There was an article at OSNews.com a few weeks ago that tore into OpenOffice versus Word, regarding usability. My problem with OpenOffice is that it’s trying to replicate the Word experience, right down to many of the annoying things.
And there’s no real version for OS X.
On the Mac, I use Nisus Writer Express from the good folks at www.nisus.com.
I tried the OpenOffice.org suite a couple of years ago. Within 25 minutes of random noodling around, I found several serious bugs, and a few missing key features that I had to have. Uninstall. Delete.
To be fair, I’ve also found a blatant error in MS Office XP that hasn’t been corrected, even through 3 service packs. I won’t bore you all with the details. Suffice it to say that if you want to do a merge with a Word main document and an Excel spreadsheet data source, and you want to use more than two selection criteria to choose the Excel records you want to merge, hold on to your hat! I found a workaround, but I was surprised to find a bug of that severity.
The new one (equivalent to Star Office 7) is much better. The only incompatibilities I have found have involved change recording. In the old days Impress couldn’t handle really complicated diagrams, but now does much better. I suppose if you get into the bloat part of Orifice you can run into trouble, but it is getting increasingly rare.
Oh, and as far as editors go, ed rules. Emacs in a pinch. Framemaker is much better than Word, but pure troff (or even better, runoff) is the way real men write.
We’re straying from word processing, but a quick question: will the OpenOffice spreadsheet handle array formulas? (Tough to describe, but if you need them, by god, you need them!)
Couldn’t have put it better! I see no point in this “heading” business. If I ever want to use the same heading again, I’ll probably just do it again. This would take only seconds. Alternatively, I could open the document with the heading I want to duplicate and copy-and-paste it into the new document.
You probably would if you were trying to generate a table of contents automatically. IIRC (it’s been a while since I did anything serious in Word, being retired!), that’s where it pays off.
You appear to be trying to post a message to a message board. Would you like the Office Assistant to help you out with that?
You’re evil, Cicada2003. Back underground for another 17 years! 
At work, they took away our nice WordPerfect and made us use Word. They did this gradually. One by one, we got new(ly reconditioned) computers. The new computers had Word, not WordPerfect. The alleged reason? So we’d be able to send attachments that everyone could open. Then, for the next several months, problems kept being caused by people sending large attachments. Hardly anyone had any idea of what constituted “large”.
I don’t see how anyone who has used WordPerfect can ever be happy with Word. It’s been some time now, but I still miss Reveal Codes. And I hate that I have to TELL it to give me a new blank page.
Huh? Please explain what you mean by that. Are you saying that, when you launch Word, it doesn’t come up with an empty document?
But shouldn’t users be able to choose this option when and if they actually need it?
As I’ve already explained, you can turn off virtually all of the automatic formatting, and everything will be “normal” style from then on. You can choose this option.
When I open Word, it gives me a blank page. If I use it, save what I’ve done, and close it, I have to tell Word to give me a new blank page. It’s a minor thing, but it annoys me. In WordPerfect, when I closed a document, a new blank page was there automatically. I suspect this is a difference put into Word just for the sake of not being the same as WordPerfect.
A more annoying thing is this: Say I’m trying to select a nifty font for whatever I’m doing. I highlight some text, glide down the list of fonts, and select, say, Garamond. Say I decide, no, not what I want; better keep looking. In WordPerfect, if I went back to the list of fonts, I’d be right there on Garamond. I could continue down the list. In Word, when I go back to the font menu, I’m NOT right there at Garamond. I’m back at the top of the list. I have to scroll down to Garamond again before I can resume.
I also hate the tiny default font that, as someone else mentioned, carries over into the email program. I found out what to change so that the email font would be larger, but making the change caused me to lose several selections I’d made as to what font I wanted various other things to be. Why can’t I have everything appear in whatever font and whatever font size I want?
Sorry, Hazel, but to me, this sounds like a simple case of someone being forced to give up something familiar and adopt something unfamiliar, and nitpicking the unfamiliar for solace.
Having to click once on a readily-available “New Blank Document” icon doesn’t strike me as being a problem. In fact, I can just hear someone else saying, “Why does WordPerfect always assume that I want to open a new blank document? If I want it to do that, I’ll tell it to!”
Ditto for the font list. Someone else would say, “Why does WordPerfect assume that I want to start looking at the font list at the point where I left off last time? What if I decide I want a font from nearer the top of the list? It makes me have to scroll all the way back up!”
I don’t use Word as my email editor. I prefer to use HTML. So I really can’t help you there. I’ve never found that my Word default font choices “bled over” into any other programs, however, so I’m not sure what problem you’re having. For me, everything does appear in whatever font and font size I want.
The last time I used WordPerfect, I thought it was an utter piece of crap. Why? Because I couldn’t find things on the menus, and couldn’t make it do what I wanted it to do. Is it actually worse than Word? Probably not. It was just unfamiliar to me.
Wouldn’t it be better to have all that “helpful” stuff defaulted to OFF when you install the programme, and then if you later want to do something more special you can figure out how to select it. I find it far more annoying not knowing how to turn something off, than on.
Ok, now I’m not sure if it fixes it automatically, I’ve never tried it. But you go to options in the format menu and go to spelling and grammar. Click on settings, where it says, “check for spaces between sentences” or something, select “2”.
:: opens word ::
I just tried it. It doesn’t do it automatically, but it does the whole green grammar thing. And you can’t set AutoCorrect to correct it because it doesn’t conatin every letter. Unless of course you put in an entry for every letter of the alphabet, say replace “. A” with “. A” 
cheers
engine
Perhaps, and this is the usual complaint about MS software. They assume you’ll want the little paper clip to pop up and try to help you. They assume you’ll want the automatic formatting on. They assume you’ll want the autocorrection stuff on.
Of course, if they delivered the software with all of this stuff turned off, most users would never know that it was available, and the complaint would be that MS puts all these helpful features into their software, but hides it so you never even know it’s there!
True, Early, very true. And thanks for the tip!
Haven’t read the whole thread, but I can’t stand MS Word. Too damn helpful, every time it tries to help me it inevitably does something that Idon’t want done. The worst time was when I tried to type up my resume, I had to do everything twice to get it to stay the way I wanted, and eventually I aveup because it would not let me do what I wanted to do.
Get MS Works. All the features that MS Word has plus more, minus the ‘helper’ program. No more paperclip.
Perhaps if they included a user friendly paper manual, this wouldn’t be such a problem.