Down among the users
I’ve been trying to use Open Office more or less exclusively for a few months, to see if it’s ready for prime time. Most of the time, it works just fine, has certain advantages over Microsoft’s Office (cross platform, price, export to PDF, file compatibility), the disadvantages (mostly startup speed) seem acceptable, and the occasional bugs I find I’ve been able to report and get fixed. I consider myself reasonably technically sophisticated, though, so it’s interesting to also hear what the rest of the world thinks.
I was chatting with someone who I wouldn’t have thought did much with computers, but apparently does. He maintain websites for a couple of organizations that he’s involved with, and was keen on the whole “Open Source” thing to manage to download and install Open Office. He told he that he had used it for awhile, but had to give it up. The problems? 1. People couldn’t read the documents he sent them. You have to do “Save as…” and click OK on a scary dialog to use OO’s excellent .doc export filter. 2. “It changed all of my existing documents into its own format.” Pretty serious! But what had happened is that after OO told Windows that it would handle .doc files from now on, thank you, Windows changed the icons from Word icons to OO Writer icons. These were sufficient to send him back to Word.