Open Office versus Microsoft Excel

Hi guys,

do anyone have an url and something that can post to me that prooves excel is better?

I need some practical examples, but they must be easy to remember and short enough to be used in a presentation.

If someone have a code comparison this would be GREAT (OpenOffice Basic versus Excel VBA).

For example:

Microsoft Excel: 65,536 x 256
OpenOffice.org Calc: 32,000 x 256

That is a *very* good question. I don't have a live failure to submit but I'll keep my eye out and do some testing to find one. As to OO, for myself, VBA capability is major, but I am eager to be swayed over to the whole suite.

To me the basic evalution boils down to subtracting negatives - if any exist or if they are significant. This is not to say I'm against OO and I want it to succeed - big - and raves and kudos abound out there. I already know how MS deals with negatives (not). But since any negatives are important, though rarely reported for OO, I picked up a little buzz. These are all short:

A few j-walk bloggees speak: http://j-walkblog.com/blog/comments/18118_0_1_0_C2/
next link very odd - great if you start from Google, else requires registration
Word vs. OO vs. Star: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum10/6734.htm
year old comments: http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.c...=790061&page=2
also perhaps dated? http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.c...=875559&page=1
OO Calc bash: http://www.diaspoir.net/blog/mt/archives/000133.html
Ah,heck,one of the many feelgoods: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/3154?page=last
Sarcasm supremo (long): http://business.newsforge.com/articl.../09/05/1414247

Hi AntiGates,

very interesting links thanks.

I like this one:

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by http://www.diaspoir.net/blog/mt/archives/000133.html

Excel. Nope, open office still doesn't touch it. Nothing touches it. Excel is Microsoft's killer app, and they probably don't even know it. It hasn't changed very much for about five years, 'cause there's not much to change. I've sent at least two large firms down the Microsoft Office route since I started using it in 1993 or so. Just today, being determined to have a Microsoft free day, I wanted to chuck some numbers I grabbed from the screen into a spreadsheet, parse them into individual entries and see how they related to each other. Now in Excel, alt-d, e brings up the 'parse selected cells' dialog. Open Office calc didn't seem to have that. I couldn't find anyway to split a cell by spaces (or whatever) without resorting to writing a BASIC program. And that's an enormous shot in the foot right there. Sure, you're copying Excel by having BASIC as the macro language, but, often, that's the only programming language available on a Windows box. And VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) in Excel is a great tool for reading in data, processing data, writing out results files - it's the reason why Lotus 1-2-3 no longer exists and why Quattro never took off - don't get me wrong. But this is a Linux box. It has Perl, Python, C, C++, Fortran, Bash, etc all available as scripting/programming languages. Let me use Perl on a spreadsheet and Microsoft will wobble. Let me use a combination of C, Fortran and Perl on a spreadsheet and I can eliminate proprietary transport planning software almost straight away. All it would need would be for the spreadsheet to recognise the #! declaration and insert a library of it's own to link in. e.g.

---

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by http://www.diaspoir.net/blog/mt/archives/000133.html

#!/usr/bin/perl use OpenOffice; ... my $row=10; my $col=100; foreach my $parameter (sort keys %value) { print SHEET("1999 Results",$row,$col) "$parameter"; print SHEET("1999 Results",$row,$col+1) "$value{$parameter}"; $row++; } If you know perl and associative arrays, you know just how powerful that would be. If you don't know perl, it's hard to describe, but there just isn't a better programming language for analysing things where the data structures have to be built on the fly.

---

Now, this is a killer. Many thanks for TheAntiGates!!!

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,117793,00.asp

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Paleo

Hi guys,

do anyone have an url and something that can post to me that prooves excel is better?

I need some practical examples, but they must be easy to remember and short enough to be used in a presentation.

If someone have a code comparison this would be GREAT (OpenOffice Basic versus Excel VBA).

For example:

Microsoft Excel: 65,536 x 256
OpenOffice.org Calc: 32,000 x 256

---

If you will NEVER have any need to send workbooks to others, use whichever product has the functionality and expected future support/growth that suits you.

If you have to send workbooks to others, use Excel, unless you are ABSOLUTELY certain that they are using a compatible product
.
If you have to receive workbooks from others, use Excel, unless you are ABSOLUTELY certain that they are using a compatible product.

If you need a set of integrated Office products, use Excel.

If you need an integrated Office programming envirinment, use Excel.

If you need to use 3rd party apps that use VB/VBA, use Excel.

Thanks Howard!

This data is to be used at a seminar, so what a need the most are some links with comparisons just like those you have typed, so thank you very much.

BTW, I must add that if you need little programming for your worksheet you unfortunatelly may use OpenOffice because its inbuilt macro language (basic) is somewhat similar to ours VBA (sure both have the same origin). You may use without any problem MsgBox or InputBox, the main problem arises when you try to send a value to a cell. The OO Object Model is trully very complex and user unfriendly what makes you write tons of code to get the same functionallity you get on little lines of VBA. (Just testing this by now)

My feeling about Open Office is that, in the real world, OO does not matter.
Only Windows Office matters and, in some market segments, perhaps, Wordperfect Office.

