Open Office for Windows

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MANUFACTURER: Openoffice.org
PRICE: Nothing
Minimum Requirements:Pentium compatible PC, Win95,98, NT, 2000, ME, XP, 64MB memory, 250MB hard drive space
Web Site: www.openoffice.org

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ALL RIGHT, ALL RIGHT. I'm giving it a go. A guy from OpenOffice.org (why does it keep filling this in for you?) contacted me after I wrote this column and said I should give this word processor, now available for Windows, a whirl. So I have.

Open Office stuff is based on Sun's StarOffice software. Given my recent experience with Sun's legal department, I've tried to forget that while reviewing this software. As well as downloading the app software from the site, you can also grab the source code, and lots of developer info too, if that's your bent.

The goal of the whole project is to create a leading international office suite that will run on most major CPU systems, and include "open component" application programming interfaces using XML.

The Open Office folk are too fond of the word "issue" and the Web site "insists" that all public communications refer to the project as Openoffice.org, not OpenOffice or Open Office - plus the logo belongs to Sun, while the site and the project is also sponsored by Gnasherzilla.

I've reviewed dozens of word processors in my time including the incredibly clunky Multimate (Wang word processor compris), the Byzantine Wordstar, the mysterious and inscrutable, Lotus Manuscript, the impenetrable Xywrite, the DisReputable DisplayWrite, the strange Samna, the cranky Wordcraft, the imperfect Wordperfect, the quirky Q&A Write, the piffly PFS Professional Write, and even Gem First Word Plus. Not to mention the innumerable Microsoft Words for both DOS and Windows.

Why? Because I've earned a living as a writer during the 70s, the 80s, the 90s and now in the 21st century - and pretty early on --- in the late 70s, realised that a word processor would eliminate Snopake, or cut down on the correction ribbons for an IBM Golfball typewriter, and kill the numerous drafts of documents, the proofing of galleys and all that other old stuff from yesteryear.

After all these years, and currently being a Windows user, I often use Wordpad, which only lacks a spell checker and a word counter to be the perfect vehicle for someone filing Internet stories and reviews. Microsoft Write was OK when that was about the only other application for early versions of Microsoft Windows other than Aldus Pagemaker.

Open Office is really a suite of different software including a spreadsheet, a drawing package, presentation software (Powerpointless) and other bits and bobs - for the purpose of this review I'm just going to look at the "Writer" function.

FEATURES
There isn't much point listing all of the features of Open Office - you can find a list on the website, here.

Let's just say it's stuffed full of features. As a writer, this is not necessarily a good thing. Open Office has got just about everything plus a little bit more, and it's fair to say that whoever you are and for whatever reason you use one of these word churners, you're unlikely to need all of them.

Many of the features - just as in Microsoft Word - are turned on by default, so the first thing I did was figure out that you can modify the defaults by tweaking a master template (master document), so that every new document you start will use your favourite fonts, layouts and the like.

The things I turned off immediately are Open Office's versions of autocorrect and autoformat. HTML pages don't like what Microsoft calls "smart quotes", I hate it when word processors attempt to complete a word for you, or start capitalising words, inserting dates or any other smart-arse stuff that other people think I might need.

You can grab the 51MB Windows installer from here -- there's language versions for Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, French, German and English.

Once you boot up the installation file, it asks you some very polite questions and occupies about 140MB plus on a Windows machine.

The curse of PC computing and word processing is the file format. Microsoft Word, with every new generation, makes subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle changes to its file format. I remember Oliver Roll, then at Microsoft UK, once proudly demonstrating a new feature in one of the old recensions of Word for Windows, and looking a bit dumbstruck when I got angry and told him that the "new lamp" had just killed two years of painstaking work building up a glossary for a book in the previous version. (WinWord 2.0)

Open Office uses an XML-like file format for saving and opening documents. When we save this document it had a .sxw extension - this is the format for the Writer module of this product.

You might notice - as we did - that your documents that used to have the little Microsoft icon on them are converted to look like OO files once the package is installed.

