In complete honesty, what are some of the weaknesses of OpenOffice? Lest I seem like an OpenOffice fanboy, I will say that I expect that I will agree with a number of its weaknesses, but simply be unaware of them since I have not used Microsoft Office much since moving to Linux a few years ago. One weakness I do know of is that its .doc converter is not perfect.
Seriously. Open a recent version of Microsoft Office or Apple iWork and just start writing some letter or presentation. Chances are, it will look quite pleasant, if a bit generic.
Do the same thing in OpenOffice/LibreOffice and it will look like a document in Word Perfect ca. 1995.
This is not to say that OpenOffice is not capable of producing nice-looking documents. Technologically, it is perfectly fine. But the templates are awful and sadly, that is what most people will notice when you give them a document written in OpenOffice.
Also, the GUI could use a bit work. LibreOffice is a step in the right direction, but it still looks a bit boring and clunky compared to its proprietary brothers. Case in point, my mother 'got' iWork Pages and MS Word after a short introduction. She might not know about all features, but she could find them and use them once we pointed out there existence to her. But over the course of about six months, we were unable to get her to use OpenOffice proficiently.
We use OpenOffice at work. Aside what the others said, it has horrible automatiritis, worse that old Word versions.
Example: I have a "Heading 1" style at 20pt, bold, italic. Start a new line at the end of a document, choose "Heading 1", OOo decides to make it 20pt, bold, but not italic. No idea why. Style setting is correct. Only fix is manually adding italic markup to the text.
IMO, its main weakness is that it feels like an outdated version of MS Office. It also makes users need to think a little but more. For example, it encourages you to make an informed decisions regarding your file format preference and be aware of their consequences with regards to file sharing, freedoms, etc. Something most users prefer to keep hidden.
Spreadsheets and presentations aren't as pretty and even less pretty when opened in MS which means OO.org is pretty useless to anyone who uses these for work or school.
Basically its software for people who want free software or for people who don't want to pay for software, won't/can't pirate it, and either don't mind tiny inconveniences or have pretty basic needs.
Office is a software package that for many people, represents a big part of their computer literacy. Being a little different can be the same as making them a little dumber.
That said, its perfectly fine. IF MS fell off a bridge tomorrow most people would use it without much issues.
I'll have to disagree with two of those statements. To me MS Office (admittedly I haven't owned any version since the ribbon toolbar) looks much worse now than LibreOffice does (and as far as I know it hasn't deviated too far from OO.o).
As far as the file formats go, I like it to remind me to convert back to .odt when I'm done using a file in .doc because it uses less of my Dropbox. However, I've given LibreOffice to both of my parents now and they can barely tell the difference- once I set their initial preferences it stopped prompting them about file formats.
Sure you do. Most people don't want to know about file formats. Neither do I honestly. To people who have been using the ribbon toolbar (newer versions), OO feels like going back. And sure you can give it to your parents or anyone else, especially for home use. I did say it was perfectly fine.
Everyone hated it originally. Now people like it. It's just like most changes. I haven't used it much myself. I usually use Open Office.
Sure, setting is a possible "solution" but that implies there is a problem. Most people will do fine with it but most people probably also just wish their son would just install pirated Office for them like their neighbors.
The last time I tried to use Calc to generate some graphs it completely choked on tables with just a few thousand rows. I don't know how the competitors perform, but for me that was enough to switch to R for my plotting needs. R produced plots in less than a second where Calc took minutes just to open the file.
