MS Office: Love it or Leave it?

Open Office is easier to use, does more, is free, and doesn’t crash my computer. Not once, EVER.

Google Docs does it for me, and iWork.

OpenOffice.

It’s free, it’s open source, it’s cross-platform, it’s reliable, it’s functional. In the early days I complained cos it had poor macro support but macro support now rocks.

$700 (*) vs free with negligible downsides. Not a difficult decision.

Besides, commercial software brings with it all those licence management complexities… I need another copy on my laptop, my partner needs to read my document, I just rebuilt my machine and have to reinstall etc etc… none of those are issues if you stick to free software.

(*) Admittedly only $160 if you’re not going to use it in any way that makes you money. But can you really say that?

I use iWork these days, alongside the occasional use of google Docs. I tried very hard to be an open office convert, but it was just so hideously ugly. Also, I found it fairly slow on all manner of stellar machines. So I’ve abandoned it. But I do give it a shot with every new update. One day, maybe 2 or 3 versions from now, I figure that the UI will be tolerable enough for my daily use.

Given that I’m pretty sure I have a heavy Mac readership, iWork isn’t surprising. I use Google Docs as well, especially when I have to manage the documents with others. No matter what though, in the end you have to agree on a single file format to work to and stick with it. You can’t waffle between what the final output will look like or be based on.

If we’re just talking word processors & not office suites as a whole, then it’s hard to argue against .DOC as the common format.

Sure, it’s a Microsoft file format, but you can’t really call yourself a word processor if you don’t have rock solid .DOC support. The irony is that .DOCX is theoretically an open format (in reality Microsoft stacked the standards committees in order to get it ‘accepted’ cos a lot of governments were getting edgy about being locked into a proprietary format & mandating “all office software must support open file formats”) but support for that is spotty.

Depending on what I’m doing with the file afterwards, I tend to split my output between .DOC, .ODT (Open Office native format – great if the file isn’t going to anybody outside our house) and .PDF. PDF is good cos I can be pretty certain that the recipient will see what I see regardless of what program they use to read it.

And yeah, OO is pretty ugly. I’ve seen more than my fair share of open source projects where developers have spent man-years making it look pretty before they spent time fixing the features & bugs so I’m surprised that nobody’s skinned the hell out it yet