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.

Open Office “Ninja” has a great resource on the different ways to translate a .docx file at:
http://www.oooninja.com/2008/12/better-office-docx-converter.html

For reference, the ODF-Converter-Integrator available for free download from OO-Ninja works perfectly in translating the wireframes from a .docx file to Open Office .odf – something that Sun’s Open Office (even with all its benefits) couldn’t do. Opening a 35 page .docx file of wireframe sketches in Sun’s Open Office without first converting the file using this utility does not work currently – all of the lines, text, and tables run together and the document is unreadable. The other option which looks really good is Novell’s Open Office – it has the .docx to .odf converter built in so that it actually works, but there may be some cost for the software.

Download Sun Microsystem’s Open Office: http://www.openoffice.org/

Download the .docx to .odf Converter: http://www.oooninja.com/2008/12/better-office-docx-converter.html

Download Novell’s Open Office: http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/features/ooo.html

After getting everything up and running, desktop re-built, I realized quickly that Open Office was a much better application than Word. It supports Word formats as well as .pdf, but really the gem is its simplicity – doing everything you need for word processing and office document management, plus additionally including drawing, spreadsheet, presentation, and web publishing. Free open source software contains many benefits, but the best here is finally the end of the dancing paperclip and “dog” characters that are constantly popping up and giving advice in MS Word.

Background:

http://technologizer.com/2009/01/02/microsoft-clippy-patents/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant

While I am in no way a Microsoft basher- I switched from Mac to PC in the late 90′s, but at the same time, I am not the only one who sees “Clippy” as a prime example of a reason to advocate free, open source software. As Michael Meeks, a programmer with Novell who works on Open Office and Word compatibility stated in an interview a couple of years ago:

Free software gives you the freedom that, even if you are a one-man shop, you can have it fixed if it is annoying you enough. The example I like to give is ‘Clippy’ — remember? — that whipping boy of journalists. You couldn’t turn it off and it came on and you had to talk to it before you came on.

Now turning Clippy off, in my estimation, is a single line of code change. With Microsoft you just couldn’t do that. You couldn’t get into their software, find the piece of code and just fix it. If you think about the software cost of some catastrophic blunder, often it would be way cheaper if you could just get in and fix it. I think that is a huge benefit of the free-software industry.

I am also not likely to be opening up Open Office and start re-arranging the code base to add and remove features for my own use, but nevertheless I am really happy about making the switch and expect to stay with Open Office as my main software for office productivity and document authoring. Even so, it is still a huge decision to change my entire desktop from Widows to Linux, much more so than migrating from Apple, and I doubt I will make that decision at any point in 2009. While I will most certainly upgrade from XP to Windows 7, skipping Vista altogether, as I think many users will, Microsoft needs to definitely improve their Office software or risk losing more and more market share to Open Office, and ultimately the whole desktop market to Linux on this same principal.

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

Making the Change – MS Office to OpenOffice.org