A farewell to Microsoft Office

+5 7 votes

A farewell to Microsoft Office

by Leo Waldock on 18.07.2010 19:26 17 comments 4935 views
Categories: Secure IT
Tags: microsoft, office 2003, windows 7, thunderbird, openoffice

Bye Bye Microsoft Office
It's Sunday afternoon and I've been pushed over the edge by Microsoft's product activation process to such an extent that I have ditched Office 2003 in favour of OpenOffice and Thunderbird.
The problem stemmed from another Microsoft product when I decided the time had come to make the move from 32-bit Windows XP to 64-bit Windows 7. My old PC had done sterling duty and worked perfectly but the desktop had started to look a bit old and crusty and I also fancied making the change from DirectX 9 to DirectX 11.
I built a replacement PC and in the process I made the jump from Intel Core 2 to Intel Core i7 and all appeared to be well. The next step was to install my chosen applications, including Office 2003, so I could get email up and running, which meant I had to activate both Windows and Office.
A day or two later my new PC began to mysteriously blue screen and restart. It appeared to be a problem with memory compatibility so I spent a week changing component after component (four lots of memory, the graphics card, CPU, motherboard, sound card and power supply since you wonder) until I got to the C: drive.
Ok, it's not called the C: drive these days but you know what I mean. Happily I made the transition from hard drive to Solid State Drive (SSD) a while back and the process of copying the contents of one SSD to another is incredibly swift. Unfortunately it also meant that I had to reactivate Office as Microsoft appears to be more deeply concerned about system changes with Office than it is with Windows.
I guess that tells us which division of Microsoft makes all the profit and therefore merits the most protection.
Changing the SSD didn't solve the problem and today - Sunday – I had a flash of inspiration. In the past I have used a dedicated network card but now I was using the integrated NIC on the motherboard. There's nothing wrong with integrated hardware but heck, it was something I hadn't considered so I whipped open the case of the PC, slipped in a shiny Intel Gigabit card, disabled the integrated NIC in the BIOS and was good to go. It's too early to tell whether the change has helped my PC but what I can tell you for certain is that Office 2003 regards a change in the network adapter as sufficient grounds for reactivation.
The automatic on-line activation process wouldn't play ball and neither would the phone system so I ended up speaking to a worker on the Hell Desk. She was adamant that the only people who could get Office working were the UK technical support desk and they work regular office hours Monday to Friday which isn't much use on Sunday afternoon.
There's an irony here as I was originally sent my retail copy of Office 2003 by Microsoft themselves when I reviewed the package many years ago and I know for a fact that the software has only ever been installed on my personal PC.
Cursing their corporate name to the heavens I paid a visit to OpenOffice and downloaded their free 141MB office suite and followed that with 9MB of free Thunderbird email agent
It took me about fifteen minutes to install the software, set up my email account, import email from Outlook and to change my default applications from Outlook, Word and Excel to Thunderbird, Writer and Calc.
I've thought long and hard about my closing sentence and have chosen the words with some care.
Microsoft, you can take Office and shove it.

Comments

# | by Michael Whittaker on 28 July 2010, 10:08

I sympathise, but the problem for many of us in small to medium corporate environments is that most of our day to day accounting and tax software uses or links output to Microsoft office products so sadly we are not able to make the choice. Although I might for files at home??

# | by Duncan on 28 July 2010, 14:26

I believe Open Office can read and write MS Office file formats and this can be set as the default. It may not be able to run macros, which would be a problem if you rely heavily on them. An increasing number of sizeable organisations are going to Open Office - the latest I heard of was a local city council in Spain (Zaragoza?).

# | by Colin Antrobus on 28 July 2010, 18:12

I am used to using both MSOffice and OpenOffice. I find myself increasingly gravitating to OpenOffice. As with most software there is good and bad in both, but I think the file conversion of text documents is easier/smoother in OpenOffice which can read and save to various MSOffice version, and other file types.

# | by Andrew Crook on 28 July 2010, 18:47

Unless the Excel or Word document uses some of the more esoteric functions, Open Office 3 will handle both 2003 and 2007 format documents automatically. You can also use the Microsoft Office compatibility pack (free from Microsoft) to convert 2007 version files to 2003 version.

I have used both Office and Open Office and find that Open Office 3 is far closer to Microsoft Office 2003 in looks and functionality than Microsoft Office 2007. So for all of those who hate the ribbon in 2007/2010 (I quite like it actually) Open Office 3 is a good and free (to purchase) alternative.

Using Thunderbird as a substitute for Outlook is more tricky - they are very different products, so it depends upon your business requirements. I have just upgraded to Thunderbird 3 which is a vast improvement on Thunderbird 2 (no International Rescue jokes). For pure email management Thunderbird is fine - but Outlook has better diary and time management features.

# | by Rob Watson on 30 July 2010, 10:07

So, nearly two weeks in - any regrets Leo?

# | by Leo Waldock on 30 July 2010, 10:22

Very few regrets so far and none that have been strong enough to persuade me to reactivate Office 2003. Give it another few weeks and I'll uninstall the Microsoft suite.

As an IT journo I use Office to create very basic spreadsheets for features tables and my documents are child-like and contain little more than text. The kids use more features when they insert pictures in Word for their homework.

By contrast I have to keep everything as simple as possible as my editors and sub editors often use Macs and then plonk my text into a DTP system or directly into a web edit kit.

Group working plays no part in my life.

With those massive provisos in place I am very happy with Open Office but am going to have to hunt around for a decent spell check dictionary. When it comes to Thunderbird 3 I am generally very impressed but the way it handles file attachments is not intuitive and takes a moment of thought.

