Comments on: OpenOffice vs MS Word: Which is better?

By: David M. Doolin, PhD

David M. Doolin, PhD — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 07:26:33 +0000

@Josh – I wish it weren’t so, but it seems not much better than Star Office when Sun first acquired it.
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By: Josh Kohlbach

Josh Kohlbach — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 03:27:07 +0000

I used OpenOffice pretty much all my way through uni. While it’s features are like you said “the right way” I just found the constant incompatibilities with everything everyone was sending me or I was sending them was getting annoying.

It got to the point where I was just exporting everything in PDF including resumes and things. Not a bad work around, but still tiresome.

I’ll probably go back to it when I install Linux and I suspect it might perform better under that OS. You’re right, on Windows (XP at least, can’t vouch for later) it’s a major memory and CPU cycle hog.
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By: Anne

Anne — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 03:08:02 +0000

Ah, yes. I do have my own unique brand of crazy completely different than slow computer program issues. At least it’s never dull.

By: David M. Doolin, PhD

David M. Doolin, PhD — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 02:51:09 +0000

Anne, it’s always nice to know you’re not going crazy… at least not going crazy with respect to this!
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By: Anne

Anne — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 02:48:03 +0000

I have OpenOffice on my MacBook. I thought the slowness was me. I only use it for spreadsheets since I have an older version of iWork that does not include Numbers [their version of Excel]. I have always used Pages for my documents, though. Now I have a program called Scrivener for larger documents and it doesn’t seem to hang [at least it didn't during this past November's NaNoWriMo challenge].

By: David M. Doolin, PhD

David M. Doolin, PhD — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 21:20:15 +0000

@Sean, @Blake – I’ve tried really hard to like both applications, but I’m back to using LaTeX now.

It just got too difficult to deal with all the idiosyncrasies of each program.
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By: Blake @ Props Blog Reviews

Blake @ Props Blog Reviews — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:54:01 +0000

“RAWR” – Dave D.

I know that feeling Dave. I didn’t know that Word converted all images to bmp, but I did notice that any Word (or especially powerpoint) files I have with images are huge.

In fact, I had a powerpoint crash our printer at school while printing a poster because the file was too large to process! Now I understand why.

I haven’t used open office before. I’ve been lucky enough to always have developers copies of Office (I have family members who are programmers, so they hooked me up with their stuff).

Based off what you’ve said, I don’t think that I would even want to try using Open Office. I hate slow programs. They piss me off.

Did you ever use Word Perfect? Does Mac or Linux have an alternative that is better?
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By: Sean

Sean — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:10:14 +0000

Well, suck on that, fanboys!

I use open office, mostly because it is free. Well, only because it is free.

I haven’t had a problem with it, though I have never needed to edit really long documents with it.
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