22.11.05

Did anything at all happen with Openoffice 2?

Here's a post I made to the Openoffice Forums:
While I totally love Openoffice, there were a number of things that cheesed me off in 1.x, especially since we are trying to roll it out in a corporate environment to eventually displace MS Office. So when Oo2 went stable I thought "great, surely a lot of my problems will be fixed". Boy, to say that I was underwhelmed when I finally got around to a test install would be an undestatement.

  • This thing is still nigh fucking impossible to roll out in a windows multiuser environment where the user doesn't have admin rights. Instead of goddamn updating the existing install, I had two Oo installs competing for access on the files, and there is no way to update the filetype associations to use the new version (sure, I just installed Oo2, why wouldn't I want to use Oo1.1.4?). Uninstalling the old version manually left the filetypes dead, and now I get some gobbledygook about inserting the setup-CD everytime I try to open a file (mind you, I'm switching between user and admin here all the time. For the admin, everything works, but he doesn't actually work with Oo, now does he). In other words, nothing has improved.
  • The import filters for extraneous filetypes that I tried haven't improved at all. We have a couple of pretty big .xls files with graphs and stuff here that I just couldn't get to work in Oo1.x, and they are one of the major reasons we have *both* Oo and MSO installed on all machines right now. Well, the goddamn things look *exactly* the same in the new version. OK, I admit I didn't really expect these to work flawlessly now, but *no change*? What have you people been doing?

No, wait, let me guess:
The only thing I have seen up to now is the pretty. It seems the bulk of the whopping 50 MB that this thing is bigger than the previous version (200 MB? Jesus Christ of Nazareth on a Pogo Stick. Is there a 3D shooter in there as an easter egg?) has been spent on serious prettification. I'm practically frothing at the mouth here; have you been bought by Microsoft? Or Apple? Fuck.

Corporate Business, meet Openoffice. It's your best hope to get away from Microsoft; yeah, you're pretty much fucked.
Openoffice, meet Corporate Business that is willing to switch. You don't give a fuck about that, do you?
Of course, I caught some heat for this, and I'm pretty sure the post will be locked/deleted within a day or so. This is, of course, justified, as I did not use the language that should be used for such a complaint, and it was disrespectul of the creators of what is, in the end of the day, still a very fine piece of software. But I still feel that the points I made were, at least partially, valid. I did go into that install with great expectations, and what struck me first were that the things that had bothered me most were still there, and for that I got an art upgrade. All for the measly price of 50 more MB install size. I have since found a number of good things in the new version, but this update is pretty much tainted for me. Fuck.

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