Making the Change – MS Office to OpenOffice.org

After years of working with Microsoft Office, and most specifically Word, as my primary word processor and office document management program, I have finally switched over to Open Office from Sun this month. Like most other decisions of this type, it is too bad I waited so long. The circumstances were that I had a project with a requirement to create nearly 50 pages of flowcharts & wireframes diagramming the architecture of a site under development, but I didn’t have a copy of the Vizio program installed. I was using an old copy of Microsoft Office, and still running XP on my desktop, basically because I saw the newer versions of Vista & Office to be bloated and over-intrusive. I used some of the Garrett IA conventions to draw the flowcharts for the site in Illustrator, and then exported it as a .png file into Word.

For a nice archive of downloadable shapes for building wireframes, see:
http://www.jjg.net/ia/visvocab/

I had two versions of Office installed, and decided to use the text box drawing facility of Word 2007 to build the wireframes for the site. Sadly, over the last two weeks, my computer’s performance had been slowing. I defragmented the hard disk and about two days later the disk crashed – it looked like a bad sector. After running CheckDisk utility, the computer booted up again, still slow, the sector had recovered. I decided it was a good idea to replace the main hard drive, and spent the weekend rebuilding the desktop. In the process, I lost my ability to edit .docx files, and the wireframes were due on Monday. So, I began looking to convert the .docx files to Open Office files for translation and republication.

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