Entries Tagged 'Software' ↓

My laptop came pre-installed with a demo copy of Microsoft Office 2007, which was set to expire after a month. I’ve got Office 2007 at work and think it’s fine once you get used to the interface.  However, once the trial period expired on my home laptop, I decided I really didn’t need Office 2007 and furthermore didn’t want to pay for it. In summary, I have Office 2007 at work and Open Office at home.

During my lunch breaks at work, I do a little fiction writing.  Nothing too spectacular, but it keeps me entertained.  Normally, if I know I’m going to want to work on the piece at home I either upload it to Google Docs or make sure I save my word document as a .doc rather than .docx (the new office format).  As you can guess, I forgot this time and saved as .docx.

Once I got home, I double-clicked on my file and it launched Word 2007 (it of course told me my trial had expired).   I cursed my stupidity, opened Open Office and tried to open my file.  Of course Open Office can’t handle the new .docx format.  No problem, I thought. Then I opened Word 2007 again (it again told me my trial had expired, I need to uninstall)  and tried to copy my text and paste it into Writer.  It turns out that one of the functions in Word that is disabled when your trial runs out is the Copy function (including Ctrl+C).  I could see the text, but do nothing with it.  I wound up re-typing the entire thing. In other words, Microsoft owned my content.

Not only did this make me mad, but it turned me off from buying the product.  I think I’ll just stick with Open Office for now.

I have been in a few discussions recently about the worthiness of Microsoft Excel, Google Spreadsheets, and OpenOffice Spreadsheet.

My claim is that none of them have features that I need that none of the others have.

I keep jumping into the conversation at the point where people start championing the massive feature set of Microsoft Excel.  I ask them what features Excel has that none of the others bring to the table.  Instead of getting answers, the conversation switches to needing to use Excel because the office they work in demands it.

But I still haven’t heard which features these people need out of Excel.

For me, I can use all three of them.  There is nothing that I do that isn’t a feature in all three of them.  I prefer OpenOffice for anything that I plan on keeping since I spend about equal amount of time on Linux and Windows.  I like using Google Spreadsheet for quick throw away things.

So, let’s work on the basis that work/family/Dell will let you use whichever one you want as long as the features are there.  Which ones would that mean you can use?

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