I recently did a review on an ebook from The Writer’s Manifesto. It was an ebook about, well it was about writing ebooks. There were a number of things that I pulled from that book and one of them was to give OpenOffice from Sun Microsystems a try.
Old dog – new tricks
Before I go any further on my rave (and yes, Virginia it IS a rave) you need to know that I have been a steadfast user of Microsoft Office type products for nearly 15 years. I remember being all geeked out for the release of Windows 95. Of course, that was when the computer ads all read something like “Blazing 486 processor speed! Tons of room in this state of the art 350mb hard drive! Lightningfast 14.4k modem!”
Hehe. Oh, my.
I’ve eschewed Word Perfect and for a long time looked down my nose at Mac-geeks. (although now I want a Macbook so bad I can TASTE it).
I’ve always thought it’s just made no sense to go with anything other than Word for my word processing needs. I’m familiar with it, it’s pretty much universal and with enough “ohms” while seated in a Lotus position, I can almost get past the thing putting caps on a character that I don’t want capped.
Move over, Darlin’. I’m coming to bed
I downloaded the free opensource software that is OpenOffice this last weekend. I was a bit frightened and intimidated, but my inhibitions soon melted away.
First, the interface looks similar to Word, so I didn’t feel like I had stepped into the Lunar Command Module. Most of the icons were in roughly the same spot and the pull down menus were intuitive.
I had to place a number of images in the document I was working and setting the page wrap was a cinch, as was adding a header and footer. I really got the feeling the designers wanted a word processor to help the end user process words – not a word processor that thinks it knows better than I do what I’m trying to accomplish.
You can save your OpenOffice document in whatever format you choose so no worries about compatability.
Like Firefox, there’s almost as many extensions available as the amount of bonus $$ given to AIG Execs. These extensions help you to powerfully create a word processing system that does just what you need. Do you need all of your images to have captions in Portugeuse? There’s an extension for that. (ok, well there’s probably an extension for that.)
I really like that it’s got a one click to .pdf feature.
I’ve only been using it for a week so I’m certain I’ll come up with other things to love, but for right now I’m enthralled.
What’s your take?
Do you currently use OpenOffice? If so, what made you switch and what do you like the most? If you don’t use it right now, are you willing to give it a try?
I’ve played with OpenOffice, a discover back in my how-do-you-create-a-pdf phase (around the same time ebooks were moving away from being distributed as .exe files that needed passwords). I liked it, but for some reason felt compelled to dish out for Office. Also for some similarly inexplicable reason felt compelled to dish out for the Office 2007 upgrade, which I now regret.
OpenOffice looks like the old Word I used to know and sorta like, nothing like the Office 2007 which along with Vista makes me want a Mac (but I can’t taste it yet, not until it seems like an affordable option and I wouldn’t be wasting my still-fairly-new laptop and desktop).
So, OpenOffice is a great choice if you don’t want to buy Office . . . and I see no compelling reason anymore to do that.
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Terry –
Great minds. I was over at YOUR blog commenting as you wrote this. Too funny.
My own story with MS is not too dissimilar. One of the reasons I’m going to OpenOffice is that I shall one day have my Mac, and I’ don’t want any MS stuff anywhere near it, if I can avoid it.
Thanks for the feedback!
George
I definitely agree that OpenOffice is a great alternative to Microsoft Office. I use Microsoft Office 2002 at work, and when I bought a new home computer about a year ago, it came with Office 2007. The “improved” Office 2007 is anything but intuitive to me. I immediately looked into OpenOffice, and have been using it at home ever since. As you mentioned, the OpenOffice interface is so similar to the “old” Office 2002 interface I’m used to that I was able to jump right in without a hitch. I definitely recommend anyone give it a try before forking over the cash for Microsoft Office!
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Evan,
Somehow I just knew you wee an OpenOffice kind of person. Thanks for the feedback and letting me know what I thought to be true actually is!
George
For the little that I use office programs for, Open Office has been very good to me. I do have MS Office 2007 on my Windows computer, but my main work computer has Open Office installed instead. I mainly use OOO for opening up attachments sent to me via email, and even the .docx files look good when opened in OOO.
If I wasn’t provided the MS version of Office, I never would have purchased it on my own; Open Office just makes more sense for me.
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Hey Rob,
Thank for comin’ by, Twitter guy.
I appreciate the feedback. I’m hearing from a lot of folks that they are using OOO. That’s cool. I’m really having a blast exploring.
George
I’ve been using OOo for several years now — switched from WordPerfect. I find that it reads Microsoft formatted files pretty well although it still has trouble with some formatting of columns — something to do with how they calculate the padding.
I love almost all of the features compared to the Office products I’ve used for clients and my wife. The only area I would like to see done better is the scripting editor and DOM. Office is much easier and cleaner to write for. Thankfully I don’t need to do that much and OOo is getting better.
When it comes to PDF, I actually have PDF-XChange installed as a printer on my system. It allows me to embed fonts (which OOo may now do, I haven’t looked in there for a few upgrades) and it also produces smaller PDF files.
