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About this siteFor six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul Monday, April 26, 2004Office 2003 vs. OpenOffice.OrgeWeak: "When eWEEK Corporate Partner Ed Benincasa shared his desire to perform a user-based comparison between the OpenOffice.org project's OpenOffice.org suite and Microsoft's Office 2003, we saw a perfect opportunity to compare the suites under real-world conditions ... We worked with three groups of users, all of whom currently use Office 97 or 2000 for productivity tasks. We tested OpenOffice.org and Office 2003 with sample documents provided by eWEEK Labs and with the testers' own files. We concentrated our tests on the applications' capability and compatibility, as well as on user training requirements. During tests, most users had little or no trouble moving from their current suite to OpenOffice.org. However, for more advanced users—especially advanced users of Excel—OpenOffice.org did not fare as well ... Users who tested Office 2003 found the suite more polished and easy to use than Office 97 and 2000. However, only a few testers—again, mostly advanced users of Excel—said an upgrade to Office 2003 would provide them significantly more useful functionality ... Almost every person who tested Office 2003 expressed appreciation for Office's Task Pane—an interface feature that lets users carry out operations related to the document at hand, such as using the thesaurus while working on a Word document. Testers also said they valued Task Pane as an interface to Office's help system, which they found to be effective."Huh. Someone found the task-based UI in Office 2003 to be "effective." Nice. Word vs. Writer "The testers who worked with Office 2003 said there were few differences between Word 2003 and earlier versions of the Microsoft word processor ... However, the testers who worked with OpenOffice.org said the suite's word processor application, Writer, seemed familiar as well ... Several testers said they were impressed with the ability of Writer to save documents as PDF files, a feature they believe would save money as well as time because PDF export for Word requires a Microsoft add-in that must be purchased separately." Excel vs. Calc "Those who are accustomed to using Excel 97/2000 as an analysis tool ... leverage Excel's statistics capabilities, among others, and appreciated the improvements made to the Pivot Table feature in Excel 2003. OpenOffice.org's Calc offers a similar feature, called DataPilot, but testers had trouble locating it because of the differences in the way Calc and Excel are organized ... Among the more casual spreadsheet testers, the differences between the spreadsheet applications were less jarring." PowerPoint vs. Impress "A move to either PowerPoint 2003 or OpenOffice.org's Impress would require significant training because PowerPoint 2003 is the Office application that's changed the most since its 97/2000 incarnations and Impress is the OpenOffice.org application that differs most from Office in its design. Shaffer said of Impress: 'Its icons and commands are not very similar to PowerPoint' ... Impress and PowerPoint handled transition animations differently, and certain Impress capabilities, such as three-dimensional text in presentations, did not carry across to PowerPoint." Stupidly, the eWeak report doesn't appear to pick a winner, but rather lists a similarly numbered list of "pro" and "con" items for each suite, all of which are obvious (Office 2003 con: Licensing costs; OpenOffice con: interface differences) Wow. That's incisive. It's seems odd that eWeak would spend that much time and space reviewing the two and not come to some conclusion. [ Posted at 6:32 PM | Permalink ]
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