So when I recently upgraded my laptop I needed some software to open and create documents. Like Microsoft Office.
However my copy of Microsoft Office is getting a bit dated, and while bought legally is bordering on over use on my computers. So I figured I’d give OpenOffice.org a shot.
Opened it up, messed around with it a bit. Changed all of the defaults to save files as Microsoft standard formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc…). Everything overall has gone well.
Microsoft Office has focused on making all the menu options easily available to users. OpenOffice.org is very Office XP’ish. So it is simple (which I like). However I did find one issue. I was creating some documentation for a project at work. Required some vertical text (like the image in this post). Couldn’t find a way to do it at all. So I went to my favorite search engine and started looking around. I found this post from April 2006. Says you have to turn on Asian language support to do this.
Are you kidding me? Some things should be turned on by default… this is one of them. There are times where open source projects get so wrapped up in doing it ‘their’ way that they forget to think of the ‘customers’.
However, in spite of this… OpenOffice.org has its learning curve but for free, you can’t complain.