OpenOffice is good enough for you and me

I am not the most demanding office software user, but I am hardly the simplest either. I have used OpenOffice for five or six years to some degree, and I have never had a problem in opening all useful files from MS users. Sometimes they used to look a bit funny as sometimes hidden stuff was not hidden anymore, but you could read the text and work with it quite fine.

Since OpenOffice 2.0, I have been able to open and edit any file that I have come across and send it back to an MS Office user without problems, and without having them know the difference. These days, I personally almost always keep text as .txt for as long as possible, OpenOffice is there to add formatting and make PDFs for me.

We'll see what happens to this happy picture when MS Office 2007 gets deployed. I am hoping that most IT departments will set the default file format to be classic Word .doc or RTF.

But MS 2007 has more features, I hear you cry. Well if OpenOffice has 500 features more than I will ever need to use, then Microsoft Office has 2000 more features than I will ever need to use. These extra unneeded features are just a waste of even more disk space.

Indeed I cannot think of anything I need to do in MS Office 2007 that MS Office 98 cannot do. The last decade really has not improved the Office suite much in any fundamental way.

OpenOffice is up to £200 per seat cheaper than MS Office. OpenOffice 2 does everything the vast majority of people will ever need to do with Office Software. If you are buying licences for people that only use 5% of the features of MS Office then you are wasting money. Managers at companies still buy MS Office software because it is not their own money they are burning, it is someone else's money, i.e. the shareholders or the taxpayers' money.

Simon Phipps once told an interesting anecdote about how OpenOffice started in the first place:

> The number one reason why Sun bought StarDivision in 1999 was because, at the time, Sun had something approaching forty-two thousand employees. Pretty much every one of them had to have both a Unix workstation and a Windows laptop. And it was cheaper to go buy a company that could make a Solaris and Linux desktop productivity suite than it was to buy forty-two thousand licenses from Microsoft.

Microsoft Office has a terminal illness

Microsoft Office is jack of all trades and master of none. In my opinion, simple text documents and emails are better done with a lighter text editor. More advanced tasks are better done with more specialised software.

How many places have you seen people suffering with sprawling Excel databases on Windows shared drives, or worse emailing them around? This is a really human-intensive task, people waste hours and hours trying to keep up all the disparate files synchronised manually, when often all people need is a basic networked database with a simple front-end.

Computer software tends to pull people into two tribes, those that are still forced to use Office and those that jump at the first opportunity to something else. Have you ever seen a good website made with Frontpage? No, me neither. Ever seen a professional graphics person or designer use Microsoft Office? Of course not, they have Photoshop/GIMP and loads of other more specialised applications. Serious publishers use LaTeX or whatever rather than Word.

There is a cool professor called Edward Tufte who argues that Powerpoint leads to bad presentations and inattentive audiences: Powerpoint "usually weaken[s] verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt[s] statistical analysis". According to the most extreme interpretation of this perspective, Powerpoint is one indirect cause of the Columbia space shuttle blowing up and the War in Iraq being so poorly planned, I kid you not!

I do not want to even get started on the abomination that is Outlook. I leave it to the venerable Bill Joy:

Another reason spam is so bad is that so many companies use Microsoft Outlook for reading e-mail... it's quite easy to design a virus to go through your e-mail address book and broadcast spam to all the people you know. As soon as your company starts using Outlook, you can see emergent, horrible, almost biological things start to happen. So by using Outlook, you're not practicing safe e-mail.

Not only has it been at the centre of most of the really big computer worms, Outlook also sends out needlessly over-formatted email. Some office worker cuts and pastes a couple of times, and then before you know it, the email has five colours and five fonts. It is also the biggest stumbling block to ubiquitous OpenPGP email signatures.

Have I missed anything? What naffs you about MS Office?

MS Office is probably the least productive way to use a computer for almost any task

This fact did not matter, as the ubiquity of MS Office made up for many of its flaws - it was quite simply the only show in town. This is no longer true, the World Wide Web will make more efficient and more collaborative working available to everyone. The future is a mix of web-based services and lighter and smarter desktop features. However, I also want a lot of office tasks to be done for me by the computer and the cloud. I do not want to 'open' any application ever. Human intensive 'applications' are bad.

I want Nautilus and my web browser to be the front end to my software and everything else to be hidden away. I want to share documents, edit movies and upload photos; all without ever seeing the interface become filled up with 'applications'. GNOME and KDE are both too Microsofty on that front and have a lot of work to do.

OpenOffice is weird program. It is not very Unixy at all, it just bundles in loads of libraries you already have on Linux. It also does not really interact with the rest of the operating system. It does the job yes, and I prefer it to the monster that is MS Office. We need OpenOffice, because people assume that when they move to Linux they will do things the same way, this is not always true however. OpenOffice provides friendly hand holding to people brainwashed into equating computers with Office software.

I think eventually we will have something very different than the current version of OpenOffice. Hopefully, as time goes on, it will become more modular, less redundant and more Unixy, a truly Open Office that can be automated and more integrated both with my Desktop, as well as with web applications.