http://www.ComputerBob.com/reviews/review_open_office.php .
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by ComputerBob
November 5, 2002
Last Updated January 7, 2003
Disclosure: I am not affiliated with OpenOffice.org in any way. This review is based on my first impressions of OpenOffice 1.0.1, gained from downloading it, installing it, and using it for more than 25 hours.
Would you like to get a full-featured office suite for free, including software for word processing, spreadsheets, slide show presentations, and image editing? What if it could also seamlessly exchange documents with Microsoft Office applications?
The mission statement of OpenOffice.org is "To create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format."
In other words, OpenOffice (a free product), would like to replace Microsoft Office (an expensive product) on most users' desktops. With that in mind, there are versions of OpenOffice for Windows computers, Linux/UNIX computers, and Macintosh computers. OpenOffice 1.0.1 for Windows includes the following applications that can share data with each other:
Incidentally, according to an article that I've been unable to find more than once in the maze-like OpenOffice.org Web site, the correct way to refer to the product is the OpenOffice.org Suite, or the OpenOffice.org Project, or the OpenOffice.org Software, or (I think) the OpenOffice.org Application(s). In other words, "OpenOffice.org" is to be used only as a adjective, followed by the word "suite" or "project" or " software," or "application." That's because a different company already uses the name "OpenOffice."
Despite all that, it appears that everyone still refers to the entire suite as OpenOffice, so this review will refer to it as OpenOffice or OO.
My home PC is a Pentium II-266, with 224MB RAM, and 26GB of hard drive space, running Windows 98 Second Edition. To start my test, I downloaded OpenOffice for free from its Web site and installed it. The OpenOffice.org Web site is often very busy and very slow to browse, even at midnight my time, so it took me until almost 3:30 AM to download the 50.5MB zipped package over my dial-up connection. Yes, I really wanted it that badly, as part of my search for a way to break my over-20-year addiction to Microsoft operating systems and software. Those who are willing to wait for it can order a low-cost CD copy of OpenOffice 1.0.1 from several vendors all over the world.
Once I had installed it, I did many tests to see how OpenOffice applications would compare to the MS Office 2000 applications that I've been using for many years. I also opened many different types of MS Office documents in OpenOffice and opened many different types of OpenOffice documents (saved in MS Office format) in MS Office 2000.
Part way through the installation, the OO install program told me that I don't have a Java environment. It gave me the choice to browse my hard drive to show it where my Java environment was, or to continue without having any Java environment. Unfortunately, neither the install program nor the included "Readme" files mentioned anything about how to install a Java environment on my PC, so I chose to continue the installation without having any Java environment. Despite spending an hour looking for it online, I was unable to find any clear, non-technical answer to the question "What difference does it make to not have a Java environment?"
When the installation finished, I had a new OO "Quickstarter" icon in my tray. Right-clicking that icon displayed a menu that allowed me to start any of the four main OO applications. From my reading at several Web sites, it appears that the purpose of the Quickstarter icon is to pre-load most of the OO applications into memory each time Windows starts, to reduce the amount of time it takes each application to load when it is selected. On my PC, it took 12-15 seconds for each application to start from the Quickstarter menu, which is comparable to the start times for my MS Office 2000 applications. When I shut down the Quickstarter menu, it took each OO application about 30 seconds to start.
Competing with Microsoft Word, OO Writer appears to do everything that I need to be able to do in a word processor, with a similar, but cleaner interface than Word. Writer also converts and saves documents in Word format nearly flawlessly, with only a few minor exceptions that I noticed. One of my Word documents contained a large table with text and numeric values in its cells. The bottom-right cell was a calculated cell, meaning that Word automatically summed the cells above it to obtain the value for that cell. While the table displayed correctly in Writer, and the value in the calculated cell was correct, the calculated cell had turned into a normal cell and no longer functioned as a calculated cell until I told Writer to make it a calculated cell. Then, it worked perfectly, and instantly updated the calculated value each time I changed one the values above it, without me having to press F9 key (Word's re-calc key). When I saved that document in Word format and opened it in Word, the calculated cell turned back into a static cell until I told Word to make it a calculated cell again. I consider the calculated cell issue to be a very minor shortcoming on Writer's part. Another minor issue I experienced is that bullet points in Writer documents appear as weird black circles with the number "10" in them when saved in Microsoft Word format and opened in Word. I've read where others have reported that Writer also has trouble converting very complex tables from Word documents, as well as some headers and footers, but I don't really need those features, so I didn't test them. I thought that Writer's menus were in some cases very similar to Word's, and in other cases, more intuitive than Word's. For example, even though Word has a Format menu that lets you configure character, paragraphs, bullets, and other formatting settings, if you want to format a document's page margins, you have to remember to go to the File menu and select Page Setup. To format a document's page margins in Writer, you go to the Format menu and select Page from the same menu that has options for formatting characters, paragraphs, bullets, etc.
Competing with Microsoft Excel, OO Calc appears to do everything I need to do in a spreadsheet, with a similar, but cleaner interface than Excel. It also reads and writes Excel files nearly flawlessly, with a few minor number formatting exceptions. I converted several of my semester grade spreadsheets containing multiple sheets, with no problems. Overall, I'm very pleased with OO Calc.
