I think I’m through buying Microsoft Office
A few years ago I was excited at the prospect that OpenOffice would by my office suite of choice, but I ran into two significant problems.
- I didn’t like using it as much as I liked using Microsoft Office. I was reluctant to admit it to myself, but I finally had to.
- The version that ran on the Mac was horrid. It was butt ugly and slow, and required an X server.
I really hadn’t looked at it since, but recently I put together a Ubuntu (Linux) system in my office and started playing with the email reader Evolution (which is a pretty good replacement for Outlook in Exchange shops), I needed something to process Word and Excel attachments, so I downloaded OpenOffice. Boy, is it nice now! The clunkiness I remember is gone and the user interface is more natural to those of us who have used other word processors and spreadsheets. I haven’t checked out the presentation tool.
But what about Macs? At long last there are promising developments. After years of little development, a real effort is being waged to create a version of OpenOffice that will run directly on the Mac desktop (and not on X). The first Alpha release came out very recently. It’s a long way from being ready, but it’s something.
