After a long hiatus from open source productivity software, I am again giving OpenOffice a shot. My home laptop started with an old vanilla install of XP, and out of installation convenience, I have been using open source software as opposed to the usual higher-end commercial packages. Below are a few of my thoughts and suggestions for others undertaking the same experiment.
First a little background information; this isn’t my first time using open source productivity software on my primary desktop. Ten years ago in college I had converted my PC to Linux and used it successfully for a year or two, until it, similar to Windows, became slow and unwieldy as I installed more packages and drivers. The final straw was the eventual upgrade / installation complexity, as the large number of packages were not compatible with each other, and each had prerequisites of different base library versions. Installing new software would often take several hours or a day, depending on the number of component incompatibilities. Left alone, Linux works great, however customization and experimenting with many different software packages is cumbersome and even worse than the Windows DLL complexity.
Ten years later, the software is much improved. I am using the OpenOffice package – currently maintained by the Apache Foundation. They offer a productivity suite similar to Microsoft Office, and their Word Processor is aptly named “Writer”. Although the software has made great strides in the past 10 years, there are still a few items to be desired:
Fonts / User Interface
Despite my initial negative response to the Office Ribbon, I have been finding myself missing the ease of adjusting styles and options . OpenOffice uses an old-style menu that had been familiar to Microsoft Office 2003 and earlier. The newer versions of Word had also introduced a very elegant set of fonts named “Calibri” and “Cambria” – and these are missing in OpenOffice since there are proprietary Microsoft fonts.
Adding the Calibri and Cambria fonts into OpenOffice is relatively easy. Simply download the free “PowerPoint 2007 Viewer” from Microsoft, and this will install the fonts. Then make these fonts default in OpenOffice Writer by going to the menu “Tools->Options”, and selecting “OpenOffice Writer->Basic Fonts (Western)”. On this tab, select Cambria for the Heading, and Calibri for everything else.
Word Count
One of the pleasant surprises in the newer versions of Word was the real-time word count on the status bar. Unfortunately, OpenOffice lacks this capability, so it is necessary to manually check the word count by going to “Tools->Word Count”. Although plug-ins exist to help add that feature to OpenOffice Writer, there have been warnings of hang-ups and crashes due to these plug-ins, so I decided to stay away.
Interoperability
Unfortunately, OpenOffice Writer is not as friendly in working with other programs as Microsoft Word. Copying / pasting from Word into web browsers works much better than with Writer. The Writer software adds extra line breaks, extra spaces, and odd markup. Although this would happen in earlier versions of Word, the newer versions have become streamlined and more interoperable with web browsers and other software packages.
Overall
While OpenOffice offers a compelling alternative to Microsoft Office, it is slightly less polished and requires the user to perform extra work. The level of user interface research that goes into a high-end productivity suite truly becomes apparent when you try to perform the same operations in lower-end software. Still, the free price cannot be beat, and these small hang-ups have not significantly altered my workflow.
Written by Andrew Palczewski
About the Author
Andrew Palczewski is CEO of apHarmony, a Chicago software development company. He holds a Master's degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has over ten years' experience in managing development of software projects.
Google+
