Why OpenOffice.Org Is Better Than Microsoft Office
Today I was helping out at my family business, a district distributor for Unilever (popular fast moving consumer products), in a small town in Indonesia. It happen that the harddisk on our operation computer was damaged beyond repair (that apparently happen easily with the unstable electricity current, accepted as norm here). This computer is used for running a distribution system as required by Unilever.
While easiest solution seems be to get a new harddisk to replace the damaged one, it is not that simple here. There is no adequate computer store here; I need to either pre-order with expected 3 days waiting time, or drive 4 hours (8 hours including return time) to get one. Beside, we need to get a support guy from that bigger town to install the proprietary distribution system.
Luckily for us, we have a backup computer with the distribution system installed on a Windows 2000 system. So I just need to carry it over, plug-in the monitors, keyboard and mouse. And voila ! It works, actually. Data is stored on another server computer, so everything is quite ready to run.
Except for one problem.
We need to extract data from the distribution system into Microsoft Excel file. So I pull out the Microsoft Office 2007 Small Business Edition installer. This was previously installed on the damaged-harddisk computer, running on Windows XP. Since the harddisk is damaged, I take it that I can safely assume the installation is void and I can transfer the programme to another computer.
Alas. Microsoft Office 2007 doesn’t run on Windows 2000. I Googled for hacks to force install Office 2007 to Windows 2000 without much success either.
Now, I want to weigh my options, but there is really no other option. Any option that require re-installation of the distribution system is out, as we need to send a report urgently. And pirated older versions of Microsoft Office(available aplenty in our town) is out of question also, as we must ensure only legally licensed software on the computer.
That means we will need to make do with this installation, and find alternative to Microsoft Office. Personally I have been using OpenOffice.Org in my own notebook for quite some time. Included in the Open Office package is the Calc application for spreadsheet, similar to Microsoft Excel. Using a thumb drive, I copied my older installer file, and run the setup.
Anxiously, after that, I open the distribution system, run the data extract, and yep, it manage to extract an Excel file (in .xls extension) successfully without any hiccups.
In this case, it really happens that OpenOffice.Org has saved the day while Microsoft Office with paid license could not. Why is it better?
- It’s free ! I didn’t need to worry about the duplicate installation from same installer. I can in fact install it to as many computers as I want.
- It is much less demanding than Microsoft Office in term of minimum requirement. Even with the latest OpenOffice.Org 3.1, it runs smoothly on the less powerful system.
- It performs the task as well as Microsoft Office.
Besides, the association that open source software – with complicated user interface – is for geeks only is way past. Now with many of the open source software, good user interface is one of the most important design consideration.
Update: Additional advantage, as comment below
You might add another beautiful advantage: Openoffice calc has extremely good functionality for converting to almost any characterset/code page if you save your spread sheet as csv-file.
So are you still using Microsoft Office? Try Download OpenOffice.Org. It is good, really.
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You might add another beautiful advantage: Openoffice calc has extremely good functionality for converting to almost any characterset/code page if you save your spread sheet as csv-file.
Indonesia which town?
@Name : agreed. good point taken
@dom : Pemangkat, about 4 hours drive from Pontianak
Oh OK, Borneo side.
Yup. Been here before?
Nope, but I have a chinese indo female friend from Kalimantan now working in Brunei. I guess u must be Teochew or Hakka. I’m a Teochew.
I like it.
Thought along those lines when I did a backup recently.
Thanks.
Interesting. Just pulled up your blog post doing a search for XP repair.
I like XP but it can be tough to fix sometimes. (But it is still easier for me to understand than NT!)
Thanks for posting.
Yup. Agreed
First of all: No UPS at company? That’s a shame… really.
Second: No backup system? (I mean – complementary backup – not with incompatible Win2k) Well – it’s a shame again. But wait – they already didn’t get their own UPS (when they knew that electricity current at their site isn’t stable) so what did I expect? I guess as this is “family business” they didn’t think about hiring a sysadmin (even outsourced – cheaper) – it could work even from far away you know :>
Third: Office 2007? What the hell? Can’t they just buy older version of Office with XML documents converter downloaded from MS site if they knew that their “backup” machine was operating Win2k?
To sum it up: You may call OpenOffice.Org better than MS Office but it was all their fault – and their lack of imagination. So this story is rather not good argument :>
What do you expect from a town where the nearest decent computer store is 4 hours drive away. You could even argue that someone should open a computer store here, but reality can be much different from what you know or imagine.