Indeed it was more than a year ago, but the whole issue is pretty much immaterial as my school’s computers all use MS Office and there’s nothing I can do about it. Anyway, I feel no compulsion to give OpenOffice another chance to fuck me. I’d much rather vote the Office file formats completely out of existence and switch to RTF or plain-text.
Monty
It’s good you’ve had luck with the Open Office word processor.
My experience has been what fetus has encountered.
I like it. I enjoy using it and helping others use it. I’ve created a lot of good documents with it, even very long ones. For me, a Word doc is a comfortable place to be. I’m not kidding.
Except bullets and numbering. They suck.
Have you ever found a way to turn them off? Permanently? Whenever I type something that resembles a list, the program starts doing it’s thing and drives me absolutely insane. Nothing short of setting the PC on fire seems to make it stop permanently.
You can turn them off permanently in the Tools menu under AutoCorrect Options (or just AutoCorrect, depending on which version of Word you have). There are two tabs, one for AutoFormat and one for AutoFormat As You Type. Just uncheck everything you don’t want (I uncheck everything except “smart quotes”).