I would never say that OOo is better than MSO. I don't believe that
OOo is any lighter than MSO; in fact, since OOo is closer,
feature-wise to Office97, one could argue that OOo is far more
bloated. ("One", in this instance, would not be me. ;))Now, I'm not dogging OOo one bit. In fact, I love it. I use it all the time. My wife will often call to me from the other room, "How do you do this in Word?" My inevitable response is, "Use OpenOffice, then ask me again!" One killer feature of OOo for me... My wife taught high school this year. Never again, but that's another story. Anyhow, I helped her make lots of little multiple-choice quizzes throughout the year. In Word, I was copying and pasting to randomize the answers. Either that, or I had to do it as I typed. When I started doing it in OOo Writer, I discovered that Ctrl-up and down reordered list items. Miraculous. Suddenly I didn't dread making those tests. Some things just make more sense to me. Format -> Document rather than File -> Page setup. And while some people hate the word completion, I like it. With vocabulary words like indubitably, only having to type it fully once was kinda nice. One thing that FLOSS apps are always way behind on is UI. If you want to convert users and cut into MSO's userbase, you have to be pretty. People like pretty. People will give their money to a pretty thief before an honest ugly fellow. As far as Google Docs, I used Writely when it came out two years or so ago, and I was impressed. They even added a few new features after the Google acquisition. If I'm typing a letter, or maybe a blog post, it'd be great. I tried to create the aforementioned quizzes, though, but with very few list options, it was futile. MSO will also always kill OOo in the collaboration arena. That's their forte, and they do it well. Expensive and proprietary, but well. So there are my thoughts. Joe
