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Microsoft Office Software: the office open source challenge

by SoftwareGuru
updated Sunday 17th August 2008 15:18 GMT

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The open source challenge to Microsoft Office is growing just as quickly as the billion dollar wars on internet search with Google Docs, Adobe Buzzword and Sun Microsystems OpenOffice all lining up to persuade users to consider alternatives to the popular choice, Microsoft Office 2007.

Many home users in particular have purchased the latest version of Office, tried using the new User Interface (UI) and then vented their knee-jerk reactions online through blogs and comment sections. This is a real shame because investing just a little bit of effort in MS Office can reap incredibly satisfying rewards, helping to create documents that look sharper than ever.

OpenSource War

The open source challenge has already drawn first blood but the war itself is far from over.

Unlike home users who may use Office 2007 infrequently, daily business users can get to grips with the trade off quickly.

The short term obstacle of having Office 2003's most common features moved elsewhere in the new interface can be offset against the long term gain of having related functions grouped together along with new exclusive features (double click on an image in Word 2007 and browse the FX options to see what we mean, or the CV templates, or embed objects, etc...).

However, even if you can accept that the new car comes with a new dashboard, Microsoft's competitors are quick to highlight the compatibility issue of Office 2003's .doc standard against Office 2007's .docx standard.

OpenSource Challenges

Of course in reality it's about as much of an (non) issue as watching video files on your computer or game console. To clarify, if you want to watch a TV show or film in your media player but you're missing the correct codec then you simply download the codec for free and get on with watching what you want. Same goes with Office, save a doc in whatever format you or your end user needs and anyone can view it.

Office 2003 users can update their software to read Office 2007 .docx files. Not exactly difficult unless you're using pirated software in the first place.

People will go to incredible lengths to view multimedia files whether it's .avi, flash or whatever but have less patience, if any, when presented with Office document improvements. Which would make you wonder why (a) they wanted a new improved version in the first place, and (b) how open source software can persuade users to become more willing to learn anything new.

There is no doubt that the open source challenge is firmly in the mind of the market leader. For example, Microsoft is helping Apache but will still compete against it via its own web server software, IIS.

It won't have escaped their attention either that companies developing or shipping products that support Office Open XML file formats also include IBM, Sun, Apple, Novell, Corel, DataViz, Nuance, Adobe, ThinkFree and Zoho.

Review Microsoft Office 2007 features for yourself.

The open source challenge to Microsoft Office is well under way. How will Office users respond? Read more here.

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Join the debate on open source softwareand the issue of Office usability

Join the debate on open source software
and the issue of Office usability