Congeries of cross connected concepts
Instapundit has been praising OpenOffice. Well, it’s OK. I use as my primary document editing application, but I have used MS Word 2003 and it’s not clear to me that OpenOffice is better. I think that if Word were half the price it is, I’d probably by it and use it instead. Although Word has the annoying “I know what you meant” features, in real life I end up fighting with Open Office formatting more than I did Word, particularly with embedded pictures. I recently tried to do a simple 2 column layout for a new letter for a Cub Scout pack. I wanted to put some pictures in it, with very simple layout — A paragraph of text, a picture, another paragraph of text, a picture, etc., with no complex text flow. But every time I would edit any of the text, the pictures would literally jump around like hyperactive toddlers, frequently ending up on top of each other. I would have to patiently straighten them back out and put them in the right place again. Very frustrating.
Oh, and Word crashed less often than Open Office. I crash the latter on a regular basis. If it didn’t have the auto save / recover, it would be unusable for that reason.
| Bret Monday, 12 May 2008 at 11:18 |  |
OpenOffice works well for me. I don’t usually have a whole lot of pictures to put in my documents though.
| Gronker Monday, 12 May 2008 at 12:36 | |
As in all things opensource, you get what you pay for.
| Bret Monday, 12 May 2008 at 13:23 | |
If that’s so, it’s a little surprising anyone at all bothers with linux, apache, open-office, etc. Why do suppose anyone uses any of those? Do you think that everyone using Linux is just an IP communist who’ll use free software even though it has no value to them just to make a symbolic stand against the evil empire of microsoft?
| Ali Choudhury Tuesday, 13 May 2008 at 03:27 | |
I used OpenOffice for a few weeks while I was getting my regular computer fixed and had the same complaints. Nowadays if I need to use an Office-like suite on a machine which lacks one, I just use Google Docs. I doubt OpenOffice will displace MS Office in the business market any time soon since so many apps only work with Excel.
| Gideon7 Tuesday, 13 May 2008 at 13:08 | |
There are few commercial 3rd party apps for OpenOffice because of the GPL. Any 3rd party VBA/OLE code would have to be made public.
| David Cohen Tuesday, 13 May 2008 at 15:48 | |
Bret: Got it in one.
| Bret Tuesday, 13 May 2008 at 19:25 | |
Oh, okay then.