I hope that you really enjoy the new found freedom!
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Bill,
That’s awesome. Fortunately my us of word proccessors thus far has been fairly straightforward. Thanks for the tip about the pdf program – I’ll check it out.
Cheers – and it’s good to see you here.
George
Hi George, I don’t want to rain on your OO parade, because it really is awesome software. When I tried it, though, I wound up running into a problem, which was that my clients and collaborators didn’t use OO. Therefore I had to reformat docs, keep two versions in my files, and stuff like that. I ended up going back to Office, even though OO is a superior product. If there’s a workaround to my problem, I’d love to hear it because I’d dump Office in a New York minute if I could.
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Hi George, I have used Open Office for years and love it. It also is less resource intensive than Word. I have used and like Office 2007 and still have Word installed on my computer but Open Office is so much better. I also use the OO versions of Excel, Powerpoint and Draw.
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The best solution for Brad’s problem is to force everyone to switch 8=) Seriously, that is a common problem. There are lots of people out there who are just so entrenched in the the Microsoft world that they don’t like change.
If you have to deal with clients and co-workers that insist on Office products then you can always use the features of OOo that allow you to read and save in various Office formats. They aren’t perfect when dealing with fine formatting details and the macros are not compatible (yet) so you will run into difficulties in those areas. It is worth trying to see if it will work for the types of stuff you’re working on though.
Good luck!
LoneWolf´s last blog post..Two Feet at a Time — Swimsuit Edition
I use OpenOffice every day. I don’t use the wordpress processor too often (although I lurve the convert-to-PDF function) but I use Calc at least 10 times a day. I recommend it to anyone I can and save them a wad of cash right before they’re about to buy Office. It’s too bad that the program is a bit heavy and runs pretty slow on an older computer, but it really isn’t any different than Office in that way.
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I use Google documents for 95% of what I do. It’s free, whever I can get the internet, I can get to my work and it takes up zero room on my machine/processing power.
Honestly, I’m not sure if it’s the same thing as that “cloud” computing that I hear about, but as much as possible I’m creating and saving things using online applications, then backing up the finished product only on my computer.
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Hey Brad,
That has been a concern of mine as well. So far not a problem but as Lonewolf points out, it could be with a more delicate document.
As always, good to see you here.
George
Hi Karen,
I’ve not had the chance to use those other components but I’m anxious to give them a try. I expect good things.
Cheers
George
Hey Lonewolf,
Thanks for dropping back with the advice. It sounds like you’ve got pretty good insight into the product.
George
Hi Cassie,
Nice to see you here, I appreciate you coming by and giving your take.
I do have to power down some of my other applications, but I am on a computer that is a bit older. And yes, it appears to be no different from the MS products in that respect.
George
Hey Tracy,
I’ve never used Google documents. I may have a look just to see what it’s all about.
I’ve heard the cloud computing term recently as well, and honestly I don’t have clue one what that’s all about.
Anyone care to enlighten me?
George
Cloud computing is basically an erasing of the hardware boundaries in computing. A virtual machine is set up that acts the same as a real one, but there could be hundreds of them on a single server or one spread across hundreds of servers. Your “machine” will not always run on the same physical machine either — the cloud will re-arrange itself as needed to handle the load.
I’m not sure if Google docs would be considered cloud computing, but rather Software as Service (SAS). It might be considered part of a cloud by some though or at least use the cloud to provide the service.
LoneWolf´s last blog post..Two Feet at a Time — Swimsuit Edition
Lonewolf,
Ok then. That makes sense.
Thanks for getting me up to speed!
George
This is the first I’m hearing about Open Office. I have always and still use Microsoft Office products so I guess I dont feel the need to make the switch since I have that at my disposal. I will give it a try though just to see how its like. It maybe something for my fiance to use since he doesn’t have Microsoft Office on his computer.
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Hi Carla,
I’m glad you stopped by. I’d be interested in hearing your Fiance’s experiences if he gives it a shot.
Cheers!
George
I have used OpenOffice for years and have turned many of my customers into converts as well… I convinced many of them to switch to OpenOffice after their computers needed to have the operating system reinstalled and the Microsoft disks weren’t shipped with the PC when new… Not one of them has regretted the switch and they all enjoy the fact that they aren’t forced to pay a licensing fee… We should all thank the corporate sponsors who have helped fund the development of this fine product…
I am just now putting some finishing touches on a brochure template… I decided to tackle the challenge after having little luck with the supposed solutions posted on the internet, most of which were just what people managed to get to work for their own need without considering what the problem actually was… My solution takes a more logical approach in that I always set the print settings for the actual paper being used, unlike other methods… Everything else is configured to work within those constraints with no fudging around required… If only I had an actual need for a brochure template…
Hi Ralph.
That’s a pretty hearty endorsement of OO.org . Know that I’ve been using it for a bit, I like it even more than when I started.
I really do like the fact that folks can develop a template to help everyone with a specific task. One of the beauty things about the system, I think.
Thanks for dropping by and contributing!
George