OpenOffice.org 2.0 -- A free Microsoft Office Replacement?

First, my mea culpa... I have been a long-time user of Microsoft Office. I’ve been using it since the version that installed quickly (anyone remember that long ago?). Despite its bloated nature, I’m mostly a fan.

But it’s a big expense in an office. And how many of the “features” do you really use. While I do use PowerPoint occasionally, I mostly use Word and Excel. Since I have a strong dislike of databases (irrational fear would be closer) I’ve created a number of insane Excel-based workarounds for all kinds of things. I also have a number of sneaky not-what-was-intended uses for Word, but more on that later.

A couple of years ago I looked at OpenOffice. I uninstalled it within minutes. But OpenOffice 2.0 looks much more promising.

I am staging my own intervention to wean myself off my Microsoft dependency. As I use each program within OpenOffice, I’ll post a review with my opinion. Again, please bear in mind that I am biased towards the Microsoft way, but trying to reform.

I am not a professional reviewer. But I believe I am a realistic one. I will resort to the manual, but only if I have to. Generally, I like to just jump in and use a program and see how I get on. If you are looking for a systematic review of every feature, this isn’t for you. If you are a long time Microsoft user and wondering if you can just switch and keep working, read on...

When firing up Writer for the first time it takes longer to load than my copy of Word 2003 (3x longer in fact). However, I don’t run the quick-start toolbar and that does make a difference.

Once fired up, what greets you is pretty familiar stuff. You start in page layout view (which I prefer to the “Preview” option in Word) and are greeted by the typical couple of rows of icons. The positions of the “table” and “tools” drop down are reversed, but having “Tables” first makes more sense to me. Score 1 for OpenOffice.

First Gripe: Okay, this is pretty trivial, but it’s important to me. Non-printing characters. I like to see paragraph marks, tabs, text boundries, and see my fields shaded. I don’t like seeing a dot for every space in the document – it drives me nuts. Currently Writer offers a straight on or off. Either you show all paragraph marks, tabs and spaces, or you show none of them.

Other than the above, it’s all good.

So far I’ve created a handful of short (1-2 page) and long (8+ pages) documents. I have encountered zero problems. It just works. No crashes or obvious oddities.

In fact, generally I would say that the variety of options for different functions is actually greater than in Word. For example, creating a Table of Contents seems to have a lot more flexibility. The downside is that this makes some things look more complicated than they actually are.

Generally, there are a _lot_ of settings. But most of them make sense. Backup for auto-recovery of documents is off by default, which seems unwise.

Tables: Tables include a SUM math function. If you have a table with numbers and you need a total, it is a click away. Word does have a formula function, but this is simple and effective in Writer.

File Formats: You can save to a variety of formats, including multiple versions of Word and PDF. Word export has worked flawlessly so far.

There are two non-standard things I use Word for. It is entirely possible no one else does this, and/or that there is a much better solution.

Find and Replace: Word has fantastic “find and replace” features. I’ve found all kinds of uses for them. Writer has a lot of similar functionality, but is missing one critical thing. In Word, you can use a text shortcut for certain kinds of item to be searched for e.g. you can use ^t to find all the tabs, or, equally useful, you can specify ^t as your replacement text.

How on earth have I used this? Lets say you have a bunch of text that eventually needs to go in to Excel. Maybe it is a text file of a directory listing. If you put a tab between the file name and the file size, and copy and paste into Excel, Excel will interpret the tab as a column separator and voila, you have two nice columns.

Writer doesn’t offer the text shortcut. I may be able to get it to do the same thing, but it is not as simple.

Mail Merge: I use this feature a lot for non-letter writing problems. Everything from mailing labels to generating HTML and Applescript (don’t ask, really). The Mail Merge function in Writer seems to be really limited. It assumes you are creating a letter or an email - there’s not even a mailing label option. There doesn’t seem to be any way to add data fields to your document after you complete the wizard. All in all, for me, this feature is woeful, and marching towards sucky.

For 99% of what I do with Word on a daily basis, Writer has worked great. I am impressed and I would recommend trying it for yourself.

If the other components are as strong, OpenOffice is a real alternative to Redmond’s much pricier offering.

More will come soon!