As a “Power User” of Excel, Powerpoint and Word, I’m always interested to see how competing office products function relative to MS. Although I’m adept with MS Office, I have no allegiance to MS, and I’d be happy to switch to a superior product should one present itself.
Hearing so much about OpenOffice, I decided to give it a shot. For what it’s worth, I was running it on Ubuntu 8.04.
Particularly the Spreadsheet program. Right away, I was impressed by how fast it loaded and rendered data. Definitely less bloated than Excel. On the other hand, it has far fewer features.
I was particularly interested in the following features which I feel are critical for competing with Excel:
- Compatibility (interoperability) with Excel documents
- Built-in function library
- Object support such as text boxes, images, shapes, etc.
- Form controls and Macro support
- Keyboard shortcuts
My conclusion (I won’t bore you with the details) is that as of the time of this writing, OpenOffice Spreadsheet is not a viable replacement for Excel in a _professional_ environment.
The biggest problem is interoperability. I opened a spreadsheet created by Excel, but none of the charts/graphs would render. Although there is absolutely no Macro compatibility (interoperability) between the two platforms, I was really impressed with the richness of the API available for OpenOffice (no surprise there–it’s open source).
However, these are pretty significant show-stoppers. Professional Excel users (“Power Users”) frequently write user-defined functions (UDFs), and charts. If OpenOffice users can’t read these documents properly, then we’re back to square one.
From a theoretical perspective, OpenOffice could be used were it not for switching costs. A brand new business that has no need to share files with the “rest of the world,” can easily do all their spreadsheet work in OpenOffice. It’s the switch from Excel to OpenOffice that is impractical right now.
Oh, and as a VBA developer, I’m not sure I’m on board with the OpenOffice implementation of Basic. I like that you can write in Java (huge Java fan here), but the API documentation isn’t super user friendly yet.
One last point is the interface and overall user experience. Clunky and buggy. Almost none of my “traditional” keyboard shortcuts worked (fill right, fill down, etc.), the function dialogue doesn’t give you arguments in a pop-up menu, you separate arguments with semi-colons rather than commas, and if you enter something wrong, you may get repeat error alerts (at least I did until I had to force quit the app).
It’s not at all intuitive how to assign a Macro to something as simple as a button. I appreciate that they’re giving users the granularity of control with the event model, but for most Excel users, that’s far too complicated.
It’s my hope that IBM (or someone) will buy Sun and improve OpenOffice to the point that it forces MS to improve the featureset and overall quality of Excel, but that will take time.
