Windows

"I Just Say No To Voluntary Servitude…"

Posted by on Mar 29, 2007 | 2 Comments

In response to Is OpenOffice Open Enough For You?, Gnomie Michael B. Johnson writes:

Short Answer: Yes.

Long Answer: Yes, but… I don’t like OpenOffice’s styles, compared to Microsoft Word Outline view and auto-format – probably because I haven’t used it enough to get used to it. On my Linux machine at home, I use OpenOffice exclusively. Though I bought CrossOver Office and own a license for MS Office ’97, I couldn’t get MS Office ’97 to install the one time I tried. Now that’s probably not the fault of CrossOver Office so much as a lack of diligence on my part. After all, they offer tech support – it’s just that I haven’t had a convenient time during their business hours. (And I haven’t even tried Google.)

I think that OpenOffice Writer is a bit slow starting up when compared to MS Office ’97. A friend of mine tells me that Excel VBA just doesn’t translate well for his purposes, but the spreadsheets I’ve transferred over (without any macros) worked just fine for me. I personally would prefer a compiled executable to a Java bytecode solution, but Java is “open sourced,” if that’s a word.

I haven’t worked with the OpenOffice database thingy yet, whose name I can’t remember just now, beyond just launching it a couple of times and giving it a look over. I conclude it is usable, but I haven’t tried developing a complete solution with it yet like I have MS Access. You see, porting existing solutions takes time and just is not productive.

But freedom and ownership are vital to me: I will not lease Office software licenses from Microsoft. I own three Win2K licenses, one Win ’98 license, an MS Office ’97 Professional license, an MS Office 2000 Standard license, Visual Studio Professional 6.0, SQL Server 7.0 w/ 10 client licenses and various and sundry other licenses that don’t come to mind at the moment. I say that to demonstrate that I’m no software pirate; I just say no to voluntary servitude and relinquishing my data to be held hostage, to say nothing of the value of extensibility as a result of openness.

[tags]OpenOffice, Microsoft Office, Open Source, CrossOver Office[/tags]

  • Bill Webb

    Oo 2.2 just rolled yesterday. It addresses the styles to a degree, and also the slow opening and some other issues that were annoying.

    If you don’t mind having 40 MB of RAM tied up, the quicklaunch feature, enabled through Options, Memory, will launch all the apps really fast. I wouldn’t use it, though, unless you have a gig or more of memory.

    As to the main question: The only Micro$oft program I use from choice, apart from XP Pro, which I need to run legacy programs, is Live Writer, and that’s because I’m too lazy to look for a replacement.

  • Jerry Whelan

    OpenOffice is great, and since I believe in encouraging open source, I gladly use Writer instead of Word — and, wonder of wonders, Writer is free. Microsoft is a for-profit organization, known to be perhaps just a little greedy, while open source is a kind of generous community, known to be user-friendly and geek-friendly. I think it probably behoves us to encourage that and meanwhile gently guide Microsoft away from attempting to create yet another set of billionaires.

    I like Writer very much, and it just took me a little while to break the Word habit and become accustomed to the somewhat different menus in Writer. One Writer feature that I can’t do without now is the little trick of automatically and voluntarily remembering, without any effort on your part, long words that you have typed, and then offering you an inline complete every time you type the first three or four letters of that word. You can accept it with an Enter, or dismiss it by simply continuing to type. You can set the number of letters in a word that will trigger Writer to remember — nine or ten letters is good — and there you are, never type that long word again.