OpenOffice just released the long-awaited v. 2.0 of its office suite, the free version that’s supposed to begin the process of eroding MS Office’s predominance in the field. Hard for me to say. I have to admit that my experience with all of the MS Office functions, with the exception of Word, is minuscule. I know how to view presentations in PowerPoint, virtually nothing about Excel, and absolutely nothing about the rest of the suite.

So why is this idiot writing about a new office suite release, you might justifiably inquire. Well, because I did play around with OpenOffice Writer (the MS Word equivalent) on several occasions, and have been using it on my machine at work when I need a “real” word processor, as opposed to the various pieces of outdated Microsoft junk that came with the basic XP installation. (You’ll come to learn, if you haven’t already, that while I use M$’s products, I’ll do just about anything I can to keep from paying for the privilege - short of stealing the software which is… well… stealing. If the Deity had wanted us to continue stealing from software manufacturers, She wouldn’t have invented Open Source) Anyway, I got fairly well acquainted with Writer by default, as it were - and there were a number of things about it I didn’t like.

Without going into detail about matters that are definitely water under the dam, or over the bridge, (as we say in hurricane country), I’ll just say that with v. 2.0, the OpenOffice folks have corrected every bitch I had about the Writer portion of the suite. Every. Single. One. As far as I can tell. There might be some minor glitches that haven’t come up yet, but all the stuff I’d mentioned in a previous review a year or so ago… gone. I even like the little popup helper that it uses in place of MS’s stupid paper clip. It actually opens up a help menu that’s a help when you click it, and disappears quickly if you don’t; a big help getting used to the new software.

I’ve gotta figure that if it cleaned up Writer this well, it has probably put a pretty nice finish on the parts of the suite that I know little about. I suggest, therefore, that you explore on your own. (As an aside, Microsoft is concerned enough about the Open Source community - and specifically OpenOffice - that it has added the ability to handle Open Document Text (.odt) files to the latest edition of Word, in the hope that inter-compatibility will help keep folks using its products when its associates switch to O-O.)

It’s a 75MB download, and takes up about 200 MB on the disk (substantially less than Office). Worth playing with. If you don’t like it, you can always lay out a couple of hundred bucks for Bill Gate’s product. He won’t mind.

Tags: open source, openoffice, office, document, bill webb