I compared Microsoft Office 2007 to OpenOffice to find out which is the better office suite. The five points I used to compare the two are:
- The interface
- The quality of the help files and assistance when you get stuck
- The speed with which common tasks can be performed
- The richness of the templates provided
- Innovative features
1. Interface
Microsoft Office 2007
Office 2007 introduced the innovative “ribbon” interface to replace the previous “squinting at rows of buttons” interface. This interface is a massive improvement to ease of use for the end user. Buttons and menus are more visible than before, particularly the common functions which are emphasised with larger buttons than less common functions.
The ribbon also dynamically expands and contracts as the application window is resized, keeping as many useful functions visible as possible rather than just dropping the ones furthest to the right. The ribbon also scales very well to large screens, which are very common these days.
OpenOffice
The OpenOffice interface is bland in comparison, seemingly stuck in the dated “rows of buttons” style. Common functions are not presented more prominently than less common functions, and at the high resolution users run on today’s large screens it makes finding the correct button a very difficult (and squinty) exercise.
2. Help
From time to time I will get stuck on something new, or just forget how something is done. A good help file is essential for those who need quick, clear answers that help them get the job done.
Microsoft Office 2007
Office 2007 provides a rich, online-integrated help system that searches both the local help information as well as the Office Online website to find the answers and instructions you are looking for. The help doesn’t just come in the form of text instructions - there are also images and even video demos to show you exactly how things are done.
OpenOffice
OpenOffice comes with a basic, text-based help system. While you can search it easily enough, the results are very limited when compared to the richness of the Office 2007 help system. There are no images or video demos, and no integration with up to date online help data.
3. Speed
The simple task of creating and formatting a table is used as the basis for this comparison.
Microsoft Office 2007
This is a great example of where the ribbon interface really shines. Creating a table in Office 2007 is as simple as clicking on Insert, then selecting the Table button. A neat grid pops up to let you draw out the number of rows and columns you want your table to start off with.
Immediately after that the ribbon switches to the selection of styles available to format your table, with the table updating with a live preview as you hover the mouse over each style.
OpenOffice
The speed with which this task was performed in Office 2007 only highlights the clunkiness of the dated interface used by OpenOffice. Creating a table means navigating through a tedious interface where you have to set the number for each of the rows and columns.
Formatting the table is equally tedious. There is no live preview to let you quickly see how your table data is going to look. The selection of styles is much smaller than with Office 2007, and there are fewer attractive modern styles available.
4. Templates
Microsoft Office 2007
Office 2007 ships with dozens of functional, stylish document templates for each of the applications in the suite. This number increases into the hundreds when you also include those that are available through the integration with Office Online.
OpenOffice
In comparison to Microsoft Office 2007, OpenOffice has a terrible selection of only a few ugly templates included.
5. Innovation
Microsoft Office 2007
It has already been shown that the innovative new ribbon interface makes Office 2007 much easier to use than older style interfaces. However that is not the only innovative feature that improves end user productivity.
Office 2007 introduces Smart Art, a great new way of enabling the end user to present data in visually attractive lists, flowcharts and other diagrams. There are a huge number of available Smart Art types, and each one can be further modified with one of the many available styles or by manually modifying attributes such as colour and size. One of the great ways that Smart Art improves your productivity is by automatically resizing fonts and other elements as you add data so that you don’t need to manually adjust things to make everything fit in the desired space.
OpenOffice
I looked for innovation in OpenOffice and I simply could not find it. Some might find the $0 sticker price innovative and attractive, but the trade-off is you receive a clunkier interface, poor help system, slower workflows for common tasks, and much smaller selection of styles and templates for creating attractive documents.
December 18th, 2007 at 10:16 pm
I’ve always found that OpenOffice just follows what Microsoft Office is doing. You wait until the next version of OpenOffice, it will get a ribbon interface too.
You forgot reason 6: easier to deploy and manage, and maybe reason 7: works in a Terminal Server environment without stuffing around with config files.
December 19th, 2007 at 9:10 am
Your reason 6 and 7 are both good points. Most of what I mention above relates to the end user experience. Your points are very important to the administrative experience.
December 19th, 2007 at 3:53 pm
You could have pretty much written the same comparison verbatim and substituted Office XP or Office 2000 in place of OpenOffice.
The feedback I get is that most users, including myself, find the ribbon menu a huge setback in productivity and a mistake by Microsoft. Given the ribbon menu’s big negatives, I don’t think this comparison will convince many that Office 2007 is much better or useful software than OpenOffice.
You’re right about the innovation, but that’s not OpenOffice’s value. It’s a me-too clone of Office for Linux. Compatibility of function and documents is what they are shooting for.
I say more on my blog at http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/23167
December 19th, 2007 at 8:29 pm
But Gunningham, linux.com says Open Office is better!
Just kidding. I agree with your review. I’m actually a hell of a lot more productive - and also produce documents that are a lot more visually appealing - in Office 2007.
December 19th, 2007 at 8:53 pm
Michael, I suppose an Office 2000 or Office XP user might find some value in this then, if they can see that paying for the upgrade to Office 2007 will take them leaps ahead of where the free OpenOffice will get them.
If someone dislikes the ribbon interface then they are probably not going to like the Office 2007 experience, and can stick to squinting at rows of little grey buttons and cumbersome dialog boxes for basic tasks. I usually find the initial resistance to the ribbon interface to really just be a dislike of new things in general. Given a bit of time to “find where everything moved to” (which doesn’t take long) and the resistance fades pretty quickly.
