Hi Mark. Possibly the environment that one works in has a significant result on the problems encountered, and hence why it is hard to debug all problems because they don't always arise until the environment changes. I encounter little problem with spread sheets or power point, but mostly with docs. May be that is the nature of the people I need to interreact with and the way they use MO. Their pattern of use with MO creates formats that the filter developers have not encountered and hence my problems. It is good to have the discussion and bring out the issues so that they can be assessed and addressed (one way or another). steve On 2011-04-06 07:38, Mark Preston wrote:
Steve, While I understand your points, and Mike's, I can't say I agree with them particularly. On one issue we do agree and it is perhaps something to be looked at by the development team. That is the automatic timed save of documents while worked on. It is the case that should you lose a working document LibO or OoO will try to recover it next time it is started, but it does not always work nor assure a copy is made of all documents. As you say, that is not usually acceptable to businesses. However, for the rest I disagree. I have heard the claim about files from Microsoft Office needing to be changed in Open Office before but only rarely seen it to be true with a word-processed document. It is true that not all Powerpoint comes over to LibO accurately since LibO does not have available all the features that PPT can guarantee by being a closed and proprietary system. To me, this seems absolutely inevitable and not a fault at all. Similarly, I have heard about problems with Excel and especially the way pivots and data handling operations are carried out but also with "rounding features" to make the spreadsheets balance out. And yes, there are differences - although for the "rounding features" I have seen used are because there are technical errors with storage of some numbers in Excel that have been widely discussed on the web. I have to say that while I have seen that doing "the same sort of thing" to the Calc GUI results in a different operation, it is not yet clear to me whether the difference is the way that Calc is used or the way the same operation is carried out. Perhaps you could give us details? Most common of all though, is the complaint that "my company macros" don't work. Frankly, I am sick to death of hearing this one! MS macros are written in an MS language for MS features in an MS environment on MS software. There is no way in *hell* and Open Source software can pinch it, copy it, reverse engineer it, duplicate it in new code or anything else. If the macros are any use, then rewrite the damn things! On 05/04/2011 20:08, Steve Edmonds wrote:All. I tend to agree with Mike on many aspects. We use 12 instances of LO in our business and I support more privately. I inter-react with an educational institution and others predominantly MO, our business is mainly LO. For a corporation or large entity to adopt LO it must be able to transfer MO docs well. I find that probably 90% of MO docs I receive don't open in LO without need of reformatting, a corporation could not tolerate this. I found that LO does not time save (auto backup) .docs, a corporation would not tolerate that. LO development is going great, but to be considered for corporate/large organisation environments some consideration of "what is stopping LO adoption" is required. These are not show stoppers but a different emphasis on development and bug fixing. May be this is not the interest of developers and may be corporate environment is not the future of LO. I have seen some discussion regarding the mapping out of the future of LO, LO design and developer focus. May be it is a good discussion to have soon. steve On 6/04/11 5:12 AM, Mike Hall wrote:Charles, I think an appreciation of this point is absolutely crucial to a successful product, which is why I bang on about it. And I'm only faithfully recording my own experience. Unfortunately there is a difference in quality, which implicitly you seem to recognise. Yes, it's true that there have been several poor MSO releases, but in a large organisation those are not normally deployed on the corporate desktop until the problems are fixed. MS does eventually retreat on its silly ideas and there are, to all intents and purposes, almost bug free MSO versions so far as the vast majority of end users are concerned. This isn't the case with OOo/LibO - there has never been a release of such a quality that support costs could be contained at a realistic level. I wish there were and I can fully understand why this community would be very inclined to argue black is white here. Further, it's pretty frustrating to report bugs and find that they aren't fixed within a reasonable period. I don't think you would deny that that is a fairly common experience and complaint from OOo/LibO users. I see that on many bug reports. My perception and experience of the choice of application software in large organisation is that it is much more rational and hard-headed than you imply. The main cost is not the licence, for which in any case large organisations generally pay very little per desktop. It's user support that is costly, ie overall cost of ownership. Mike On 05/04/2011 16:52, Charles-H. Schulz wrote:Hello Mike (since we're all top posting in this thread)... To claim that MS Office is devoid of bugs is somewhat extravagant. There have been several versions of MS Office that were plagued with bugs; people complained but the products continued their roll-out. I don't think MSOffice dominance can be attributed to a better quality than OOo/LibO or any other contender, but to a specific framing of the market environment better known as a monopoly. As someone who has spent over 10 years analyzing competition in IT I can tell you most governments are prone to external pressure and lobbying. Choice of one office suite over another is decided almost never on quality, but on price, peer-pressure, business advantage, personal ties and favours, and more often than not, laziness and fear of the unknown. This being said, LibreOffice does have bugs -just like any other software- and we need to tackle them, so let me invite everyone here to report bugs on our bug tracker, and if possible to propose a fix; we'll deal with more bugs better and faster :-) Best, Charles. Le Tue, 05 Apr 2011 15:56:11 +0100, Mike Hall<mike.hall@onepoyle.net> a écrit :Laszlo, I worked for perhaps 15 years with various versions of MSO as both a power user and as a senior manager with responsibility, inter alia, for MSO support. I met all the senior international people at the time, from MS and many other suppliers. During that time, whether with short or long documents, I personally came across only 2 instances of genuine MSO bugs. Since retirement 16 years or so ago, I have been almost exclusively using and promoting OOo/LibO. I know what some of the technical advantages are, and I appreciate them. However, each time I start a major new activity or project, I run into a major deficiency or bug which has typically taken me a day or more's work to understand, write bug reports and work out how to get round. Most of those bugs are still unfixed. This kind of 'wasted' effort simply does not occur with MSO, or at least it didn't to me, nor did I hear complaints of that kind from the thousands of end users I was to some degree responsible for internationally. In my professional opinion and with the maximum regret, I do not believe that OOo/LibO has a product offering of adequate quality to be cost-effective in a high-cost labour economy. The support costs are just far too high. Thus, it is my considered though painful conclusion that the majority of IT managers in those economies would correctly judge MSO to be the better option. As I said, I wish it were different, but it is not. We can lobby and protest as much as we like, but in my opinion there is absolutely no chance of extensive corporate or governmental adoption in Western economies until the product is of comparable quality to MSO, by which I primarily mean an absence of bugs. Mike On 05/04/2011 12:37, Kürti László wrote:Mike, Have you ever tried to work with MS office? Have you ever made a doc longer than 10 pages? How many times you had to reedit those MS docs? Just about every time you opened it in a different PC. Pls don't get me wrong, but MS office works just as OO.o or LibO. And this is not the case, but please let yourself off the hook of MS FUDs. :) Laszlo ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mike Hall"<mike.hall@onepoyle.net> To: discuss@documentfoundation.org Sent: Tuesday, April 5, 2011 1:21:03 PM Subject: Re: [tdf-discuss] European Commitee enter talks with MS licences, Please make your action today against it. On 05/04/2011 12:11, Kürti László wrote:Even with docx, xlsx format could be read and written by OO.o or LibO (or at least a workaround can be find).Laslo, Don't get me wrong, I entirely agree with all your sentiments. Unfortunately, in practice the description of the situation I gave will dominate. The quote from your email above seems to confirm that even your company has experienced significant end user support issues. I just wish it were different.
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