Linux

Jul 20 2008   9:02AM GMT

Do We Really Need Microsoft Office? No in the Past and Future

Posted by: William Peterson
Business, Enterprise, Google Docs, Corporate, Online Apps, OpenOffice, Microsoft, Office, Learning, Business presentations, IT professional, Review, Solutions, Technology

Yesterday I read the an article “Do I Need to Buy Microsoft Office?” at Ask a Geek of latest Popular Science. As the its result of “Our geek weighs the options and finds Office might not be the best bet”, I agree that Microsoft Office’s rivals are really powerful and nice, such as Google Docs, OpenOffice or Corel’s WordPerfect Office suite. On my personal side, I would rather choose Google Docs, whether Google would charge me some fees or not in the future. But most businesses nowadays must have the Microsoft Office suite installed, while IBM extremely loves his Lotus Notes software as exception.

In the future, desktop software will be completely replaced with Web applications without doubts. So Microsoft Office is certainly the product for current days. But we can not rush to the future without it because of its popularity in the past. Because a lot of people are working with it now, and will work with it in the future for a long time. In order to avoid any bad incompatibility, our business must have and manage it. Just think about, you partner sent you a document in DOCX format, but you cannot read the contents properly with your OpenOffice, and you will ask for another PDF copy? That’s also why a huge enterprise IBM can not abandon its ever popurlar used Lotus Notes easily.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Mar 19 2008   11:54AM GMT

Gonna Catch Up: OpenOffice.org 2.4 Release Candidate

Posted by: William Peterson
Office, OpenOffice, Enterprise, Channel, PowerPoint, Microsoft, Business presentations, Review

The open-source office application suite, a free alternative to Microsoft’s ubiquitous Office, is nearing final release on version 2.4. With OpenOffice.org on track to launch version 3.0 later this year. OpenOffice.org continues to evolve. As practice makes perfect, in the coming version, its interface continues to develop into almost a twin of MS-Office’s pre-ribbon interface.

About the Office PowerPoint’s competitor Impress, there’s no problems opening a presentation created in Power Point 2007; and slide transitions applied in PowerPoint also carried over in Impress. The slideshow was editable in Impress as well. It seems that OpenOffice has added more animations options as slide transitions.

It’s great that OpenOffice is compatible with MS Office, but Microsoft Office file formats are not native to it. Everyone thinks that OpenOffice has to be an exact MS Office clone. That’s not the case, and OpenOffice has a lot of features that Microsoft Office doesn’t, like the way it integrates with Mysql to perform advanced variable stream data features for printing.

Whether corporates want to direct clients towards OpenOffice as a software solution depends on a variety of factors: budget, client’s dependence on complex spreadsheet processes and macros and the interoperability of OpenOffice with UC platforms and email and messaging systems. Certainly, OpenOffice could be a good choice, and it’s always good for further development by yourself, not just under the Microsoft’s construction.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran