tea & toast

Let me start off by saying I’ve had a lot more experience with Word'07 then I have Open Office (OOo), and I do agree with those who thinks it's unfair to compare a free product to a fee product, but the reality is that's the first thing someone thinks when they open a writing program; “what is this like to Word?”. 

So as you may, or may not know, my boss Nick has decided to rid himself of the Microsoft chains (replacing them with the chains of Apple ). This means we are attempting to move our documents out of the Word .doc format to a format that is better supported across platforms without Microsoft products. 

So here we are, looking at Open Office Beta 3, up against Word 2007. 

What about Word 03? Its 5 years old, and even universities and school are updating to the new Office, so really, what about it? It's dying software, and people have a huge learning curve ahead of them no matter what product they choose to move on to. 

If you don't want to read the in-depth, jump down to the conclusion!

Word '07

I've got to say when I first opened up the new word the first thing that came to my mind was 'wtf?'. Gone are the menus in menus in menus, and the infinite toolbars, instead we have a 'ribbon' using tabs.

Learning the new word sure was a pain, cause first needed to unlearn the old word. Stuff like 'word count' I spent ages looking for only to be embarrassed to find that word count is now live and always showing in the bottom information bar of word. Great decision, no need to do mouse word to quickly check your word count anymore!

The menu re-arrangements are much nicer than they used to be, granted it's confusing finding things for the first time, as their no longer in weird places like 03. However it can be a bit confusing with the ribbon constantly changing itself, you need to keep an eye on the new option available to you, however this is much proffered to being shown very option at once, or having to turn on and off tool bars to find it.

Formatting

Yes I do graphics, and formatting is the first thing I am interested in most applications. Sometimes I am utterly disappointed by the lack of option programs provide you, but Word 07 has gone leaps and bounds from 03 when it comes to branding, not just formatting.

Now you can set up a colour scheme for your document. This means when you hand it on, the suggested colours are appropriate to the documents current design. But it doesn't stop there, we still have our heading style etc, which was present in 03, but we also have styles for tables, and objects.

When you draw a box, word 07 now takes your colour palettes and suggests some nice tasteful auto formatting based on these colours, including soft drop shadows, gradients, thick lines, and more. You can draw a table, and in 3 clicks have all the alternate lines formatted in colours from the document, with the headings differentiated, just by selecting the 'format' tab and clicking the suggested design that looks best.

There is also a floating box that appears above select items with the basic menu options of that element – such as format and position on images, which really saves time.

So Word '07 I give a huge thumbs up, well worth the learning curve, especially for design elements to help get your companies documents back to a consistent and pleasant look.

Open Office Beta 3

Oh no, you think I’m not going to like it cause I like word 07? You'd be wrong. The first thing I have to say about Open Office is that I love it's price – nothing!

Opening up OOo for the first time is reminiscent of opening up word'03, the layout is very similar and so is the overall look and feel. Most of Word 03's functionality seems to be accounted for, and some of the tool bars are laid out exactly the same, so as a general user the learning curve will be minimal in comparison to learning Word'07, which is a huge bonus if you decide not to go down the upgrade.

Saving directly to PDF is definitely a huge plus! No worries if the machine has word 03, 07, iWorks, or another version of open office, you can guarantee that they can at minimum read the document.

Formatting

But as with all Open source programs things start to get a little fuzzy when we look at the more advanced features. Headers and Footer can be made to suit the sections they are in, the same as word'03, but you can actually name your sections, and section management seems to be much more powerful in OOo... however as such it's a bit harder to figure it out as it's using new concepts, and the first thing I did to get me through was to open up the help.

Hopefully the help is not really applicable because it's beta 3 – if it is... try finding the feature yourself first and when entirely exhausted try the help. Many cases I went to use the help, and found it was just wrong, telling you to go to the wrong menus, or about areas that no longer existed. This means you not only spend time searching the help, but then trying to follow instructions that are wrong, taking up more of your time. Fingers crossed this is fixed when it is released as a full build.

OOo doesn't have all of the functions of word'03, and I think this serves to work against the product when it is so familiar to it. Features like selecting a paragraph and pressing tab to indent it, will replace your selection with a tab. Likewise which using shift+tab to unindent. Likewise there's no easy way to see on the fly if you have spelling mistakes.

OOo does have a colour palette option, so you can change the suggested colours, which is great to see. You can save and load them, however there is no easy way to load a palette, requiring you to actually draw and object, so you can get into the Area Menu, and then the Colours tab to be able to open your saved palette. This option should be available on all drop out palettes, and should be much easier to access than that, especially as it doesn't seem to save the like between the document and the colour palette it is using, requiring the user to load this each time. The feature is under-developed, but very welcome for when it is made.

OOo does seem to have some powerful formatting options, allowing you to select how an object is position, whether it is to a paragraph, page, or its location in flowing text, which Word'03 just doesn't have. So there are cases where OOo is actually more powerful then the fee product, good work!

The Show Down

I love the new word, they really brought new life to a bloated, over-featured product that was just getting to a stage where it was hard to see any advantage in upgrading, and the new formatting features, if used, should be helping businesses keep their corporate image up.

OOo is a great product, and much easier to learn from Word'03, than the new Word'07. However as it is so similar, it becomes more apparent when features of Word'03 aren't in OOo, which will always be a let down for it. The menus are better than Word'03 but not as intuitive as Word'07. The product is also bland to look at, so some serious thought into adding some graphical interest, or skins would definitely help to boost the product away from being a Word'03 clone and reduce the disappointment in missing features. Most of all, I hope they continue to develop new features no seen in Word, and take in some of the new word features, I would love to see more soft dropdown shadows!

So if you are upgrading from Word'03, look at OOo, it costs you nothing, supports .doc format, saves to pdfs, and uses open document formats. If OOo doesn't tickle your fancy, be prepared, the new word is a totally new beast, but very rewarding if you learn it correctly.