The default Office Suite on Ubuntu is…
Here’s another article from our Guest Blogger Dr. Abhishek Puri on Opera. You can read his previous article here and here
Open Office has gone through various incarnations being heavily promoted by Sun. The best part is that it is a free open source software and be ported across different platforms. But that’s where the “good things” end.
Ever since I have shifted to Ubuntu, Open Office has remained static in it’s appearance; I am counting over 6 years of “free open source software use”. The ideological underpinnings not to use closed source software ever has not yet blinded me to the eye candy and the functionality of other systems. This is not a gripe session but Open Office is found wanting in it’s approach. It’s good thing to be standards compliant, it’s good to have cross platform availability but it sucks to have a jaded look because one doesn’t really have a choice. Indeed a paradoxical situation.
Downloading and installing to use K office is a pain because they have implemented the product in a manner which throws out user friendliness out of the window. I am not a KDE fanboy but clearly having few default “settings” that works also makes sense most of the times. It feels buggy and bloated and clearly not in the best of the “open source implementation”.
Contrast to this is perhaps the only product from Microsoft that works to some extent is their Office platform. It has been criticized ad nauseum because of the “additional options” it provides but it works and is a huge money spinner for the company. Another notable mention is Apple’s Keynote software that consistently gets scored high on usability, themes and transitions.
Why is that the developers from Open Office have not been able to innovate? In retrospect, it seems as if they are trying hard to emulate the previous versions of the closed source systems and bring out a functional product. Truth be told. Open Office is definitely a vast improvement over the previous versions. I use Impress heavily and I can testify clearly that ability to add tables and images has vastly improved over the previous versions. Animations and slide transitions are more or less static in their development but they deliver the goods specially when over the top eye candy is not required.
The difference in the approach is for other software. I had the opportunity to see Keynote in action recently and was totally wowed by the implementation. It is not even surprising that Google spews out thousands of results to turn the computer into a Mac lookalike. The usability is definitely a concern but Apple does provide a fresh perspective to it’s operating system and it’s various tightly integrated components. Ubuntu is inching closer but yet too far off for practical purposes.
This is not to say that anything free cannot compare to closed source alternatives. The debate usually centres on individual perspectives. It is all about choice. Yet, I do feel let down because my Ubuntu Box cannot match the best in the world for Office Applications.
It is no wonder that Ubuntu wanted to let go of Open Office for it’s netbook edition. It is bloated, eats up huge amounts of memory and would definitely be a pain for underpowered processors. They wanted to settle in for Google Docs with Gears implemented; it would have been a huge commercial spin off for them too. The idea is to implement Open Office as a lean mean application with eye candy and extensibility.
Interestingly, on their ideas implementation Wiki, Open Office does aim to “ape” Apple’s keynote. Unfortunately, there is no “out of the box” idea to justify this.
I am typing this out on Google Docs because it would let me email this presentation in couple of clicks. All the more practical approach. I can also collaborate with others to edit it and it works for me if I don’t demand anything extra from it. Very soon Google would be streaming advertisements too. It keeps a back up of all my past write ups although this is unhealthy reliance on cloud computing.
As I had mentioned, this is not a gripe session but an earnest need to improve upon open office beyond it’s jaded interface. This would bring in more “respectability” as well as more users, in my opinion. Ultimately it’s about increasing the user base and claiming 100 million users on the website is not going to help. Most of them, on any given day, would still want to use addictive eye candy.
