Last year, in a post on July 30, title The Power of Open Put To The Test, I mentioned a test I was planning to see how open source productivity tools held up in a consulting environment, where colleagues and clients rely on Microsoft's Office suite. Outcome of this test, which focused primarily on OpenOffice 2.0's compatibility with MS Office, is that while functionality-wise OpenOffice (OO) appears to match MS Office fully, some things still go astray with respect to the conversion of document formats. For example, while the quality of import and export filters in Impress has made a giant leap when compared to previous versions of OO, layouts may still get mixed up a bit when PowerPoint documents are imported.
Another barrier to full-fledged adoption of OO by professionals like me is the lack of support for macros in Excel. Programmed in Microsoft's proprietary Visual Basic it is understandable that OO does not support them, but it also makes that I will never have the required 100% guarantee that Excel models produced by colleagues or clients will function in Calc as intended. And although I strongly discourage colleagues to use macros in the first place - Keep it simple, stupid! (KISS) - it sometimes proves too tempting to resist. Hence, it still is a bridge too far for consultants to rely solely on open source productivity tools for their day-to-day work, especially as most of their clients are likely to use MS Office.
Given these issues, the use of Linux-based laptops by professionals is somewhat problematic as well. While Microsoft does offer Office for Mac, the release of a Linux version of Office is highly unlikely. A more practical work-around would be running MS Office under Wine, a Windows emulator for Linux. However, the fact that Wine is still working towards version 1.0 (currently at version 0.9.8), full compatibility and stability cannot be guaranteed yet. Or you could buy CodeWeavers' CrossOver Office, which allows you to run a broad range of Windows applications under Linux. Finally, one could simply wait until open source projects like OO fully support the Microsoft Office Open XML format, whose specifications were released some time ago. But be warned: you may have to wait forever!
Another barrier to full-fledged adoption of OO by professionals like me is the lack of support for macros in Excel. Programmed in Microsoft's proprietary Visual Basic it is understandable that OO does not support them, but it also makes that I will never have the required 100% guarantee that Excel models produced by colleagues or clients will function in Calc as intended. And although I strongly discourage colleagues to use macros in the first place - Keep it simple, stupid! (KISS) - it sometimes proves too tempting to resist. Hence, it still is a bridge too far for consultants to rely solely on open source productivity tools for their day-to-day work, especially as most of their clients are likely to use MS Office.
Given these issues, the use of Linux-based laptops by professionals is somewhat problematic as well. While Microsoft does offer Office for Mac, the release of a Linux version of Office is highly unlikely. A more practical work-around would be running MS Office under Wine, a Windows emulator for Linux. However, the fact that Wine is still working towards version 1.0 (currently at version 0.9.8), full compatibility and stability cannot be guaranteed yet. Or you could buy CodeWeavers' CrossOver Office, which allows you to run a broad range of Windows applications under Linux. Finally, one could simply wait until open source projects like OO fully support the Microsoft Office Open XML format, whose specifications were released some time ago. But be warned: you may have to wait forever!
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