I feel I need to give my 2 cents worth of opinions to those who think that
MS is terrible (and successful to boot! how dare they be successful!) and
OpenOffice is great.
Here's my personal view, from having worked extensively with Microsoft
Office for the past 10-15 years on my job, and now with OpenOffice for the past
4
years or so at home. Microsoft has done a lot of very good things to make the
use of computers convenient and easy to learn for the average (non-geek)
user. They've made a lot of money doing so, but it's because they've put out a
good product. You don't get to be as successful as they have been by not doing
a lot of things right.
OpenOffice is also a great product. Given the choice of OpenOffice for free
vs MS Office for $500 or whatever they're charging these days, the decision is
EXTREMELY easy -- OpenOffice.
If OpenOffice and MS Office were the same price (either free, or $500, or
some price in between), I'd have to say I'd pick MS Office.
Why? Just a lot of small to medium things that make OpenOffice a bit tougher
to use, in my humble opinion. Some examples: (1) Mailing labels -- I learned
how to do these in MS pretty easily by reading the help. I still haven't
mastered it in OO, after having spent at least 10X the time it took me to learn
it in MS. (2) Bullets -- When making text larger, it seems natural that
bullets should increase accordingly. In MS they do, in OO Writer they don't.
After
spending significant time reading tips on how to get this to happen in OO, I
think I'm finally able to do it but it's a multi-step process. (3) Printing
in a spreadsheet -- I think I have finally figured it out in OO but it took
some doing and a lot of wasted pages. Also, when you do a print preview, it
doesn't necessarily show what WILL be printed, but everything that could
conceivably be printed from the spreadsheet. I've taught myself to kind of
ignore
that, but it's still disconcerting.
Many other examples like the above. Are any of them showstoppers to using
OO? Not really. I'm a strong advocate of OO, and I encourage anyone I know to
try it out. I REALLY appreciate all of the volunteer work that has gone into
creating this package. I'm not a programmer so I can't contribute in that area,
but I've done a fair amount of writing and I think I could help with the
documentation effort, and I've offered to do so. I hope to be able to give back
a little bit to the community. So I'm not bashing OO at all. I just get a bit
tired of hearing the bashing that MS gets, mostly unfairly in my opinion.
Dick, Webster, NY