Competing with Microsoft PowerPoint, OO Impress was not able to do all the things that Microsoft PowerPoint 2000 could do. Though I successfully opened several different 10-14MB PowerPoint 2000 presentations in Impress, each one took almost a full minute to open. And each time I opened one of my PP presentations in Impress, the configuration of every slide immediately changed to require a mouse click to manually display each object in every slide, one at a time. None of my timed object animations worked any more. Sure, they still animated, but only after I manually clicked to make each one display, and the resulting presentation looked very amateurish, compared to the careful visual symphony of manual and timed objects that I had painstakingly created in my original PowerPoint presentations. With some experimentation, I learned that Impress does allow the use of both manual and timed objects in slides, but you cannot use both on the same slide. Instead, you must choose manual or automatic object display for all of the objects on each slide. In other words, you can choose to require mouse clicks to manually display each object in a slide OR you can choose to have all of that slide's objects appear automatically, but you can't have both in the same slide. I was very disappointed by that discovery, and spent a lot of time trying to figure out a workaround, with no success. To me, the lack of manual and timed objects on each slide is a major deal breaker, and indicates a huge gap between Impress' usability compared to PowerPoint's. In addition, I managed to find a known bug that causes all page numbers on Impress slides to change to the number "1" when they are opened in Microsoft PowerPoint.
OO Draw appears to be a very powerful application. It was easy to use, it had lots of tools, and it worked great. Unfortunately, it suffered from a catastrophic problem that I couldn't solve, that affected both it and Impress (which shares much of Draw's underlying code). Each time I clicked on ANY of Draw's 3D tools or features, it immediately locked up, forcing me to CTRL-ALT-DEL and shut down its process manually. Each time Draw locked up, if I would try to run it again, it would immediately return to the exact same screen display and locked-up state that it had been in when I had manually shut it down, even after I shut down and restarted my computer. I discovered that the only way I could use Draw again after it had locked up was to completely uninstall and then reinstall the entire OpenOffice suite. Each time I uninstalled/reinstalled OO, I was able to use Draw's features again, but only until I'd choose one of its 3D options, at which time it would instantly lock up all over again. Whenever Draw locked up, it also prevented me from using Impress. So, if I started Impress after Draw had locked up, Draw's locked-up features would appear instead, and Impress would be completely locked up.
Except for a few generic FAQs, support for OO is virtually nonexistent (pun intended) at the OpenOffice.org Web site, and it requires users to register before they're allowed to browse through the list of known problems/solutions. I registered at the OpenOffice.org Web site, but I found its support search system to be extremely unfriendly, with a labyrinth of cryptically named sub-sub-folders that did a much better job of hiding any possibly useful information than helping me find it. I found myself spending lots of time searching folder by folder, only to find tiny handfuls of solutions that had absolutely nothing to do with the searches that I had conducted.
I would feel better if I knew that someone is working to solve the problems and deficiencies that I encountered with OpenOffice, but, despite all my searching, I didn't see any evidence that anyone had ever experienced or reported any of them -- maybe because others found the online reporting system as unfriendly as I did. And, unfortunately, I wasn't even allowed to report the problems that I had experienced, because I'm not a "member" of the particular sub-sub-sub-groups of programmers that are responsible for each of the problems that I tried to report. Is it possible that my 3 1/2 hour download of OO is corrupt, and that is causing the lockups in OO Draw? Of course, but I'm not going to spend another 3 1/2 hours downloading it again. Is it possible that something in OpenOffice is conflicting with Microsoft Office 2000, which I also have installed on my PC? Sure, but I never found anything that says that the two suites cannot coexist on a PC. Is it possible that the problems and lockups that I experienced were due to one or more configuration settings in Windows 98 Second Edition, my software firewall, or my extremely secure Internet Explorer settings? Yes, but without any online support forums or other easy-to-use support facilities, I have no way of knowing if anyone else has ever run into the problems that I ran into, or figured out how to solve them.
OpenOffice is an impressive effort, with a very good word processor and spreadsheet that I actually prefer to Microsoft Word 2000 and Microsoft Excel 2000. Unfortunately, OpenOffice also has serious flaws in its installation routine, presentation software, and drawing software. Those flaws alone would prevent me from being able to replace Microsoft Office with OpenOffice at this time, but OO is also extremely poorly supported, making it nearly impossible to get help or find solutions to its problems.
Even if OpenOffice had installed perfectly, with a clear, understandable explanation regarding whether or not it requires a Java environment, and step-by-step instructions for installing a Java environment; and even if all of its many features had worked perfectly and exactly the way that they were designed to work; and even if OO's built-in and online support had both been excellent; I would still need to use Microsoft PowerPoint instead of OO Impress, because Impress can't handle PowerPoint slides that combine manually displayed and timer-displayed objects.
I will keep an open mind about the future of OpenOffice and other similar efforts, but it looks like I'm going to remain reluctantly addicted to Microsoft Office for the time being.
I installed and tried the Linux version of OpenOffice, after installing
the SuSE Linux 8.1 operating system on my computer. I also installed
and tried the Linux version of StarOffice (the commercial cousin of
OpenOffice), after installing the Mandrake Linux 9.0 operating system
on my computer. Running under each Linux version (which provided its
own Java environment), every OpenOffice and StarOffice feature that
I tried worked exactly the way it was supposed to, and I was able to
create and rotate 3D objects in both OO and SO without any problems.
Now I'm pretty sure that the only reason I had any problems with OpenOffice
running in Windows was because my Windows 98 SE did not have a Java environment.
If Sun would add instructions for installing a Java environment to the
Windows version of OpenOffice, I think they'd have a real winner.