OpenOffice 1.1.4- First Impressions

Everyone Experiments in college. Some with Drugs, Alcohol, or Sexuality. Others in their perception of the world. Even more try new political thought systems. It's good that this happens- without experimentation, no one would know about anything new or unusual. As for myself, I've been experimenting with open-source software.

I was wanting a powerful office suite, but didn't want to pay Microsoft's outrageous (at least to a college student) prices, and I didn't want to “steal” MS office via a P2P program such as Kazaa, Limewire, Etc..., so I turned to open source software.

I had heard some buzz about OpenOffice on forums, and even on television. I had heard great things about it- it would end bulky, high priced suites such as MS Office and WordPerfect, but for some reason a “free” program that was THAT good, well, seemed TOO good. We'll find out. This is the first in a long term trial of a few open-source programs that I'll be testing over the next few months, so don't expect super in-depth analysis of all of the functions (yet).

But what I will do is give my first impressions of OpenOffice.

Right now I'm using the Word Processor to type this post, and it seems to be going smoothly. I've used it for all of my posts so far, with little trouble. I do like how it is set up, and the very first thing I noticed is that it's fairly bare bones. No fancy graphics, no Office Assistant (THANK GOD), and everything that's commonly used is easily accessible. Formating pages, paragraphs and text is easy and quick, and without silly wizards holding your hand through simple processes such as creating a table.

One thing that I really like are the tool bars. They really are set up better. Items are organized better than MS Word, you have access to everything you'll need, and the icons are easily recognizable. Some may say there's too many tool bars, but hey, that's why it's customizable.

Also included are a spreadsheet program (MS Excel), a “Presentation maker” (Powerpoint), a Drawing tool (MS Paint on BGH), and an HTML Publisher (Weak Frontpage).

The one thing that is missing is a Database tool. If this suite had something that could compare with MS Access, I'd say that I'd even pay for it. But no Database, no buy.

To be honest, I mostly use the Word Processor, since most of my work is typed documents. I'll be using the Presentation Maker more in the future for class work, and I'll give an in-depth look at it then. The Drawing Tool is somewhat useless, but it's still nice to have in case you want to doodle with something a little more powerful than MS Paint. The spreadsheet app is, well, it's a spreadsheet app. It's Excel without that damnable paper clip popping up every 5 seconds. It's nice.

I'd say I'm happy with the suite so far, as it hasn't given me any real trouble, but I'm certain, just like every other program, the problems will become more apparent as I use it more. I've only noticed one issue that needs to be corrected so far, which is the fact that there are sometimes formatting issues going between OpenOffice and MS Office and visa versa. Simple page formatting problems that can be fixed in seconds in both programs. Nothing big, but I figure I'd throw in the bad with the good.

I'd recommend this suite to anyone that needs an inexpensive, comprehensive package, and knows a thing or two about using the individual MS Office programs. It's a nice change of pace to not have things dumbed down for you, and the average PC user will find it easy to use.

Visit the OpenOffice web site for more info and a free download.

Untill Next Time,

Larry