First impressions of OpenOffice

Actually I’m pretty impressed. It was a fairly straightforward installation process. It installed a little app called “Quickstarter” into my System Tray (the icons at the bottom far right of the screen, right next to the clock). I’m OK with that for now. It asked if I wanted to make OpenOffice the default for Word, Excel etc documents. It suggested I don’t if I’m only testing it, but I thought “What the hell! In for a penny, in for a pound”.

I liked that I could choose what icon set I could use for the menu items and toolbars. As my screen is on the large side, I chose to use the larger size default icons (Crystal is prettier, but different enough to make things a little harder to learn while starting out). Other things I like are:

• The ability to output documents to PDF documents
• You can save Presentation files (that’s the PowerPoint replacement) as Flash files
• It actually looks a lot like Microsoft so I have a pretty good idea of where to look to find commands

I tried to set up a quick and dirty product database, but had issues with that – it took forever to find out how to make relationships between the tables. And I couldn’t immediately figure out how to put together forms which recognised these relationships. As mentioned by others, the Help isn’t as helpful as it could be, and I think the product as a whole could benefit from including more templates and samples as standard. On the other hand, there’s plenty of articles and community-generated help to be found online.

I’m going to stick with it for a while and let you know what else I like and what grieves me. I’m hoping that within the month, I’ll know whether I can say goodbye to Microsoft or not for office software. Of course, there’s no email or calendar component, so I’m staying with Outlook for some time yet. To replace Outlook, I’m keeping my eye on what the Mozilla people come up with.

My experience with their FireFox browser so far has been very good – so much more stable than Internet Explorer. My only pieve there is that my scroll button doesn’t work within the drop down Address bar, and the URLS don’t seem to autosort by the frequency that I visit a site. But then again, I’m using an older version (1.0.4 vs 1.5), and these things may have been fixed by now.

Advertisement