One admission - I haven't even attempted to email a native ODT document and use Word 97/2000/XP as my default format to avoid confusion.

# | by Throg on 23 August 2010, 13:37

Do yourself a favour and junk Windows as well - plenty of other distros out there such as Ubunti which are just plain better than Windows (inc Windows 7).

# | by Aidan Dennis on 23 August 2010, 16:55

could you comment on whether the same XL spreadsheet column ( and line restrictions ) in 2003 are also in OpenOffice?

# | by Leo Waldock on 23 August 2010, 17:05

You're asking the wrong chap that question - I only use spreadsheets to create basic tables and to do very simple calculations. As Open Office is free it would be a simple matter for you to install the software and give it a whirl to see if it suits your requirements.

# | by Christopher Papps on 24 August 2010, 02:20

Hi folks

At the time of writing the current stable release is V3.2.1, which according to the documentation has a row limit of 65536 rows. The current beta release of OpenOffice (3.3) will replace the row limit with 1048576 rows. No mention there about column limits. See feature list here.

Macros are catered for by a language similar to VBA called Basic. See here:

HTH

Chris

*** Update -- I have just installed Beta version 3.3.

I can confidently report placing a value in cell AMJ1048576

That is 1048576 rows x 1024 columns. ***

BTW, if anyone is interested, I shall be happy to post some excel templates that translate features from old menus (Office 2003) to new (Office 2007) for Word, Access, Excel and Outlook. If my memory serves me they came from MS.

CP

# | by Fabian Finlay on 24 August 2010, 20:21

I use a lot of named ranges in Excel and Open Office does not yet recognise them This has been a problem issue fro some time. It is the only thing holding me back.

I wouldn't dream of using Outlook for email and use Eudora instead. this is now available as a free download

Download Version 5.2 and follow these upgrade instructions if you have any problem with installing the latest version. 5.2 works perfectly well and is what I have been using for years

http://eudora.com/techsupport/kb/2759hq.html

I do however use Outlook for my address book. Does anyone know a decent free substitute for use with all these other goodies.

# | by Graham on 25 August 2010, 12:28

I am still using an even older version of Office and hence keep a PC with XP for that purpose only. I would like to know if anyone has managed to move an Access database into Open Office and if so were there any problems. I use a Linux PC for internet access, much faster to start up and easily and quickly restored to factory settings, the best protection against viruses etc. However, it's a shame that we are all chained to Microsoft purely because of the "fear, uncertainty and doubt" in changing. Remember "Big Blue" anyone ?

# | by Simon Hurst on 25 August 2010, 17:16

I think a lot of people stick with Microsoft applications not because of fear uncertainty and doubt, but because it does things the competition doesn't. Equally, lots of people just use the very basic functions of the Office applications because they have always used Office when they could indeed use something like OpenOffice or one of the online solutions. I think a bigger issue is the cost of proper training and implementation compared to the cost of the software itself.

# | by Christopher Jones on 25 August 2010, 19:15

I use Office because all of my corporate customers and most of my clients use Microsoft on an enterprise basis, and I cannot afford to ignore that very simple message. I did try Open Office some years ago, and found it did not deliver enough added value for me to dump Microsoft.

# | by Christopher Papps on 26 August 2010, 01:55

Preface - I have not performed extensive testing here, however it seems OO Base does not open MS Access files as such, it merely links to them, using its own drivers.

Queries and Tables seem to be accessible. Reports and Forms are not, and therefore I guess that any VBA and macro logic is not carried across. This seems to apply to .mdb (Access 2000) and .accdb (Access 2007) files. Assessment of your requirements is therefore in order!

IMHO it seems Base is not much of an equivalent for Access, however there is plenty of other free database software out there, so I can't say I am much disappointed. I wanted to be able to replicate the ability in Access to link Access tables to other (eg ODBC) data sources, and just can't seem to make that happen.

# | by Chris Challis on 27 August 2010, 12:26

I agree with Christopher Jones as, unlike Leo, compatibility with clients and collaborators is still the number one priority. For that purpose I still use Office 2003, and will do so until it's clear everyone has upgraded (or should I say downgraded) to 2007 or 2010. I still prefer the 2003 version for basic use, i.e. unless the new functionality is needed, such as for very large Excel data sets and sophisticated PowerPoint presentations.

2003 means best to run XP. A few squid on topping up my laptop's RAM to the max has worked a treat. The household has Windows 7 and Vista laptops, but they just seem more awkward and frustrating for basic tasks - certainly nothing to encourage me to use W7 regularly. So with W7/O7 feeling like a downgrade on XP/O3, how does Microsoft do it?

# | by Andrew Mair on 16 September 2010, 10:27

"but what I can tell you for certain is that Office 2003 regards a change in the network adapter as sufficient grounds for reactivation." In my office our network was "upgraded" and ever since Excel 2002 has taken minutes to load files. We recently upgraded 1 machine to 2007 and it will load the same 2002 xls file in seconds across the same network. Any idea what is going on?? It is killing us.

Thanks Andy

@Fabian Finlay. I have used Yahoo mail since about 1999 and had a PC for nearly 10 years without an up to date virus checker that never got a virus - I believe because I didn't use Outlook. Stick to using email on the net (but NOT Hotmail) and Junk Outlook I'd say.

Remember that by posting a comment you are agreeing to the website Terms of Use. Please note that guest comments are not moderated.

Community members please first Login

Comment
Name		Email
		E-mail address will not be published

Please type in the digits from the image

Blog Topics

All blog posts

Tags

Receive blog updates

A farewell to Microsoft Office

A farewell to Microsoft Office

Comments

Join the IT Faculty

IT Counts Poll

Will you be using tablet PCs in your business in 2012?

Latest IT news

Contact Us