Do people really use Microsoft’s Office advanced features?
- Published September 13th, 2005 in Tech Comment, Free Software
When we start comparing Openoffice.org with Microsoft Office, there are a whole bunch of users who immediatly state that OO.org lacks all the advanced and complex features of the latter. Well, I believe them.
The question being is: do people really use those advanced features?
I mean, one of my jobs when I worked at FreeFEUP — a project which aimed at proliferating and advocate the use of Free Software on FEUP — was to migrate a small departament of my Faculty from Office 2003 to OO.org 1.0.1.
This wasn’t the best scenario at all. The departament handles all the public relations with the exterior so it has to deal with several documents on Office’s proprietary format. Besides, OO.org was only on version 1.0.1.
But even on such a situation, we only found two problems that concerned us: they were using Excel as a database, but filters were poorly developed on OO.org 1.0.1; documents improperly formated couldn’t be correctly opened on OO.org.
As for the first problem, it has been solved on the recent releases of OO.org. The second one is improving a lot and it’s hard to find a document that does not convert well.
So, has anyone ever experienced users using advanced features? I haven’t.
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