I have been a fan of open-source for quite a while now, and hence when a big commotion over such an application arises, I need to check it out, and I downloaded and tried Open Office 2.4 without much liking. As one needs to understand – and my blog displays this – I have not grown to like Microsoft, and so moving away from them is what I really wanted, but that was not to happen just yet.
This was all to change when using the (then) newly released MS Office 2008 for Mac (MS Office). At first, “wow, its so sleek” is what filled my mind, but as the time of using it got longer, I begun to see faults, resulting in me retrieving Open Office 3 (OO3).
Credit needs to be given to Microsoft for correcting many user frustrations that the 2007 Word for Windows version had, such as the new and annoying interface, though there were two irritations that I found to have developed; 1. Page numbering – simply is a battle to get it to do what you wish it to do, 2. Table of contents – after typing in excess of +-10 pages, I found there to be problems in the table of contents displaying what I selected it to display. These two errors, were some of my biggest reasons for taking the change.
I was typing a long document of over 15 pages, when I moved my .docx file across to OO3, virtually faultlessly! Now understand, this document had in it: pictures, a MS Office cover page, table of contents, tables, as well as drawings done in MS Office. Only a few tweaks were needed to be made, such as the color of the heading 1,2,3 etc. headings, that changed, as well as color changes to the cover page. To me this really was amazing.
Now having used OO3 for quite a while longer, though I admit almost solely in Writer (which is OO3’s version of Word), and I have found out many more of its features, that as far as I have experienced, place it ahead of MS Office:
- Can save documents in its own formates or the MS Office 2003 standards.
- In OO3 Writer, after awhile of typing, a predictive text tool becomes available, which gives you suggestions of the words you are typing.
- Many, if not 90% of all features of the OO3 suite are there, that one is use to in MS Office.
- The old MS Office layout is used, so their is easy navigation.
- The download is in one package and includes the following: Writer (Word), Calc (Excel), Impress (Power Point), Draw, Base (Access).
- It is available in many different languages.
- It is open-source, which means that add-ons are available, (as are for Fire-Fox for example).
- It is free!
Visit: http://why.openoffice.org/index.html for more on Open Office 3, or http://download.openoffice.org/index.html for the free download.
Filed under: Industry News, Mac Related , ms office, OO3, OpenOffice, word, writer
Mac users can expect the next round of OpenOffice (OpenOffice.org is an open source productivity suite similar to MS Office) software at the end of September 2008.
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