Do you use Open Office?

Do you use Open Office? I don’t. Why? It is not practical, it works slow and it’s kind of hard to use. Will I ever use? Maybe when it’s developers will learn something from Microsoft.

Everybody complains that when it comes to office software, all that is thought in schools is Microsoft Office. Even if there exists several other software for office work, it is not widely thought or used. Moreover, I think this software is know more or less only by computer specialists.

At server conferences that I have attended in the last years, there was a request to send the documents in an open format. Formats like .doc, .xls or .ppt where not accepted, as not being standard. Well, lucky for me, they accepted pdf. Creating a document in Open Office (as that was the only alternative, html was out of the question) is challenging. Let aside that Open Office’s interface is counter-intuitive, it works very slow.

Surfing around Microsoft’s websites, I came across Office:mac 2008. This is the version of Microsoft Officefor Macintosh. I placed here a commercial about it. Forgetting about the functionality problems of Open Office and focusing only on the ease of use and the way of promoting it, it’s no wonder that people prefer to use Microsoft Officerather than Open Office.

Do you think it is hard to use? In my opinion, Microsoft Office is and will be many years a milestone for the office software.

If you are a computer scientist, you will say that I am mad or I promot Microsoft. You will also give me a classic example. If I write a larger paper, Word will mess around my page, it alwas does that!. My answer to that is simple. Word is for writing simple docemnts, like invoices, reports, memos, etc. If you whish to write a professional document (newspaper for example), use a software designed for that (Adobe PageMaker or QuarkXpress will do the job).

Microsoft Office:mac 2008 web page.