Can you open an .sxw file in Microsoft Word? Yes, but it looks mightily odd, and you won't be able to understand it unless your personal version of synaesthesia allows you to read gibberish.

You can, however, save your OO files in a number of formats including different versions of Microsoft Word, in rich text format (RTF) and in various text formats, as well as saving to the Adobe PDF format.

You can also make it produce HTML, if you must.

This program doesn't have Microsoft "Wizards", the Micky Mouse Sorceror Apprentices of VoleWord. Instead it's got a feature called "Autopilot" which lets you do all sorts of different things, such as preparing letters, faxes, or memoranda, and even lets you convert all your Word files to its own format.

Course, if you're a Windows user, by now you will have learn Iconese, and OO has added a whole new set of icons for you to attempt to figure out. Luckily, you can see what these are in English by sticking your mouse pointer near them.

There are some unusual add-ins to this word processor, including a bibliography database, and external hooks to data sources, which we can see might be very useful for specific applications. There's good support for foreign languages and foreign characters.

HOW EASY IS TO USE
It's much harder to use than Microsoft Wordpad. And it's about as easy to use as Microsoft Word. There's a pretty extensive help file and also supporting documents when you install it. In addition, there's a little hint thing which looks like a lightbulb that intermittently appears while you're typing. It's far less annoying than Microsoft's famous Clippit, and you can switch it off. I switched it off. Believe it or not, back in the early 1990s Microsoft was contemplating have people like Bill Gates pop up on your screen when you had a problem and talk you through it. Clippit was the compromise, and given the horrifying alternative, you could just about live with Clippit...

Presentation often wins over content these days. For that reason, there's all sorts of features in OO that lets you tart up or prettify a document. In the 21st century who cares what you're saying, provided the document looks like you're saying something? Mind you, if you can include content as well as prettiness, you've got the perfect combo...

I'd have preferred it if you didn't have to spend a lot of time switching off autocorrect, autosense, autosniff, autoquotes and the other autosmarsearse features it comes with, which are all switched on by default. I'd also have preferred it not to change all my Microsoft Word icons to OO icons, although that's pretty trivial.

I'm reviewing this software using an AMD Athlon 2000+ with 512MB of memory - I'm not sure how well it will perform on much less humbly powered machines.

CONCLUSION
Look. It's free. Microsoft Office isn't. But Gnasherzilla's cunning plan to topple Microsoft Office might not be as easy as the Open Office folk suggest. First of all, the whole PC industry is predicated on a few fundamentals including the Wintel (and sometimes WinAMD) alliance, and a vast network of manufacturers, distributors and system integrators all hungry for margin. There's also an installed base of Office users that, as we recall, amounts to something like 90% of PC installs, despite all the efforts of IBM Lotus and others, in the past, to offer a viable alternative to Office/Word.

The developers helpfully include a little Autopilot Wizard which will fly through your hard drive and convert every Microsoft .doc you've got into an OO format. The software loaded every Word document thrown at it, although all of those old Q&A Write, Lotus Manuscript, Xywrite, Multimate, Wordcraft and Wordperfect documents are consigned to the scrapheap of PC history, unless we reinstall those packages.

If your budget is limited and you need a word processor and the other software components, we think that this has got everything you might conceivably need. The deeper question, which we've hinted at here, is whether anyone will ever need all of these features anyway.

Which is why I'll probably stick with Wordpad, at least for filing news stories to the World Wide Wibble.

If you compare the word processing part of this product directly with Microsoft Word - it compares very favourably, and some of the additional features, as well as the way it supports different languages and language fonts, are clearly better. The best version of Word for Windows was version 2.0 - which we've still got installed on our machine. It was lean, it was mean, and it worked just fine. Everything Microsoft did to Word since was largely a matter of piling feature upon feature, so diminishing useability, contributing to hard drive sales, and also selling CPUs... µ

INQUIRER SCORE
6/10 for useability, 11/10 for value of money, 15/10 for features, 8 out of 10 for Wow factor, 6/10 for documentation and support.

See Also
Windows word processor for Tibetan