OpenOffice vs MS Word: Which is better?

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I’ve purchased every edition of MS Office from before Office 95 through Office 2003.

I’ve rarely used any of them. They have always been “required” purchases because everyone else uses them. This isn’t “peer pressure” because I don’t really care how other people format documents. Well, maybe it is peer pressure… of the most intense sort: use Word or go home.

What I usually use is LaTeX.

But LaTeX isn’t really that good for laying out – fast – publications such as ebooks and the like.

I take that back. LaTeX is superb at ALL typesetting tasks… but learning a new layout style in LaTeX is time consuming, and personally, I need to get with the WYSIWYG world because it’s what everyone else is using. Very difficult to outsource document preparation in LaTeX, not that many people do it. I’m sure I would find it much easier to learn WYSIWYG document preparation is I liked. But I don’t. I loathe it. It’s infuriating.

In any case, OpenOffice fills the breach.

The problem is that OpenOffice is painfully slow.

It’s so slow that the fanboys blame the users: “You must have a virus on your computer.”

No. It’s like this: OpenOffice is painfully slow.

What these evangelists don’t get: when OpenOffice is the most painfully slow application on my computer, that’s called a “clue.” The clue is… it’s not my computer that’s slow.

Why am I using it?

Several reasons:

1. Document format is open. While I don’t have any desire to muck around in OpenOffice’s XML, it’s nice to know I could if I needed to. In fact, if the file got “corrupted” somehow, I could fix the XML easily using a validator such as tidy. I’m sure I have Word files hanging around somewhere that won’t ever open again.
2. Image handling is much nicer than MS Word. Word sucks in your images, turns them into bitmaps, and you’re stuck. It really sucks. There may be a way in Word 2003 to get around this problem, but if there is, it’s complicated and obscure enough to NOT be useful. OpenOffice reads your images from disk. This means that if you want to use dummy images to lay out a document, you can easily swap images later, OpenOffice won’t mind. Won’t even know.
3. It’s free. Costs no money. This is probably the least important reason for me. If Word would handle images how I want instead of locking me into how Word wants images, I’d probably switch. If the Word file format was open (open for real), I’d switch immediately. The problem here is that Microsoft’s insistence of “openness” doesn’t equal usefully open. Just examine Word’s HTML output if you want an example. It’s horrible.

Why I loathe OpenOffice:

1. It’s slow. Really, it is. I’m working on a 70 page document right now, and it’s just not responsive at all. Sure, it would help if I weren’t teaching myself how to do visual layout. All these formatting experiments resulting in “Not Responding,” but is that really the way to inspire users?

   Let me put it another way… I’ve had time to write this entire blog post interstitially, while waiting on OpenOffice to do whatever it does. As I write these very words, I’m trying to scroll through the document… and it’s bogged down, “Not Responding.” That’s no good. And yes, I’m using the Navigator widget too. I really am:
   

   

   Unacceptable.

For final lay out, I’ll have to switch everything to Word and tweak it all again.

Other options in this space don’t matter. Word is what’s used, and that’s that. Go try and outsource document preparation. Professionals want your work in Word. Not in OpenOffice. Not in Google Docs. Word.

I can tell you partly why this is, too.

When you outsource to Eastern Europe, China, India and like places, you’re going to working with people who – with almost 100% certainty – don’t pay license fees for software. They use ripped copies of Office, InDesign, Photoshop, everything we pay Big $$$ in the West. I know this from experience.

This has been my experience to date. Tell me I’m wrong, I’ll link to you, maybe even send you some business if you’ll work with me in OpenOffice and Scribus.

Otherwise, I may just head off to Office Depot and get the latest copy of MS Office. I hate to have to do that, but I need to get some work done, not spend my time waiting. My time is worth money. A few hours wasted time covers the cost of MS Office, hands down.

OpenOffice just segfaulted on me. I can’t recall the last time I had ANY program segfault.

The upshot:

• OpenOffice handles things “The Right Way,” but it’s too slow to be used for serious work on long documents.
• MS Word locks you into all kinds of bizarre structure and behavior, but it’s very fast in comparison to OpenOffice.

Parting shot: These results are for me, on my computer. Your results may be different, for you, on your computer. But I’m not you and I’m not using your computer.

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• The Problem of Canonicity: Which document version is the “most correct?”

Tagged as: ebook, latex, MS Word, OpenOffice