Last week, the free trial of Microsoft Office on my new laptop expired. I was reluctant to hand over a huge chunk of change to Microsoft for the full version of their product, so I decided to give OpenOffice a try.
This is not the first time I’ve tried OpenOffice. When I first got my MacBook, I downloaded OpenOffice on the recommendation of the Physicist, who absolutely loves it. I, on the other hand, was less than impressed. I found it to be a buggy, unstable piece of crap that had difficulty doing simple tasks such as putting in lists with subpoints. The only nice thing about it was the ability to save in PDF format. After several weeks of putting up with its awfulness, I gave in and purchased MS Word for Macs. And life was good.
But the Physicist assured me that OpenOffice ran better on a PC, so I tried it on my gaming laptop. I didn’t play around with it much, but, at the very least, it seemed more stable. When I downloaded OpenOffice last week, I had high hopes that I’d finally have a decent word processor that could replace Word.
I was wrong. I didn’t have any problems with stability, but the program had discovered new ways to irritate me. Using the insert comment short cut didn’t actually insert a comment. Instead, it opened my note software. OpenOffice is also unable to open the .docx format correctly. If you try to open a .docx file that has footnotes, it will display them in the middle of the damn page. Their predictive text feature is worthless (OpenOffice really wants me to name one of my characters ‘Pantyhose’). Finally, after experiencing the nice layout of Word 2007, OpenOffice’s cheap copy of the Word 2002 interface was just annoying.
In the end, I decided to go with Microsoft Office. As much as I hate to admit it, they did a really nice job with Office 2007. Because I ordered it through my university, I’m going to get Office Enterprise, which has a whole bunch of crap I’m never going to use, like Access, Groove, and Communicator. Oh well. It’s better to pay less for more rather than paying more for less.
Codex Lochianus 
Admittedly, I am kind of a Zen-minimalist when it comes to word processing – I just want a typewriter that can handle deletion. Although it would be nice if OpenOffice would update the interface. And never use the power point wanna-be feature that OpenOffice has, it is nearly worthless.
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Always interesting to hear others experiences. I personally use Open Office – it handled my thesis perfectly well, although footnotes changed in size when I ever swapped it from OO to word or vice versa.
I’ve never gotten used to Word 2007 – the joys of a free trial eh 🙂
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I think most of the problems with the footnotes arose from the fact that I was trying to read .docx files. When I was reading plain .doc files, the footnotes were more or less fine.
I didn’t like Word 2007 at first. But, once I started using it more, I fell in love with the Ribbon.
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Incredibly interesting post. Honest..
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