I’ve used Microsoft Office 2007 and actually liked it after getting used to the interface! Unfortunately many hard drive crashes and system reinstalls later, I have used up all the installs on the original CD. What to do now? My answer was Sun Microsystems OpenOffice 3.2. It features a word processor called Write, a Spreadsheet application, a Presentation application called [Presenter, database and a variety of other programs. It’s roughly equivalent to Microsft Office 2003, in fact the interface is surprisingly similar! There are some things you need to know however before you really start to use it. First by default all files are saved in Open Document Format files.Microsoft Office will not read these! If you need to maintain compatibility with Microsoft Office you have to change what file format it saves to in each application within the suite! Not easily done! If you decide to leave that alone you can go to the bottom line in the Save screen and chamge it to Save as: Microsoft Word 20003/XP document. The problem is you get an annoying prompt that states you’re not saving in default format and if you don’t click correctly, saves in the default format! So change the settings!
The word processor can be worse than Word for autoformatting! I end up fighting it more than I ever did in Word. I would have preferred more manual control as is the case with WordPerfect! The settings to turn off this are almost nonexistent and nearly impossible to find when they are! This is in my opinion the single most annoying feature of the word processor! Microsoft Word seems to not have any problems reading the file and formatting correctly once the document is saved with the correct file format. So this is a good thing! The other area I use the most is Presenter. This does have some compatibility issues with PowerPoint! A PowerPoint generated file displays with color background offsets, some templates don’t display correctly and frequently font is something completely different than anticipated! Going the other way, PowerPoint seems to display everything correctly but again, the font you originally used may be a rough equivalent. This is especially true if you have used one of the special fonts within the suite. Most of the animations display correctly within PowerPoint but not necessarily the other way around…strange! I haven’t used the spreadsheet program that much but so far the few I’ve done seem to display fine in Excel especially if saved in .xls format. The curious problem of the file being locked when I copy it doesn’t occur when saved as a .xls file. That’s been a real problem for me saving in .odf format so I don’t use it anymore. I have not used the other features in OpenOffice 3.2 and will let someone else comment on that who may use them.
Overall, this is a goodalternative to Microsoft Office but it is loaded with many unusual bugs that I find to be prominent in open software. While Sun has dealt with some of these from version 3.1, not all have been addressed. I guess I shouldn’t complain though because OpenOffice 3.2 is free!
