OO vs. Office?
 

I just purchased Omnifocus and have been very impressed, and am trying to decide whether or not to purchase OmniOutliner. I just got the entire Microsoft Office 2008 suite on my mac (for cheap, of course), and I'm trying to see what the real benefits of OO are.

I think it would make it very simple and painless to manage several phases of my business, from finances to web content writing. I like it, and I'm definitely considering the Pro version.

What benefits does OO have over the brand new Office suite? After using Office 97 for years, I think the note taking feature in Word 08 is very slick, and Excel has incredible templates to get pretty much any project done.

What are your thoughts? It it the simplicity that makes it sell, or is there more to it? Omni is awesome, but Microsoft will never lose the software game. They own too much of Apple.

Totally tangential to your question, but Microsoft doesn't own any of Apple; they bought some non-voting shares back in the '90s, but they have long since sold them. (At quite a profit, if I remember correctly.)

Except to test Office-related bugs, I haven't really used it for several years. Obviously, I'm a biased source, but Outliner and some applescript does everything I need it to do, and I can do stuff in outliner (export to a dynamic html document for posting to the web) that I'm not aware of being able to do in excel - could certainly be wrong, though.

Outliner is definitely [B]not[/B] a complete replacement for Office, though. It occupies a middle ground between Word and Excel, in my fairly unqualified and biased opinion. ;-)

In any case, I'll clean up that document I mentioned and try to post it somewhere publicly accessible.

If you use outlines or make lists a lot, OO is fantastic. Word is a terrible outliner (Notebook view is a modest improvement). It was designed not to outline, but to create a hierarchy that would be turned into a written document. For quickly bashing out notes, OO will be faster and easier.

Plus it does lots of other stuff. Columns, drop downs, styles, etc. Great list keeper.

OTOH, it's a bear to get OUT of OO and into Word to MAKE that structured document when/if you decide you need to.

SIGH. It's never easy, is it?

OO export insufficient
 

I am glad to see that I am not alone in my disappointment with such a limited ability to make a structured document in any version of Word from OO. IMHO, it is a shame because so much of OO is what I need, but the inability to export reliably to structured documents in Word has me now looking for a replacement to OO.

It also leaves me doubting that I would pay again for an upgrade to get a function that should be included in a $70 program. Not a great value, folks.

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[QUOTE=iNik;38846]If you use outlines or make lists a lot, OO is fantastic. Word is a terrible outliner (Notebook view is a modest improvement). It was designed not to outline, but to create a hierarchy that would be turned into a written document. For quickly bashing out notes, OO will be faster and easier.

Plus it does lots of other stuff. Columns, drop downs, styles, etc. Great list keeper.

OTOH, it's a bear to get OUT of OO and into Word to MAKE that structured document when/if you decide you need to.

SIGH. It's never easy, is it?[/QUOTE]

Our Word export format moves over all the formatting that their HTML document type supported at the time the export was written. If I remember correctly, it didn't support multiple columns, for example.

We haven't had a chance to look at it again since they released Office 2008, but in general, if their format doesn't give us the tools to represent your information the way it looks in Outliner over in Word, we can't do anything about that.

Fair play, Brian. It does mean that my docs are somewhat 'trapped' in OO though. Right now I am building a template for use in Pages that allows me to do much of my outlining there. I am also working some with Numbers. I miss the many easy features of OO, but struggle with the the lack of easy export options that preserve most of the features (regardless of your fine efforts.)

Thanks for the reply.
Best wishes for future efforts,
Josiah

Josiah - any chance you could make this template public?

What about the plugin that lets you export to Excel? Couldn't you export everything into Excel and then insert it in a Word document?

Yes, it works like a charm. If an OO document has columns, you can export the full document to Word by converting it to CSV or XML, and then copying it from Excel.

It doesn't preserve the hierarchy, but it does export all of the data. That's enough for me.

I'd love to see better Word export support in OO. Looking at something like Matchware's OpenMind product for the Mac, it certainly seems to be possible to output an outline that is accepted by Word 2008 and even uses the built in styles and formatting.

i have a licensed copy of word08 that i never use--it was part of a bundle. if had to choose between word08 and oop3 i would flush word and keep omni. my main word processor is nisuswriter pro.
i was attracted to the idea of word when recently some concept mapping and mind mapping software claimed to integrate with office08 and open office. what i later discovered is that this integration is limited to their pc platform versions.
i want software that's built for the mac, not some dodgy jar file with a 3rd world interface. so i'd rather use oop3 than some of that mindmapping stuff.
one of my big probs is getting software that reads rtf files on an ipod touch or iphone, stuff that reads office is out there but who wants it?

I can understand that - I'm not a great fan of Office myself. However, I often need to produce documents that will be opened by people using Office on the PC (and I've yet to find anything that can produce documents that open with full fidelity - especially if they include graphics).

However, it would also be nice to see OO able to produce an outline that would be recognised by Pages 09 - given its outlining capabilities.

[QUOTE=Curlypaws;53452]I can understand that - I'm not a great fan of Office myself. However, I often need to produce documents that will be opened by people using Office on the PC (and I've yet to find anything that can produce documents that open with full fidelity - especially if they include graphics).

However, it would also be nice to see OO able to produce an outline that would be recognised by Pages 09 - given its outlining capabilities.[/QUOTE]

You can bet your bottom dollar that the Pages 09 outlining frameworks are proprietary and that Apple won't release them to other developers.

OmniOutliner & Pages
 

Sorry to hear that Pages 09 won't be able to read OmniOutliner. That means I probably won't buy it. I agree with what's generally been said here about the difficulty of getting OO outlines into a word processor. It's more trouble than it should be for those of us who like to write in OO but need to share the product with others who use Word.

It's been a while since I've looked very closely at this. Could you please let me know what specific problems you have moving from OO to Word so I can make sure we have them all filed?

Somethings to know about the design of the export is that row text will be turned into heading levels in Word and row notes will become regular body text. The heading styles in Word should match the row level styles in OO although not all style options will carry over. Local styles in general should be preserved, like bold/italic/font color.

As far as columns in Word, they aren't real columns, it simply flows one column of text into the next column you set up in that section. So if the problem is that the Word export only supports one column, had you not used OO and started in Word, would you still have created the columns you did? And if so, would you have used Word's column feature, or create it using tabs?

Or maybe more important to know, what kind of documents are you wanting to take to Word, and for what purpose? Is it to share them with non-OO or Windows users? Is it to do more complex formatting that you need a real word processor for?