Common reasons not to use OpenOffice [closed]

Question

I personally use OpenOffice (OOo) on both Windows and Linux, but have MS Office installed at work. I understand that in some business situations there are thousands (upon thousands) of existing MS Office documents that may or may not convert cleanly to OpenOffice.

Not everyone is in that situation though. Among non-IT folk, I rarely see OOo. Why is this so?

What are common reasons for people not using OpenOffice? Are they from before it is even tried, or is it from unsatisfactory experiences when actually using it?

Answer 1

I started writing this as a comment, but then realised I was actually answering your question.

I've not looked at OpenOffice in years. It used to look horrible, and I guess the saying 'first impressions last' is true, as that's why I never looked at it since because of the way it looked.

On Linux, I used to put a lot of effort into making the fonts look as nice as possible, but OpenOffice used to do its own thing with font rendering and widgets and it looked awful.

I don't use Linux these days, (Mac at home, Windows at work), but after reading your question I went to investigate OpenOffice again. Version 3 looks really nice, and could end up replacing Office 2008 on my Mac, pending some testing of course.

Answer 2

Marketing, pure and simple. Most non-IT folk I know have never heard of OpenOffice.

Personally I use it because I don't have £300 spare for something to type the occasional document up or open an attachment people send me.

Answer 3

This is a summary of already given reasons, broken up into categories. Feel free to improve it.

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Technical problems/issues

• OpenOffice Calc has issues loading large (> 10 MB) MS Excel documents.

• Keyboard shortcuts depend on keyboard layout.

• Rendering issues with document display

• Formatting isn't always correct between MS Office and OpenOffice (even older MS Office formats)

  • Problem sharing documents for editing to those without OpenOffice
  • Issues/Time required when converting existing MSO documents to work correctly with OpenOffice
  • People don't realise they can share read-only documents via the PDF format.
    
    

Usability

• Doesn't have the ribbon-style menu.

• Slower out-of-the-box than MS Office.

• Currently has no solution to match MS Outlook, especially for level of integration.
  
  

Usage Training and Financial

• People already know MS Office.

• People haven't paid for current version of MS Office, so have no need.

• Keyboard shortcuts different to MS Office.

• Enterprises already committed to MS Office.
  
  

User perceptions

• Bad first impressions from older versions.

• Marketing. Most non-IT folk haven't heard of it.

• Not seen to be written by a major/reputable company, so it can't be good.

• See MS Office is a standard.
  
  

Other

• MS Office usability/stability has improved, so less need to look elsewhere.
  

Answer 4

I think the main reasons why people don't try or use it are the very simple and partly false ones:

• Because they only know MS Office
• Because it was written by geeks in the basements of their parents house, it can't be good
• Because it 'completely looks different'
• They never even paid a Dollar for MS Office, so they don't care
• They are under the misinterpretation that MS Office is a Standard (no, I still don't accept OOXML)

Answer 5

I use MS Office when I am on Windows. But on Mac OS X and Linux, I use OpenOffice. When I have a choice of either to use, I incline on MS Office when I know that the people I will be sharing the resulting document with are those who will only ever open it on MS Office. I've had complaints of document formatting issues from people who opened my OpenOffice constructed document on MS Office; and when the document you are creating puts a lot of importance on the layout, that becomes a problem.

Answer 6

My issues were that I found OOO a fair bit slower than MS Office (to open for example), and that some of my regular keyboard shortcuts didn't apply. I was moderately satisfied with Open Office until a free beta of MS Office 2010 became available.

That said, MS Office 2007/2010 is playing havoc with my keyboard shortcuts.

Answer 7

For me, it's mostly formatting in writer. For overdesigned documents, it's like IE6 vs modern browsers. But I use OOo everywhere if I can.

Answer 8

OpenOffice Calc have problem with opening a big Excel file (for example, 12 MB).

And shortcuts in OpenOffice depends on keyboard layout.

Answer 9

+1 for MicTech's answer. I also have problems when openning big Excel file in OOo Calc. And I have some problems when using OOo in Windows, including:

• Slow start-up process.
• Slow context menu displaying.
• Bad font/picture rendering, I have to zoom in and zoom out again or do something to make it re-render to view it smoothly.
• Some shortcuts are different from MS Office (of course this is just a matter of taste)
• Not fully compatible with MS Office's file formats, not only with MS Open XML (.docx, .xlsx, ...) but also with former file formats (.doc, .xls, ...)

However, when using OOo with Linux (Slackware on my computer), I don't have any problems related to performance. I think OOo is implemented on Linux better than on Windows.

A small note: although OOo is poor, its Go-oo build is not so bad.

Answer 10

Microsoft Office used to be pretty unstable and rubbish but these days it isn't too bad. For those folks with an MSDN subscription it doesn't really make much sense not to install it, particularly when your customers are highly unlikely to be using OOo.

Personally, I'll use the OOo Calc tool when I'm working with CSV files as Microsoft Excel doesn't really work with anything that isn't in one particular "form" of CSV.

Answer 11

The major reason, is that companies still are sold to Microsoft. All enterprises are using Microsoft office. So on all document containing reviews and comments and all MS related features, we are forced to use MS Office.

Though Open Office supports these features, it somewhat looks quirky. Even Table of Contents created in Open Office, looks bad when opened in MS Office.

I use OpenOffice.org on my Mac at home. The same documents when opened in office, looks lacking. Only when Enterprises adopt OOo, this problem will be solved.

Answer 12

Does not have anything to match Outlook, which I really like.

Answer 13

To be honest there is no major drawback. Okay, its a bit slower and there is no ribbon interface which is quite annoying. BUT. You can speed it up . REALLY much.

http://the11throck.wordpress.com/2008/01/12/make-openoffice-startup-faster/

Secondly, you can have/install awesome plugins, addons like "Lightproof" spellchecker. Its a Hungarian spellchecker, and it does a superb job. The theme is adjustable under Linux, and there is no problem with anti aliasing/fonts (you just have to ask / Google how to set it.) Thats all. AND. Use Go-oo. You can read why, and what is it on the webpage. Ubuntu packages this version by default for example. But on Windows you should get this one.

Answer 14

I used OpenOffice for a few years without too many problems - little annoyances here and there. Then at some point my PC would slow down to a crawl. I then found out that after exiting OO, it would leave a process running, and that process would use up nearly 100% CPU. Open a few documents a close several times and the processes would add up. I talked to a few OO users I know and they had the same problem, so it wasn't something odd on my PC. That was the last straw. I don't have a tendency to suggest a bug in open source software - had too many "STFU and RTFM or fix it yourself!" (I'm not joking.) You try to help improve a product and you get shot down, soo... Hey, call me when you grow up.

In the meantime, I got a chance to try Office 2007. Unlike many people, I got used to the ribbon pretty quickly, and it also works very well and has an improved grammar checker (after years of stagnation.) So I uninstalled OO have been running Office 2007 for nearly two years now. And now we've upgraded to it at work as well, so I'm dealing with the same software at home and at work.

I still use a lot of free and open source alternatives in other domains, but I was tired of dealing with the little quirks in OpenOffice. I still think it's a very decent suite - I do recommend it to people who don't want to pay for/cannot afford Office, though I mention that little CPU usage problem I had so they can keep an eye on it.

Anyway, I don't know how "common" a reason this is, but I do know a couple of people who have moved to Office (or the WordPerfect suite in one case) for the same reason.

Answer 15

I had bad initial experience with OO when it came out. Tried it again last year and found it to be much improved. I also have a single user license for MS Office but it's a little out of date, being Office 2000. I use OO where I can and MS Office 2000 where I must.