OpenOffice.org is “a piece of crap”–or is it?
by Lasse Havelund
Recently, a report (PDF) on a number of students opinions on OpenOffice.org Writer vs. Microsoft Office 2007 Word and OpenOffice .org Impress vs. Microsoft Office 2007 Powerpoint, whose conclusion is down-right depressing to those of us, who would prefer to see open source software introduced into education. I sought out to attempt to see if I could confirm–or debunk–the comments made by the students, and from that, provide some feedback to the OpenOffice.org developers on how we can create an even better office suite, which would help us introduce it to educational and academic institutions.

The students, aged 14–16, who had previously only worked with Microsoft Office 2003, were given two tasks. The first one was to do with creating a presentation, the second to do with writing a document, which used mathematical typesetting.

Impress vs. PowerPoint

The students were given an introduction to Impress first, given two hours to work with it. The students then received instructions on how to use PowerPoint 2007, and, again, given two hours to work with that. The students were given free reign to do as they pleased with the presentation, but urged to include audio, video, images, animations and so on in their presentations.

When evaluated, the students noted that importing sound into Impress was difficult, that the application was slow and crashed often, that changing slide backgrounds and designs was difficult–all said with a healthy dose of expletives. PowerPoint received little to no criticism–only praise. Bummer.

Word vs. Writer

The students were given the task to transcribe a number of mathematical equations from a paper. They were, as with the Impress/PowerPoint test, given a quick introduction, and a time frame to work with the two applications. The students reported issues with simple symbols like “+” and “-” not showing up (the report says this is likely due to an ‘install error’; I’m thinking charset or font-related), and this ruins the impression for a lot of the students.

My Go: Which is Better?

In some ways, I love OpenOffice.org. I don’t use word processors or spreadsheets. I tend to use LaTeX for anything I write which has to look even the slightest bit nice, be that a letter or a report, so I haven’t used Office 2007 or OpenOffice.org much over the last few years.

I decided to look at the different problems the students faced, and give my own opinion of the applications.

For these tests, I used OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 and Microsoft Office 2007 on a Windows 7 system, due to some nasty problems with Wine.

Impress vs. PowerPoint

I figured I’d do the test by creating a quick presentation with images, charts, text, lists, audio and so on from a pre-made template available in the application on first launch. It didn’t take me long to create one in either of the applications, but I was amazed with the ease of use and quality of the templates made available in PowerPoint. The product I got from each of the applications, having spent maybe 10 minutes with each, is visible below on a sample page.


That's PowerPoint at the front.

There’s no question that the PowerPoint presentation looks much slicker, much more professional and much more appealing. Well done, Microsoft. Well done.

I did notice a lot of problems adding sound to an Impress presentation, something which was easily done with a couple of clicks in PowerPoint. I never managed to add a sound that worked in Impress.

Both performed reasonably well at inserting charts and images, but positioning and styling was much better in PowerPoint.

In this test, I’d say PowerPoint wins hands-down; there’s still a lot to be done in Impress to make it just as useful as PowerPoint is today. If I were to pick between these two programs, I would choose PowerPoint (good thing I use beamer).

Word vs. Writer

One of the great advantages of using LaTeX, like I do, is how incredibly easy it is to typeset mathematical equations and formulae. I’ve always been skeptical of using word processors for mathematical typesetting, but I felt like I should try to repeat the test they did by typesetting a number of simple bits of math, like expressions using square root, playing with superscript, fractions, etc.

Like the students, I started with Word, and quickly got comfortable (well, semi-comfortable) with Word’s built-in equation editor. The typeset results are beautiful and clear, automatically centered, x^2 is automatically translated to , etc. It just felt right somehow, with the only point of criticism I could find was the inability I had to type multi-line equations (again, I’m spoiled by LaTeX).


Pretty, and functional.

I started on my document in Writer, but I found the mathematical input to be lacking and annoying. Wanting to use the input panel supplied instead of fancy keyboard shortcuts, I found myself incredibly handicapped.


What? Seriously?

I gave up half-way through and went back to Word. Yes, I said it. I went back to Word.

Conclusion

The study was ignored, and OpenOffice.org was implemented anyway. Yay, some would say. I’m not sure what to think. Microsoft licenses are incredibly expensive–imagine the hardware that could be purchased with the amount of money it would cost to equip a school with Office 2007–but isn’t good education, particularly in computing, priceless? I value OpenOffice.org greatly. I think it’s a great product, but some things do need ironing out, as both my personal experience and this study outline.

OpenOffice.org was not up to par with Microsoft Office 2007. I will not, personally, use Office–be it open or not–but I can definitely say which one I would be using if I were: Microsoft Office.

To any OpenOffice.org developers reading this: Keep up the good work. You’ve come far. You’ve created a great product, used by millions of people every day. But continue to improve. I don’t necessarily want you to give me a pretty ribbon interface, but work on accessbility. Changing backgrounds and designing themes is hard in Impress. Work on the mathematics input in Writer/Math. It needs it.