Which Office Suite Do You Use?

[blue]

Which Office suite do you use? If it is not listed, please vote Other and list it in the reply. The poll will remain active for 30 days.

[DesDownunder]

The poll has a problem, because I actually use Open Office and Microsoft office on the same computer, and sometimes for the same document. Why? Different people want the document in different programs.

[E.J.]

The poll has a problem, because I actually use Open Office and Microsoft office on the same computer, and sometimes for the same document. Why? Different people want the document in different programs.

vote for both (it may take 2 separate votes)

never mind, you can't vote twice, even if you delete cookies. Some would call this a feature, but I would agree that it is a problem if you use more than one suite.

[blue]

Hang on, looking to see if I can get it to accept multiple choices, or failing that, multiple votes. It's been too long since I last did a poll with IPB.

OK, you can now choose more than one, and you should be able to delete your vote and re-vote.

BW 2012-04-07 11:37am CST (GMT -6)

[Lugnutz]

I use Open Office but it seems to take a day and a half to open. Other than that, I don't have a problem with it. I can fave files in different formats too.

[DesDownunder]

Success! My votes now represent my usage of the two programs. I hate both of them...for different reasons.

[Richard Norway]

I use both Microsoft Office and Open Office. I've used to MS Office for years and only recently loaded Open Office. It's come a long way since its beginning and is just recently outshining MS Office.

[DesDownunder]

I find there are somethings that MS Word does better than OpenOffice- Track Changes for one. Insertion of images into a Word document is easier and more stable, workable, etc. MS Powerpoint has many more options and OpenOffice cannot duplicate some of the effects possible.

Open Office will open older and newer file formats with ease and let you edit and then save in a variety of formats.

Images in a Word doc file can get very screwed in open office. Transfer between Powerpoint and Open Office is a mess, but then my demands are intense.

I wonder if the younger generation are going to suffer the way we have, as we had to use this stuff whilst they were being developed from day one. Presumably future advances will be more easily accommodated by kids who have grown up with more mature programs, or am I being naive?

Microsoft in particular, seem to be reinventing some very strange wheels.

What's this button do? Where did my hard drive go?

[Gee Whillickers]

The problem is that Microsoft makes their file formats weird on purpose. That's the whole point. They've done the exact same thing with everything they've touched. The whole point is to make it very hard for other programs to open and save them correctly in this weird and undocumented format, thus forcing all the users to use nothing but Microsoft products. While I understand their lawyer's and marketing people's point, I still hate it with a passion.

That's why OpenOffice and its brethren came alone. A fully open and fully documented file format, so you can open and save to your heart's content with whatever software you prefer, rather than the software that makes one company the most money. Of course, battling against ver​y established installed base is a supremely uphill battle, thus the reverse engineering that makes it possible, at least most of the time, to save in Office file formats.

As a result of Microsoft's corporate bullheadedness, I choose to avoid using their products whenever possible, only succumbing when absolutely necessary. So I use LibreOffice. Of course, since I'm running Linux, using MS Office isn't an option anyway unless I wanted to run it through Wine, and I don't.

[bi_janus]

I use MS Office mainly because I'm lazy and Microsoft is the standard in my work environment. Most word processing programs will allow me to save documents in a variety of file formats, and most documents I circulate go out in PDF anyway. But, there are always minor formatting issues that don't translate well. Now, the other MS Office components are irritating in varying degrees (the ubiquity of PowerPoint is a catastrophe), and Access is just lamentable. Since I use Macs at home, Filemaker Pro is my DB program of choice, and I wish I could get our IT department to use it. Alas, I am stuck, flailing in the MS spider's web.

I will never forgive Gates for almost driving WordPerfect (before Corel got a hold of it) from the marketplace.

[Tim]

I've used MS Office Lite (the portable version) 2007 since starting Law School because it's not a resource hog like the installed version and Open Office. With my new job, however, I need to use excel and excel 2007 is very confusing. Luckily, I have a friend who gave me a copy of MS Office 2003 where excel is much more intuitive and now I use it exclusively.

Tim

[The Pecman]

I refuse to use .DOCX formats, because I deal with several people who can't or won't use that format. I'm much more comfortable sticking with the regular .DOC format, because I know it's readable by many open-source word processors.

I've also held back on upgrading to the new Microsoft Office package, just because the "old" one (circa 2008) works fine for me.

