June 30, 2009

Office-compatibility torture test

SoftMaker Office shines and OpenOffice.org falters in InfoWorld's Office-fidelity face-off

In InfoWorld's tests using complex Word and Excel documents, OpenOffice.org 3.1 failed to deliver on its promise of better Microsoft Office interoperability, severely mangling our Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel test data files. By stark contrast, SoftMaker Office showed excellent compatibility with Office 2003 file formats, making it a safe choice for heterogeneous environments -- at least where external data access wasn’t a priority. Neither OpenOffice.org nor SoftMaker Office was able to preserve links to an external SQL data source in imported Microsoft Excel documents. (See the review, "The better Office alternative: SoftMaker Office bests OpenOffice.org.")

The three images below show the identical document section rendered under Microsoft Word 2010 (in compatibility mode), OpenOffice Writer 3.1, and TextMaker 2009, respectively. Notice how OpenOffice mangled the hanging indent in the bulleted list, while Word and TextMaker rendered the list correctly. (Click each image for a closer look.)

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tmstone835 30-Jun-09 11:54am
Open Office does have database connectivity to many back-end database technologies including ODBC, MySQL, dBase, and Access as well as direct file links. Just as in Microsoft Office, you need to configure your database connectivity. I really doubt if your Excel spreadsheets would connect to a database server if you tried moving the file to a computer that did not have the DB connectivity configured properly. It would be interesting to see if the connections would be maintained if your OpenOffice system had the database connection configured. The easiest method is to use the database wizard from the File --> New --> Database and select Connect to Existing Database. There is an option to make the connection available to all OpenOffice applications.
slacka 30-Jun-09 10:56pm
Randall can you please post a link to your torture test files? I'd like verify your claims with Go-oo variant along with posting a bug report for the issues you have identified.
samoanbiscuit 1-Jul-09 4:19am
Interesting article, but one issue I have with this test is the fact that you used a new pre-release version of MSOffice, but use the current versions of OpenOffice. If you could hunt down a pre-release of the new MSOffice, surely you could have found or asked someone for an OpenOffice beta or nightly build.

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