German council ditching OpenOffice to go back to Microsoft

Do any of you technical types still use a word processor on a regular basis (apart from to read documents others have sent)?<p>I just can't remember the last time I created a document in one.<p>If I want to communicate, a plain text email is fine.<p>Want to collaborate on a document? Wiki or git versioned text file is better.<p>Want to publish something for others? Wordpress or straight HTML is better.<p>Want to make a posh looking document? LaTeX generated PDF is better.

MS Office, (especially Excel and Word) is some of the best software ever developed. Excel is a fantastically powerful and flexible system and honestly, beyond basic spreadsheet/word processor use, nothing comes close to MS Office.<p>I was kind of hoping that OpenOffice use in Germany would be a success but really can not see how it can compete with MS Office, except on sticker price.

Strange that if you create a Word Processing format so byzantine that even the combined might of IBM, Sun, Google and the open source community can't reverse engineer it, (and that you yourself struggle with when porting to Mac OS X or Win 8 RT) that the result is people considering you the safe option for their government data.

I use LibreOffice on my own computers. If I ever had to exchange documents with anyone else, I don't think I would.<p>A friend and I were trying to pick a format to use for some files we're jointly working on via Dropbox, and .docx was not sharing well between multiple pieces of software. I don't know whether Pages on his iPad was more of a problem than LibreOffice, but either way, we settled on Markdown. It's simple, has 100% compatible editors on all platforms, and works just fine for simple documents.

I have to say, I sympathize with them. I tried libreoffice, but I just could not keep it up. MS Word is annoying enough for me, LibreOffice adds that extra annoyance. I just wish we could move to a markup system like markdown or restructured text with split editors that generate the document on the fly on a different pane. Plain text! Plain text!

The obvious problem I think, notwithstanding the fork of OpenOffice, is that MS Office is the de-facto standard and it's not in the interest of MS to have the compatibility gap closed. The critical issue with OpenOffice is rooted in Cat String Theory. Compatibility with MS Office is the driving force for development and it's not producing the best UI/UX experience.<p>I think LibreOffice needs to step out of the shadow of MS Office.

Strange they didn't even consider Google Docs or web for the purpose. It is quite understandable that experience with OpenOffice is not as smooth as it is with Microsoft's word or Apple's iWork, but why not give web a chance and then decide this?<p>As it is Governments are supposed to explore all options and then choose the 'technically acceptable most economical' option? I think Google docs will be sweet and better in some ways for the council, considering that these entities are in dire need of more collaboration.<p>Just my 0.02 cents.

Not surprising. Been through many MS -&#62; OO and back again with various organisations throughout the years. OO is good if -everyone- uses OO.<p>In most organisations you get some genius who develops a fancy-smancy spreadsheet, visio diagram or word document with linked data which will be dependent on the MS access runtime, this gets distributed to all the OO users and it just doesn't work.

<i>"Numerous statements concerning LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice are incorrect or outdated," they said in the letter, adding that the support of LibreOffice and OpenOffice is at a professional level these days. "The assessment of the evaluation that compatibility to Microsoft Office cannot be reached in the next few years, is also wrong," they said.</i><p>This is not the best way to respond to losing a customer. Though a lack of customer relations is in favor of participation in an ideology is one of FOSS's great weaknesses.<p>The Council changed vendors. They had no choice because Open Office was killed off.

I wonder why SoftMaker doesn't push itself in its home market hard enough. They are at least not worse than Open/LibreOffice.<p>On a different note, it surprises me there doesn't seem to be any effort on a LyX-like editor, probably less tied to LaTeX (LyX already has to do a lot itself, it even got at least one renderer (LyXHTML) that doesn't involve LaTeX at all).<p>That would be a word processor I'd use (otherwise it is as jiggy2011 says).

I see a lot of comments here, decrying the decision based on a mere word processor. Do also note the problems with the spreadsheet part which, as quoted, is much worse.<p>I can completely sympathize with being forced to abandon Linux itself because of its inability to compete with Excel. There simply is no <i>compatible </i> alternative to excel<p>I'm willing to bet that it was a bigger factor than word processing.

<i>Since then, the city noticed that it has been far from ideal to use only OpenOffice for digital correspondence. Microsoft Office for instance is the standard for external communication, the council said.</i><p>Well, ur doin it wrong. There are vastly superior alternatives to the workflow I think this implies (e-mailing attached documents around).

Considering public institution are using taxpayers' money, I think all of them should be using open source software, for both budget reasons and in principle (to help grow the <i>public</i> open source community, and then benefit from it in the long term).<p>The problem here also sounds like somebody was trying to use Microsoft Office docs in an older version of Open Office. So they were the ones locking themselves in before, and now their solution for having hassle-free work is to reward Microsoft for it, and lock themselves back in? It's like a drug addict who thinks withdrawing is too painful, so might as well continue taking the drugs.

The frustrating thing is that people think that they have to use a word processor where a simple text editor would suffice.

LibreOffice is fantastic, give it a try

Why aren't we using HTML for documents yet?