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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

A Month Without Microsoft Office

Harry McCracken in PC World:

Back on August 3rd, I installed the Beta 1 version of Windows Vista on my work desktop. That meant reinstalling all my applications...but I didn't have a copy of Microsoft Office handy. So I installed a beta copy of OpenOffice.org 2.0--the leading open-source office suite--figuring that it could serve as a stopgap.

More than a month later, I'm still using that OpenOffice.org beta to do my everyday work...and it's been a remarkably smooth experience, especially considering that this is a pre-release product running on a pre-release operating system. I've wrangled lots of Word and Excel documents in OpenOffice.org's counterparts (Writer and Calc, respectively), and as far as I can tell, the only tip-off that my colleagues have noticed is that my documents have funny icons rather than the universally-known Office ones.

Actually, there's another way, and this is one of the few things that really irk me about OpenOffice.org 2.0 beta: When you open, edit, and then save a Word document in OO.o, it applies a bewildering array of new style types to the document. So when you open it in Word again, and view the Styles and Formatting pane, prepare for a shock. It's a mess. Anyway...

All in all, this is a considerably more polished product than the version of OpenOffice.org I wrote about back in May of last year.

Agreed. OpenOffice.org 2.0 is a huge step in the right direction, and for that majority that aren't professional writers, it's clearly enough. Am I suggesting abandoning Microsoft Office? Yeah, I think I am.

[ Posted at 12:23 PM | Permalink ]