The same resistance to change often comes through from these people in other ways too - eg wanting to stick with traditional file shares instead of moving to SharePoint document libraries for managing documents (sometimes they even prefer file shares for documents which need version control and have workflows associated, despite the obvious benefits of SharePoint in this scenario….but I digress).
The trouble I have with OpenOffice is the fans that tell me it is “just as good as Microsoft Office” and that those who use the Microsoft product are fools. My response is to demonstrate just a few points as to how the Microsoft Office suite can be superior to OpenOffice in terms of the end user experience. It has certainly enabled me to be more productive when writing documents and preparing slide presentations. If the argument needed more weight I’d simply add a few more points along the lines of what Aaron points out.
January 6th, 2008 at 7:41 pm
Sure, OOo is as good as Ms Office. Yet it is the only choose for many GNU/Linux Users. While is may be rubbish on windows for many reasons. But on Linux, it performs much better. Comparison without OS difference is insufficient. At least OOo looks can be changed in GNU/Linux systems and its speed improved a lot.
Sorry for my English, I am Chinese from PRC.~
January 6th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
Performance (in terms of how fast the programs run) wasn’t something I looked at. OpenOffice doesn’t run slow on Windows. It is the features that are where it falls behind.
If I have to invest development time and money into OpenOffice so that it has the superior features of Office 2007 it is much easier and far less risky to buy Office 2007.
January 18th, 2008 at 6:43 am
Sure, it’s better; but for what, an extra hundred bucks? I’m not even sure if Microsoft Office is closed-source, freeware, shareware, whatever, and I haven’t even checked to see if it’s available for free, but, no doubt, it’s likely up for sale at newegg.com for a good hundred or so dollars. Open-source, F…T…W…!
January 19th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
I’m not one to sacrifice useful features for the sake of saving a few bucks on software.
March 2nd, 2008 at 5:18 am
…ahahaha! Useful features? Are you kidding me? What? A flashy interface? All those extra features do is flood… thereby shrouding your ability to even operate the program. That’s how I see it, anyway…
And, you say a few bucks? Open Office is FREE! Absolutely! Whereas this program probably costs more like 120 bucks… far more than a few… Anyway, I’m outty.
March 2nd, 2008 at 6:46 am
“Flashy interface” would imply its all style and no functionality, which in the case of Office 2007 is far from the truth. Clearly we see things differently there.
It should be clear from my blog posting that I’ve looked at Open Office, that I understand it costs $0, but regardless of that it is an inferior product as compared to Microsoft Office 2007. Put simply, I won’t choose a crappier product just because it costs nothing.
March 17th, 2008 at 7:04 am
I’ve heard good things about Office 2007 and if I had to use Office I think I’d happily learn how to use the ribbon if only so I could get out of the abject misery that accompanies any attempt to use Office 2003. Having helped my partner write her PhD thesis on that I can say it was truly awful - pretty templates mean nothing when the damn thing doesn’t understand the concept of creating and sticking to text styles. That was the product that OpenOffice was designed to compete with and in that comparison MS Office is without doubt inferior. OpenOffice does the basics very well, something that’s been lost in MS Office’s evolution.
As for the issue of how well OpenOffice compares with Office 2007 - well, assuming Office 2007 has the basics right that were so wrong in 2003, I’d be hard pushed to sell the idea of OpenOffice to people on the grounds that it’s the better product. Contrary to what you say, though, MS Office’s benefits do not warrant it’s cost. OpenOffice does the vast majority of what an office suite needs to - if you want to spend the money getting the best then great. Most people are more pragmatic than that though. I don’t wish to see my local school spending money on Office just as I’d rather they didn’t issue Basildon Bond notebooks. It’s just not necessary when OpenOffice does what they need, the money would be far more wisely invested elsewhere. And I doubt very much whether the letters our secretaries produce would be any prettier or more efficiently written because of The Ribbon. The templates and the smart art in particular are of little use to most business users (or, at least, most business users who want to keep to some semblance of a corporate look). Having quick access to styles (that don’t update themselves a-la Office 2003!) and a file format that is an accepted standard are of interest, and OpenOffice do these well.
April 15th, 2008 at 7:14 am
I have worked a lot with office xp, 2003, 2007 and openoffice. Well, openoffice is better, far better:
1. Much easier to use and better menus
2. Better documentation, thousands of pages [for free] about every feature and online wiki
3. It never crashes, while MS Office sometimes refuses to open large files
4. Easier to recover a lost or corrupted file
5. Higher rate of development
6. A lot of useful add-ons
7. Much more powerful in writing math symbols
8. LaTeX compatibility
9. Better styles and formatting
10. Spellcheck for every language
11. MS Office is very poor in drawing (flowcharts etc.) compared to OO
July 7th, 2008 at 9:51 am
To insert a table in OpenOffice 2.3 Click on the drop down arrow next to the table icon in the toolbar.Left click drag to the required size. Done. Floating toolbar appears to apply formatting. So how is 2007 better? Anyway it wouldn’t run on my 667Mhz P111. But GNU/Linux does. So no point in the comparison really. You pays your money and you makes your choice. Or don’t pay money but contribute to bug fixing, documentation or whatever you can do. I like that.