OpenOffice.org 1.0 Review The Interface Is Familiar Eric Grevstad
The Interface Is Familiar
A standard OpenOffice.org installation takes 130MB of hard-disk space. For the most part, the applications look and work like the Microsoft mainstays you know by heart, minus the animated paper clip (though you'll likely want to switch off the "Help Agent" that flashes a light bulb linking to an appropriate help screen every time you do anything). Many menus and keystrokes match their Office archetypes (Ctrl-Bksp deletes the previous word in Writer, for example), although others don't (Ctrl-D and Ctrl-R don't equal Fill Down and Fill Right in Calc as they do in Excel).
A few defaults need tweaking — you must visit the Tools/Options dialog box several times to change each program's unit of measurement from centimeters to inches, and on our Windows XP system we had to customize text and slide-show bullets from weird Wingdings characters back to plain dots and dashes. On our Win 2000 desktop with different fonts installed, bullets looked fine but we had to use the Options box's font-substitution feature (a powerful cure for Linux's frequent screen-font stumbles) to replace an ugly menu- and dialog-box typeface with the familiar Tahoma.
One awkward inheritance from StarOffice 5.2 is sluggish program loads — while they perform snappily once loaded, modules like Writer and Calc took a leisurely 15 to 25 seconds to launch on our test systems (a Celeron/1.3 and Pentium III/550, respectively). By default, a "quickstarter" module loads with your Startup group and provides a system-tray menu that trims six or eight seconds off those application launch times.
We were also mildly annoyed that, if you've got only one document open in an OpenOffice.org application, closing the document also exits the program, instead of leaving the application ready for you to work on another file. On the positive side, you can access any OOo program from within any other — loading an existing or starting a blank spreadsheet, for instance, from within the word process.
