Breaking the Word Processor Curve

Bruce Byfiled makes a compelling case for OpenOffice, as more than just a replacement for word. I’m a long-time OpenOffice user, but to be honest I mostly use it to open office files and do most of my writing in vim or on my PalmPilot, so I may not be the best judge. But this article explores a few features of OpenOfccie that are superior or just more stable than their m****s*** Office equivalents.

When you first switch to Writer, this claim that Writer beats Words may seem hard to swallow. And no wonder; you’re too busy learning the new menus to get beyond the fact that everything’s only half-familiar. And if you’re an unsophisticated user who has yet to learn (to steal the title of Robin Williams’ book) that the PC is not a typewriter, you might never notice. However, if you’re an advanced user for whom style, structured text and long documents are all part of word processing, then the claim soon becomes self-evident.

Understand that I’m not talking features here. True, with its PDF and Docbook export filters alone, version 1.1 of Writer leaves MS Word playing catch up. However, features are an arms race in which superiority rarely lasts for more than one version. When I say that Writer is the superior piece of software, I’m talking about the basics, the everyday functionality that can’t be improved without massively rewriting the code.

4 thoughts on “is OpenOffice.org a superior tool?”

  1. In general terms, i agree. however, there still problems. for instance, i installed OO on my iBook and it runs on top of the XDarwin window system and OroborOSX. unfortunately, this makes it very slow and cumbersome when compared to the 3secs that MS takes to launch.

    while stil at the camp, i read in /. that the next version of MS will not interoperate with OO, and thus anyone trying to open MS files with OO will be an outlaw. what rubbish. absurd! the OO dev community ‘d better work on these flaws so that the next version of OO, regardless of platform, will be as solid and robust as a rock.

    my 2 eurocents

    george

  2. While at work I deal with MS prods. At home, OO. I love the play and counterplay of those two, and being convinced of the benefits of OO, both socially and economically, I agree on its superiority. But it has to attract much more than just the casual user to be a real alternative, instead of an exotic curiousity.

  3. As far as it goes with editing the documents, OO is working well. There is of course a problem with MS compatibility – Impress sucks at Power Point files veeery badly. But the more important thing for OO to become a widely used application is availability of enterprise level applications which integrate with OO suite. I would really look forward to something like Knowledege Management or a Workflow system based on OO.

    Maybe OOs real superiority will emerge from it’s multiple programming language bindings for creating extensions.

  4. hi there!

    i know it’s been nearly a year since this entry was posted, yet i know you’re being notified of new messages posted here, and i have fresh information regarding the OO mess i described above in the first reply to your entry, so…here goes:

    louis-suarez potts, community manager of OO, told me that the /. piece was most certainly FUD, and there should be no uncertainty as to whether the next version of MSoffice will interoperate with OO. It will. And he also told me the new new release of OO for macosx runs like any other app, thus eliminating the need to run it through X11. Very good piece of news, both in a technical and business-wise/political sense, if you ask me:-)

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