I’ve been a fan of OpenOffice for a while, but I’ve never sat down and used it much.
In many ways, I’ve been a hypocrite. I’ve been recommending and installing OOo for friends and relatives for several years but, like many IT workers, I have MS Office installed. It’s difficult to break the habit of launching Word, Excel or PowerPoint when I need to.
However, during the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working at a company which still uses Microsoft Office 97. They’re not interested in paying out for new versions of Office and I don’t blame them. But, I just couldn’t bring myself to use it – and I could hardly force them to upgrade.
Bring on OpenOffice. Fortunately, I’d only downloaded version 2.2 a couple of days before and had it on my trusty USB stick. Quick install (on Windows 2000 no less!) and I was ready.
I’d always considered Write to be a fairly out-and-out Word clone. At a basic level, it is – write the odd letter, and you won’t notice much difference. But, I’m a big fan of templates and document automation, so I set about defining numbered headings, contents pages, and cross references.
First difference: bullet and number styles are applied in addition to paragraph styles. It’s a bit weird at first, but I got used to it and it sort of made sense after a while.
The next issue: automatic heading numbers, e.g. section 1, 1.1, 1.2, 2, 2.1 etc. Word isn’t always great at this, and I still get confused after many years. OOo provides the very useful Outline Numbering tool to set it up, but I just couldn’t get it working correctly at first. I’d end up with numbers randomly restarting and all sorts of weird problems. I very nearly scrapped OpenOffice and returned to Word 97.
Eventually, I solved the problem. If you use Outline Numbering, DON’T use any options on the bullet/number list toolbar. It affects the heading you’re working on, but takes it out of the sequence and seems to start a new one. Weird but, again, sort of understandable.
I use automated cross-references a lot, and Word makes it fairly easy, even if the system is a little buggy and frustrating. OOo requires you to mark text before it can be referenced but, once you’ve done that, the process is better than Word.
Next: diagrams. Both systems are very evenly matched here, but OOo probably just has the edge since it provides a separate drawing program which makes it much easier (although you don’t have to use it). The only think that confused me was that OOo doesn’t offer a way to import it’s own graphic files, but will happily grab any others. A simple cut and paste is all that’s required, but I’d have liked to link to the file rather than embed the graphics.
MS Word is pretty good at creating a table of contents, OOo seems a little confusing. Although it works, the Entries tab is weird and takes some getting used to.
Overall though, I’m impressed. The document structure is retained very well – Word often resets styles when numbering is restarted, or overrides the default style too easily. In fact, I’m going to use it more. I may not give up on Microsoft Office just yet, but OpenOffice is very capable and its price is astounding!
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