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Friday, December 11, 2009

In praise of OpenOffice

9:35 PM / Technology / 3 Comments

I've been a Microsoft Office user for as long as I can remember. I started out on Word for DOS back in the late 80s and moved over to the Windows version (Word 2.0 at the time) when I got Windows 3.11. As a measure of how, erm, eccentric I am, I still remember my unbridled delight when Word for Windows 6.0 came along and offered the option of automatically turning straight quotes to curly quotes. Er, yeah. In my defence, this was before I'd discovered the Internet or computer games, and word processing was about the most exciting thing I knew how to do on a PC.

So yes, I'm practically a lifelong Microsoft Office user. Recently, however, I've been experimenting with an alternative: OpenOffice.org, put together by a consortium of developers including Sun Microsystems, is remarkably similar to its Microsoft counterpart in most respects. The big difference is that it's absolutely free which, considering that you're getting fully fledged word processing, spreadsheet, database and presentation (think PowerPoint) applications, plus a vector graphics editor, is pretty damn impressive.

Seem familiar?

I've been using OpenOffice Writer (OpenOffice's answer to Microsoft Word) as my primary word processing program for the last week or so, and I'm pretty satisfied. Of course, it's difficult to let go of a near-lifetime of conditioning to do things the Word way (honestly, the only other word processing program I've ever used is the horrid ClarisWorks, which was foisted on me thanks to the school's bizarre decision to furnish its Computing department with Macs), and on a few occasions I've found theoretically simple tasks to be needlessly convoluted. For instance, I've still not got the hang of the implementation of Styles, and something as straightforward as having portrait and landscape pages in the same document is strangely complicated. It also strikes me as being less stable than Word: it crashed on me once yesterday, and quite honestly the last time Word did that to me was back in the Windows 98 days, about a decade ago. Finally, most of the more formatting-intensive of my existing Word documents look positively alien when opened in OpenOffice Writer, so if I do decide to switch over full-time it's going to be a nightmare and a half making sure all the extant chapters of my thesis (for instance) are appropriately reformatted.

Still, when starting documents from scratch, I've been very impressed with OpenOffice. Download it yourselves and give it a whirl - it's cross-platform, and it's not as if it'll cost you anything.

3 Comments

 
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