Hatrack River Writers Workshop: Open Office

This is topic Open Office in forum Open Discussions About Writing at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

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Posted by Keeley (Member # 2088) on :

Any opinions out there? Is it a good alternative to Word?

Posted by mikemunsil (Member # 2109) on :

In one word, Yes.

It does not always perfectly read/write Office documents, but most of the time it does. It has about 80% of the functionality of MS Office. But how much of MS Office's functions do you use? If you use that much, good on ya.

I once worked for a year collaborating with another person via email, trading documents and spreadsheets and he never had a clue that I was using OpenOffice.

So, there you are then.

Here's a review of OpenOffice as compared to MS Office 2003. This section concentrates on Writer vs Word.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1571627,00.asp

You can download OpenOffice here:
http://download.openoffice.org/1.1.4/index.html

[This message has been edited by mikemunsil (edited February 16, 2005).]

Posted by MaryRobinette (Member # 1680) on :

I love it. I like the spreadsheet better than Excel. The word processor is almost like Word, but just different enough to require a learning curve.

Posted by Keeley (Member # 2088) on :

Thanks for the links, Mike.

Posted by Luke (Member # 2364) on :

In my day job, I'm a computer systems administrator, and I support computers running Windows, MacOS X, Linux, Solaris, and IRIX.

I use OpenOffice.org for my day-to-day work on a Linux laptop, and it's quite handy. I can send/receive files with folks running Microsoft Office on Windows and MacOSX very easily. My only gripe about OpenOffice is that it will sometimes display Word documents that have bizarre formatting in odd ways -- but, many supposedly compatible versions of Microsoft Office do that too!

OpenOffice has improved quite a bit over the last few years. When it was first Open Source'ed, it was a bit unstable, and the widget set looked funny. Now, it's as stable as anything Microsoft has released and it looks nice on every system I've used. It has all of the features I need, so I'm happy with it.

So, OpenOffice is good system. It's not the standard by which others are judged (Microsoft Office), but it's an excellent deal for the price ($0.00 + the time to download). If my employer (a university) hadn't already negotiated a site license for MS Office, I would install OpenOffice for my users and then only pay the $400-or-so licensing fee for Microsoft Office for the few people who really needed the extra compatability and/or features.

[This message has been edited by Luke (edited February 16, 2005).]

Posted by Luke (Member # 2364) on :

Another option that might be suitable for writing a novel would be LaTeX (http://www.latex-project.org/).

LaTeX is the kind of thing that someone is either going to love or hate, but it's quite popular with my users for writing academic papers and textbooks. Granted, the reasons for this appear to be that it has great equation-formatting features and that journal publishers will provide LaTeX-compatible descriptions of their formatting-rules. Another reason, though, is that you can't sit there and mess around with the formatting the way that you can in a WYSIWYG desktop word processor -- you have no choice but to write.

On the other hand, LaTeX has a nasty learning curve. So, if you're the kind of person who doesn't like the idea of spending extra time to learn a markup language, OpenOffice, StarOffice, AbiWord, KOffice, AppleWorks, or even Microsoft Office may be a much better fit for how you work.

[This message has been edited by Luke (edited February 16, 2005).]

Posted by mikemunsil (Member # 2109) on :

Good posts Luke. I had forgotten about LaTex. On purpose, I think.

Posted by Jules (Member # 1658) on :

I started writing a novel in LaTeX once, but switched to OO.o about 18 months ago, and am happy with the switch. The problem with LaTeX is the difficulty of converting to a format compatible with MS Word. OpenOffice's RTF exporter works first time, every time for me.

The only thing I have against OpenOffice is the long startup time, but these days I leave it running and use the hibernate function on my PC, so I don't have to do that very often.

Posted by JBShearer (Member # 9434) on :

Wordperfect. Yes, it's STILL around. As a matter of fact, many Publishers still prefer Wordperfect format for electronic submissions. Just look at any indepth review--Wordperfect has around 130% of the functionality of Word.

Plus, Wordperfect 12 has TWO big extra benefits. Emulation of either the old WP 5.1 (remember the blue screen from school?) or Microsoft Word emulation . . . with ALL the extra functionality.

It's cool. AND the most powerful app you can get. PLUS you can import/export ANY format without the problems that Word has.

There is a fully functioning demo out if you want to try it. Check out Corel.com

Posted by mikemunsil (Member # 2109) on :

I agree. If you're not tied to Word, and are going to buy a word processor program, then Word Perfect is hard to beat.

Posted by HSO (Member # 2056) on :

I learned word processing on early DOS-versions of Word Perfect. I mean, early versions... (1986, perhaps, maybe '87). I liked it then. I'd probably still like it except most companies don't use it, so I've adapted to using MS Word with some grumbling involved.

Granted, MS Word has a lot of crap issues to deal with, but it really has a lot more functionality than most people are aware of. It's there, it's just hidden because Microsoft dumbed down the interface thinking that nobody would bother learning how to use Word properly. And because they did that, they fulfilled their own prophecy. Few people do realize how to make Word work for them... "Ah, I'll just click this button to format the text..." rather than making an appropriate Word Style.

As an example, I copied the entire public domain "Elements of Style" book from bartleby's web page into a Word doc (because I didn't want to rely on the web site for the information, and money is a bit tight). I simply dumped it right into a Word Doc as is. Stripped away the HTML elements in two quick key presses, and then created about 4 or 5 styles to handle the formatting. It took me about 1 hour to make a "professional looking" document, and that is because the website put everything into a table and I had to carefully extract the table text into paragraphs. It's beautiful now. If books were A4-sized, it could printed as is.

Even still, if I wanted to make it more book-like, that change would take me precisely 10 mins. Updating Styles is the only way to manage such a change effectively.

I'm curious about Open Office tho'... I'll try to have a look at that at some point.