[colinian]

One of the authors I edit uses WordPerfect, so I had to install it because converting back and forth between Microsoft Word's .doc format and the WordPerfect emulation of the .doc format started giving us problems. I was able to buy a copy of WordPerfect Office X4 Home and Student Edition for $9.99 online from Nothing But Software.

Colin

[Guest Dabeagle]

I use Open Office because it's free. Word didn't come with the computer, because I built it myself, and I don't have the extra bucks to throw out there for it. Of course it makes folks like Mike have to get it for me to send raw files to, but 'into everyone's life a little rain must fall'.

[DesDownunder]

The rain, it falls, it doesn't fall, and still the flowers grow.

[blue]

Hey Beagle Boy, ;) you can get Open Office to "Save As" in "Microsoft 97/XP/2000/2003" format (.doc) and it will make document exchange with Mike and others easier.

[vwl]

I use Word, as I have for many many years, so I find it cumbersome to use other word-processing programs -- finding how to do things that in Word are now instinctive.

As an editor, though, there are several features of Word that would have to have equivalents in competitors. First, I use the Comment function that in Word is on the Review tab in order to remark on what has been written -- that is, to make comments outside the text of the manuscript. Second, I use the Compare function to create red-line versions of the edited pieces -- where the red lines show all the changes that I have made in a document. In my view, the Compare function differs significantly from the typical red-line-markups-as-you-go function, which is also available in Word. The Compare function allows me to edit a perenially "clean" copy of a manuscript -- that is, showing no markups. I find the instant markups shown, as I go through the text, difficult to read and I'm prone to creating new errors, particularly when the changes in text are complex.

In short, I have considerable capital built up in the use of Word (and Excel). This does not preclude use of another word processor, but notes the hurdle to making a change.

[colinian]

I use Microsoft Word 2010. I'm used to it, and I've customized the ribbon and added Office Tab to make working on multiple documents easier. Because I do editing as well as writing, I use the Review feature of Word that isn't fully supported (or not supported at all) by the Word clones out there. I like that the word count in the file I'm working on is displayed all the time in the status bar at the bottom of the window. The grammar checker sucks. Its worst offender is not recognizing that it's isn't a possessive; my granddad say it's been doing that since the added grammar checker was added way back when he started using Word. That's before I was born!

Colin

[Guest Dabeagle]

Hey Beagle Boy, ;) you can get Open Office to "Save As" in "Microsoft 97/XP/2000/2003" format (.doc) and it will make document exchange with Mike and others easier.

Thanks Blue! I don't normally send the Open Office document to Mike anymore, but I did have to when the Midnight Dude book was being put together and I with I'd a thought of that. Currently I send him the html page, which has it's own issues as he and I have recently chatted about. I use a product to create my html pages called Edit Plus 3 and it does what I need it to and the finished document loads and looks correct on my server (and Apache something or other If I recall). However one of the problems I had in formatting years ago while using...some html program, big name....I think they make a program called Fireworks as well, or did. Anyway, it was the indents for the new paragraphs we couldn't get to display. This program allows that easily and I have stuck with it. The only problem is it's thirty bucks, so I keep it on my ancient laptop which is now on day 1597 of my 30 day free trial. They fixed that bug and now it does stop working after 30 days.

[blue]

Adobe gobbled up and killed its competitor, Macromedia. It kept a handful of Macromedia's products and neglected and then killed the others, in favor of its own products. You're likely thinking of Adobe Dreamweaver, one of the ones Adobe kept from Macromedia.

If you don't mind hand-editing web pages, I recommend CoffeeCup's HTML Editor. Cheap price, good updates and support, and free upgrades once you've bought their software.

If you'd rather use a "visual" designer, then go with...their Visual Designer. Heheh.

Every word processor I've seen exports a lot of crap into HTML pages and CSS styles. It's a pain to clean up. But them's the breaks.

I will post a handy way to do proper indents on paragraphs that should be easy to use. I'll just have to write up the instructions on how to use it.

[blue]

Of course, I got carried away with the indents with examples of a few common uses. There is a style clash somewhere that I haven't squashed yet.

Please See: CSS Goodies at my website.

See Also: Common Grammar Problems, which has a few old in-jokes. It's finally available again.

[dude]

Speaking of your website, Ben... do you ever check your email? Been waiting for a reply for a couple of days.

[blue]

My email there is sometimes wonky, and I need to set it to flag me when I get new mail. I'll check; very sorry for the delay!

(That's a sign that I have hardly been getting any email lately, by the way.)