[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by nomesque

I don't think OOo is for everyone. If you know Word already, and you're doing the things that Word does well... might as well stick with it.

But take a large (300 page) document with tables and images, create a Word version and an OOo version, and have a race to open, edit, update fields and PDF it (with hotlinks etc included). The Word person will generally be weeping after 5 minutes That's why I use OOo in preference to Word. Although I'm not fond of MS, either.

I agree that OpenOffice.org (OO.o) is not for everyone, but I do think that it is suitable for many users. Although it doesn't have all of the features of MS Word, the ones it does have work very well.

I know from experience about how painful creating a complex document in MS Word can be. Two examples:

- Once, I had to create writing guide at work, one about 60 pages long. On some pages there would be a portrait example, and on others there would be a landscape example. It became such a formatting nightmare that I ended up printing the individual pages, scanning them, and saving them as a series of graphic files. Then I created the guide in Powerpoint, inserting each scanned page on a different slide. It wasn't the most elegant way to do it, but it did get the job done.

- In another case at work, we ended up having to FAX a certain type of document back and forth, even though it could have easily be sent via e-mail. The reason for FAXing: The document we received had to be identical to the one they sent to us (absolutely no differences were allowed between the two versions, even a small amount of extra space between two words could not be accepted). With MS Word documents, often the formatting of the received document would change on our system because of differences between the system the document was created on and our system (for example, a difference in printers can affect the document's formatting). The only way we could avoid the problem (we didn't have the ability to generate PDFs at that time) is to FAX the document.