OpenOffice.org Not Exactly Seamless, But Pretty Slick Eric Grevstad
Not Exactly Seamless, But Pretty Slick
Other differences from Microsoft Office aren't quite as welcome. Most menus and commands work very much as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint users are used to — even more so if you take advantage of the ample customization and toolbar- and keystroke-personalization options. (OOo's Options dialog box has been noticeably tidied up — American users won't even have to change each application's default unit of measurement from centimeters to inches — and its help screens, though still not encyclopedic, are much more thorough and helpful.)
On the other hand, there are still ways to stub your toe during the transition — you can't click in the margin to select a paragraph of word processing text, and the cursor doesn't follow a right-click as it does to a left-click, so you can right-click some text to change formatting, then discover you've changed text elsewhere on screen.
And again, Office documents with complex, custom-made macros are not OpenOffice.org material. Still, not only does the suite offer to set aside and save any Visual Basic for Applications code along with documents, but its own programming language is easier to access now that there's a macro recorder that captures your typing and mouse moves for repetitive tasks.
Acrobat PDF export works superbly, with a choice of screen-, print-, or publishing-optimized output (resolution and resampling) and the option to save a document as a PDF file and send the latter as an e-mail attachment in one step. If you have Macromedia Flash installed, you can also export presentations as Flash animations, and you can create, edit, and test XML and XSLT filters if you're planning to mix OOo with Microsoft Office 2003.
Most of all, as we said last year, the OpenOffice.org applications are full-featured and flexible enough to hold their own against Redmond's best for at least 90 percent of users — trailing in some specific ways (no grammar checker, a lackluster thesaurus), topping Office in others (not only on-the-fly spell checking and correction but word completion, handy floating palettes for styles and navigating through document elements).
In terms of functionality and compatibility, OpenOffice.org 1.1.x looks like a small but significant improvement to what was already a genuine, head-to-head alternative to Microsoft's 95-percent-market-share suite. In terms of fit and finish or polished appearance, version 1.1 moves from the level of Office 95/97 to, say, Office 2000 — it's not as pretty as Office XP, let alone the downright glamorous Reading Layout and other features in Office 2003, but it's better than adequate.
The day OpenOffice.org gets an equally good, open-source Outlook alternative is the day it gets a five-star review and makes Microsoft Office the underdog. Until then, it's still an offer too good for most Windows users to ignore.
Pros: Completely free suite of office utilities; automatic, nearly perfect conversion of Microsoft Office documents; extensive, powerful feature-set
Cons: Lacks an Outlook-type client, quite a bit slower than Microsoft Office, lacks some of the more advanced features of MS Office, macros and advanced formatting not always converted correctly to OpenOffice's Open XML file format