And the integration of Office with .NET is going to make Office even more important.

It's the integration of the apps and with other VB/VBA compatible apps that matters in the end.

Hi Howard,

I totally agree with you, what a shame in my country government officials try to force people to use open source software by giving them many benefits, they just dont know this might ruin our software companies.

I think there is a viable solution at the horizon. Its Sun's Star Office because of the Sun-Microsoft settlement back in 9/2004 which lets Sun users keep on using the office conversor which is prohibited for OpenOffice users since 4/2004. As soon as SO incorporates the Java language to its macros we (office users) will have a good competitor which OO isnt at all.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Paleo

Hi Howard,

I totally agree with you, what a shame in my country government officials try to force people to use open source software by giving them many benefits, they just dont know this might ruin our software companies.

I think there is a viable solution at the horizon. Its Sun's Star Office because of the Sun-Microsoft settlement back in 9/2004 which lets Sun users keep on using the office conversor which is prohibited for OpenOffice users since 4/2004. As soon as SO incorporates the Java language to its macros we (office users) will have a good competitor which OO isnt at all.

---

Star Office is no better an alternative, it will still lack windoze Office integration via VB/VBA and .NET.

Agreed on VB/VBA and .Net part thanks to VSTO and Visual Studio but, you must admit that Java integration (if it ever works) will be very good too. Of course not for us (VB/VBA coders) but for those from "the dark side":thumb .

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Howard Kaikow

Star Office is no better an alternative, it will still lack windoze Office integration via VB/VBA and .NET.

---

Does anyone knows where to find some statistics about office usage?
- Market Share
- Number of Add-ins available
and so on?: pray2:

A good link for Office market share is:

http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/nov97/tech.htm


http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/nov97/images/ex4.gif

Note that the AICPA data is from 1997. I have no doubt that the Excel market share has grown since then - certainly at the expense of Lotus, although "other" (OO and Star Office) may also have grown. In addition, I suspect that the "two or more of the above" (17%) was largely "Excel plus something else" as people transitioned away from DOS-based products; as the first Windows-based s/sheet, most of that transition was from Lotus to Excel.

Cheers,

Dean

Hi Dean,

here is some Open Office data, at least their expectations:

Year 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
Rate 1% 2% 5% 10% 20% 30% 35% 50%

http://ooosmp.homelinux.org/Goalsand...ves/UsageGoals

Quote:

---

do anyone have an url and something that can post to me that prooves excel is better?

---

www.AnneSaidSo.com

ROFL!!

:rotflmao: :rotflmao: :rotflmao: :rotflmao: :rotflmao:

or maybe this one.

http://www.CarlosAgreedToAnne.com

Hmm, I found these to be of interest.

http://www.dorks.com/finduser.php?username=Dreamboat
http://www.dorks.com/finduser.php?username=Paleo

:rofl:

:eek: . . . :rotlaugh:

There was a problem with my links above for some reason. I fixed them now. :)

What a dork...

Hi all,

For many years ago, during the 80's, there was another spreadsheet that was the #1, Lotus 1-2-3, and in the early 90's Excel started to take market shares and finally become the #1 in the mid 90's.

When the first releases of Excel hit the market many laughed about it and made the same comments similar to some of them in this thread.

Keep in mind that Excel now have been on the market for more then 20 years while other spreadsheets have been around for some few years only.

So what we see is only that the history repeat itself.

At present the only real challenger to Excel is GNumeric and it's only available for the Linux-platform. Challenger in terms of the built-in functions it offer and propably only within the public research-sector and to some extend the public school-sector.

For commercial business there exist no alternatives to MS Office and it will take a very long time before this situation will be changing.

Competition is always good because it means that the vendors need to be on top and set the customers in focus.

So in general I always encourage competition no matter what it is about.

Kind regards,
Dennis

Hi Dennis,

have you used this GNumeric thing? Do you know where i may download it for testing purposes?

Great gifs Jake, :thumb

Carlos,

You can read more about it here:
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/

For more details about its features:
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/features.shtml

For more details about its functions:
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/functions.shtml

And I now notice that apparently there exist a version for Windows but at present test it only on the Linux-platform.

For more information about Linux I've made a write up here about it:
http://www.ozgrid.com/forum/showthread.php?t=23722

Kind regards,
Dennis

Hi Dennis,

great, many thanks!:thumb

Hi Carlos - You're most welcome :beerchug:

Kind regards,
Dennis

I am testing some Linux distributions and will test it with them. Do you know the Tech Linux distribution? It seems to be very easy to use and good.

http://www.techlinux.com.br

Carlos,

It exist over 100 distributions so it may be a difficult task to decide which to use.

Personal I prefer Debian but for newcomers I recommend SuSe and MandrakeLinux. I have no opinion about Tech distribution and the link You provide only leads to a startpage with no info?!

Last year I made a write up about the Linux-platform in general terms:
http://ozgrid.com/forum/showthread.php?t=23722

KR,
Dennis

Hi Dennis, great I will check your article.

Gee, about the distribution I provided the link looks like they got out of business, sorry.

I got too much interesting stuff on your blog. I guess I am not the only one having all the enjoyment here! Keep up the good work.