Slideshow for OpenOffice states OOo is "fully compatible" with Microsoft Office which is not true

[Jeff Lane ]

Binary package hint: ubiquity

The slide for OpenOffice in Ubiquity (viewing now on the Netbook ISO Wubi install) says:

OpenOffice.org is fully compatible with Microsoft Office" and that is not true.

It is "mostly" compatible... or somewhat compatible, but not fully compatible due to Microsoft's heavy use of VBscript and such in Office tools like Access and Excel.

Also, MS Word docs do not always render properly in OO and vice versa due to some variance in how the configurations for each document type is handled.

This is a very common complaint about using OpenOffice and saying that it is "fully compatible" is not accurate.

[Dylan McCall (dylanmccall)]

That's a good point :)

Unfortunately it's too late to change strings at this point, but this problem should be fixed for Narwhal. I will label it as such soon…

[Jeff Lane  (bladernr)]

FWIW, the OOo slide in the Kubuntu Maverick slideshow has good text that explains the compatibility without raising user expectations too high. It doesn't say fully compatible, it simply says "works with documents from office suites like MS Office and Wordperfect" or something like that.

[Felipe Castillo (fcastillo.ec)]

For natty, this should be changed to LibreOffice instead of OO...

[Dylan McCall (dylanmccall)]

Okay, sorry this missed alpha 2, folks.

Current content in the soon to be committed office.html for Natty:

“Ubuntu comes with LibreOffice; a free office suite packed with everything you need to create high quality documents, spreadsheets and presentations. LibreOffice is based on OpenOffice and tries its best to work with other applications like Microsoft Word.”

The latter was “Microsoft Office” but we don't actually support the entire MS Office suite (OneNote?), saying Office one more time in that sentence had me wanting to throw up, and people typically refer to parts of the suite like “Word” and “Excel” anyway.

[Jonathan Carter (jonathan)]

LibreOffice is rather a fork of OpenOffice than based on it. I would suggest dropping the OpenOffice.org reference complety and do something more like...

"""
Ubuntu ships with LibreOffice; a free office suite feature-packed with everything you require to produce impressive and high quality documents, spreadsheets and presentations. LibreOffice provides interoperability with many other popular office suites and fully supports the opendocument format standards.
"""

That still needs work but I also think it's a good idea to drop the Microsoft reference, you'll have to add trademark notes for both Microsoft and Word and that will just be a bit icky in the slideshow imho.