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Closing the Office door on Microsoft

Brien M Posey Tech Republic

Published: 15 Jun 2004 11:20 BST

Because OpenOffice is free and you have to pay a substantial fee for Microsoft Office, you might be tempted to migrate your entire organisation from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice. After all, migrating to OpenOffice would save an absolute fortune in Microsoft Office licenses, which is important in a time of shrinking IT budgets. Before you jump right in and begin a migration, though, there are a few issues that you need to be aware of.

Before you begin
Before you commit to a migration, you need to be aware that with OpenOffice, you get what you pay for. When you buy a copy of Microsoft Office, you're buying a mature suite of many different products. Your Microsoft Office purchase also entitles you to technical support. Although OpenOffice is comparable to Microsoft Office in many ways, there are a lot of places in which it's seriously lacking. For example, technical support is pretty much limited to whatever information you can find on the Internet.

Another major limitation to OpenOffice is that, although it offers programs that compete with Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, it does not offer products similar to other Microsoft Office applications. The most notable example is that there is no OpenOffice version of Microsoft Outlook. You can also forget about getting OpenOffice equivalents to Microsoft Office 2003 products such as Microsoft OneNote, Publisher, InfoPath, and Access.

I'll be the first to admit that there are decent open-source database and desktop publishing applications. The fact that OpenOffice doesn't offer such programs might not be a big deal since you can get these types of applications for free from other places. However, even if equivalencies to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint were all you needed, you should still think twice before giving up Microsoft Office in favour of OpenOffice. That's because the programs that come with OpenOffice do not have as many features as their Microsoft Office counterparts.

Unless you're a power user, you may never even notice the features that are missing from OpenOffice. The majority of the missing features are things that the average user doesn't tend to use. Even so, the missing features can make converting Microsoft Office documents to OpenOffice format difficult. For example, in Microsoft Office, macros are encoded in Visual Basic Script. However, OpenOffice doesn't support Visual Basic script.

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Its the applications and device drivers that run on windows that cement its dominance. How many people would fork out hundreds of pounds for Vista if Linux ran all the software and kit they wanted to use.