Usually, I don\’t use office suites a lot since I have no need and most of my task related to documents can be done either with text editor or image editor during the last few days I had some paper works related to documenting projects, making graphs, writing nice formatted text and similar things so I decided to use something from what I know can be comfortable.
OpenOffice was a first (and most probably best) thing that came into my mind and switched to it to do my stuff. I spend few hours doing my things and I realized how good and professional this suite of office applications is. Today I decided to visit their web-site and found that there is a beta of 2 there and being curious I downloaded and installed it. There are plenty of improvements out there.
First of all, the installation is separated into logical parts (Writer, Drawer, Calc,…) and there is an option to install either all of them or omit some components. This is very good feature since OpenOffice is quite a big thing (the full installation is around 100MB) and keeping it all with no need is kind of useless.
Second thing I noticed is speed improovements. New version is much more faster (I felt good even on weak machine – 700MHz, 128 RAM).
Third thing is a new application I: OpenOffice Base which is an analog of M$ Access but much better (from my point of view). It is fast, it supports connection to a variety of databases.
Finally, the whole look & feel of the OpenOffice is great. Everything seats on its place, everything is accessible and so on.
What I can\’t understand is why people still continue to pay lots of money for the M$ Office when OpenOffice is much more comfortable, more (or at least not less) functional and free.