City Council says OpenOffice shortcomings are forcing it back to Microsoft

Despite not updating OpenOffice or using LibreOffice, the city council in Freiburg, Germany is planning to replace Open Source with Microsoft Office.

The council stated that continuing to use OpenOffice will lead to performance impairments and aggravation among the employees and external parties. Since 2007, Freiburg has been using OpenOffice side-by-side with Office 2000 since 2007.

The problems that employees faced was with documents composed in Open Office were formatted in a random way when opened in another office suite such as MS Office. Also, there were conversion problems between Microsoft Power Point and OpenOffice’s Impress. The council also noted issues with Calc compared to MS’s counterpart- Excel.

Germany’s Open developers reacted angrily stating that they’ve been using OpenOffice 3.2.1- an obsolete open source office software. Several open source groups in Europe also voiced their opinions in an open letter to the council.

Source: Arnet