Leaving MS Word is so hard!
It's been about 2 months since I've downloaded OpenOffice. I never thought switching would be so hard.
The first hard part about switching is relearning what program to use when you need to write a document. By instinct, my mouse goes straight to Start -> All Programs -> Microsoft Office -> Word 2003. I never thought relearning such a stupid mouse pattern would be so hard!
The second hardest part of switching is learning how to use an easy program. Microsoft Word is so full of crap, but people are not only taught MS Word in school, but they think that it is normal to use such a bloated piece of terrible software. In reality, life should be much simpler. I don't need 49,142 features to write an English paper. I need about 5. Even though OpenOffice does have a lot of the advanced features, I am not bombarded with any of them.
The third hardest part of switching is explaining to your teachers that you don't save your documents in the terrible .doc format. Instead, I use the .odt format; yes, XML based. I know MS did something different on their format for Office 07, I think it is XML now, but I'm not going to buy it or look into it.
There are some other things that I have had trouble with, like finding certain features that I use (Header and Footer, that's about it), but besides that switching hasn't been too hard. I hope others will make the switch soon too.
Oh yeah, and the Number One thing about OpenOffice: a BUILT IN feature to convert all your documents to PDFs. Thank you Sun, thank you.
March 15th, 2007 - 16:42
Open Office is one of the greatest text writing programs ever created.
Screw Text Edit and Microsoft Word.