Open Office

Supposing you don't want to violate anybody's copyright - nevermind that Microsoft Office has gotten harder to steal these days with their Steam-like digital validation stuff - but you still want cheap Office software?  My last copy of Microsoft Word, which I found on Froogle, was only $30 or something, but it turned out it was an illegally sold OEM copy.  So I didn't want to go that route again.

And then someone suggested OpenOffice.  I tried it many years ago, back when open source was the big craze, and it sucked;  it was barely functional.  I tried it again recently, and, hot damn!  It's like a complete office software suite for free!  Although it saves documents in its own internal formats, you can still export to Word and Excel, to share your stuff with the rest of the money-paying world.  Every now and then there's some kind of glitch - weird things like using drop caps made it export to Word incorrectly, stuff like that - but it does almost everything I want to do.

Excpet you can't share spreadsheets the way you can with Excel.  Since Joel Spolsky's scheduling system is still my favorite way to schedule projects - although it sure has its problems - I'm not sure I could roll out OpenOffice instead of Microsoft at a game development studio.  Sure would be nice to lose that $500 per person capital expense, though.

Comments

[SpiderMonkey]

At some point within the past 3-4 months, I think, I read a message board post where someone was f-ing and blime-ing because they'd hit save in OpenOffice, at which point the program had not only crashed, but corrupted the file as well, resulting in them completely losing their work.

Obviously anecdotes aren't a good guide for future behaviour, so you have to be careful with how much stead you put by them, but something like that is enough to make me pretty sceptical and so I probably won't be checking it out within the next, say, 12 months.

[hemebond]

I've been using it for about 3 years now, and the only problem I have is with the page jumping when I'm trying to scroll (something about where the cursor is when I start scrolling, I dunno).

It's well worth a look, especially now that it supports ODF. You can get even further away from Microsofts grip.

[Greggman]

> Sure would be nice to lose that $500 per person capital expense, though.

After reading all those management books you'd think maybe you'd finally have stopped that kind of thinking. Concentrating on the $500 per person is not even a thought that should cross a good manager's mind. His thoughts should be, "how can I make the team as efficient has possible?" Only latter should issues of cost come up taking into consideration the costs of lost efficiencies and lost opportunities.

[Hugh "Nomad" Hancock]

Yep. Strange Company as a whole has been using OO for about 3 years now, maybe more, and it's quite, quite fantastic. Slow on older PCs, but that's about the only fault I can find.

Hmm. I'll re-read Joel's article and have a think about how scheduling would work using OO.

[Pag]

I hear that if you want to improve the loading time of Open Office, you should disable Java in the program's options. It seems it makes a world of difference, and the only negative is (I think) that it disables macros.

Also, if you like free game development programs (who doesn't?), I've written an article listing good free software for every part of game development recently. You can find it here: http://sacredcows.pagtech.com/index.php?p=21

[Greg]

So put the spreadsheet up on the server, and use your version control system to lock it when someone is editing... Everyone still has access.

I agree, OO 2.0 is vastly better than 1.0, and if it's used company-wide, incompatibility problems should be minimized.