either application.

If you use open office save it in MS Word format if you want to open it up in Word. No problems.

OK. Now try a selection of documents taken from enterprise environments that use those features beyond trivial test cases.

And watch as your document falls to pieces, headers start resizing themselves for no apparent reason, text starts to word wrap within drawings due to differing font metrics (on Linux at least), and a series of other minor problems come up.

I seriously want to like OO and want it to work - it's the last piece in the full Linux desktop migration puzzle for me - but at the same time I can't be playing around with software that might make me look stupid in front of clients.

The OO team have done a fantastic job in reverse-engineering Microsoft's binary Office formats and making open-source equivalents that are 99% compatible - but 99% just isn't good enough for me.

[Paddy]

OK. Now try a selection of documents taken from enterprise environments that use those features beyond trivial test cases.

And watch as your document falls to pieces, headers start resizing themselves for no apparent reason, text starts to word wrap within drawings due to differing font metrics (on Linux at least), and a series of other minor problems come up.

I seriously want to like OO and want it to work - it's the last piece in the full Linux desktop migration puzzle for me - but at the same time I can't be playing around with software that might make me look stupid in front of clients.

The OO team have done a fantastic job in reverse-engineering Microsoft's binary Office formats and making open-source equivalents that are 99% compatible - but 99% just isn't good enough for me.

I do not doubt you but I have just opened several complex Word document in OO and they are fine. There will always be some problems in translation but when WordPerfect was king, Microsoft has similar quirks with compatibility.

There are millions of unlicensed versions of MS Office used not just by intervals but also by companies. OO is going to be an easy get-out solution for them.

I have found that OO seems to be the standard now in hotels offering Internet workstations in the lobby.

[timh]

I'm necessarily on Windows, and I'm only a relatively lightweight 'office suite' user, but I've been on OpenOffice exclusively for about a year with few problems.

(Except for a dodgy copy of Outlook, for when clients absolutely insist on it.)

[portseven]

I think if I did a Openoffice.org deployment again on a gig I would be pushing for moving to OpenDocument format wholesale.

Openoffice.org does a great job of opening and saving ms-office documents but they are still not 100% (thanks to MS for not opening their formats). I think it would just be safer to be 100% one way or the other.

And OpenDocument is looking to be a good bet in the long run anyway, what with its' ISO accreditation and more and more organizations adopting it.

[chubba]

Vista?

Goodness gracious me, I'm still using Win98 and IE5.5.

Sorry, was Xoggoth bragging about his shiny new OS, should have known you were a Windows 98 man. SE I hope.