Comments on: Open Office vs. Office 2010

By: Ron007

Ron007 — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 01:55:08 +0000

I agree with you that the Ribbon is clunky. But it wasn’t designed without user input. The opposite is true. There was too much “user input”. The collected usage stats from millions of use sessions. Thinks of it as one of the ultimate examples of design by committee … . Unfortunately the design is intended for NEW users (new BUYERS) of Office. It almost totally ignores those of us who invested many years of time and money learning the menu system.

If you want more insight into the development of the ribbon, take a look at this page of links to blogs about the ribbon by some of the ribbon developers.

Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog – http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/table-of-contents.aspx This is an organized Table Of Contents to a large collection of links to MS Dev Team Blogs about the design and building of the 2007 ribbon. A LOT of reading, but interesting to understand the underlying (il)logic of the Ribbon

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 13:46:25 +0000

Bill there is a third office suite based on the Open Office base code it is Symphony from IBM I like the interface better than Open Office which has a hacker sort of look and feel. I have never tried Libre Office but I have heard of it maybe I will give it a shot.

BTW if you are going to chastise the author for not knowing what organization currently maintains Open Office then you should get the original developing organization correct. Open Office was originally Star Office from Sun. Sun was eventually bought by Oracle but long after Sun had turned Star Office over to the open source community and let them change it to Open Office, Oracle was not involved.

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 13:38:44 +0000

Personally after having used the ribbon for several months and gotten accustomed to it I like it better, I find it easier to use then the old clunky menu interface. But “to each his own”.

By: Bill Leach

Bill Leach — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 13:35:12 +0000

Wow! First review at WS where I have ever had a “bone to pick!” First, while Oracle created Open Office, Apache Org is now the developer.

Open Office will most definitely create PDF files. In fact Open Office was able to do that long before MSOffice had the ability (without Adobe Pro installed of course). In addition, Open Office provide some fairly decent ability to EDIT PDF files.

Finally, failing to mention that there are 2 free office suites is a serious short-fall in this article. A significant portion of the Open Office developer group broke off and formed Libre Office is a serious short coming. Libre Office is arguably more powerful and better than Open Office.

Personally, I have both free software suites and personally prefer Libre Office but have no qualms about recommending Open Office also.