Tech Talk Archives

OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org is an open source, community-developed, multi-platform office productivity suite. Jean, who has written a host of books about the suite, showed us that the capabilities of OpenOffice Writer (in particular) are not just comparable to those of Microsoft Word, but are even stronger in many areas.

Jean opened the discussion by talking about her experience with documenting OpenOffice. When she first started looking at OpenOffice, there was very little documentation, so she started documenting it and this lead to her publishing various books about the software.

OpenOffice Writer has native support for PDF, something that is very useful in a world where the PDF format is ubiquitous. The latest version of Microsoft Word has just included this feature, but it has long been present in OpenOffice.

Jean does not particularly recommend round-tripping documents between Microsoft Word and OpenOffice Writer. While OpenOffice can be used to recover corrupt Word files, not all the information in a Word file transfers across. Macros, for example, are not carried over. (My own experience is that there are also a few quirks with how layouts and page frames are converted.)

Many features in OpenOffice Writer remind one of more advanced tools like FrameMaker. For example, it has conditional text. However, from Jean's demonstration, it certainly looked a bit harder to set up and use than in FrameMaker. Like FrameMaker's conditions, they appear to be best used for discrete conditions, without too much overlap.

OpenOffice Writer has a master document feature similar to that in Microsoft Word; it also has support for fields, variables and change tracking. The lists feature works better than that of Microsoft Word.

Styles in OpenOffice Writer are organised not only into paragraph and character styles , but also into page styles, frame styles and list styles. The use of page styles means that, unlike in Word, you do not have to use section breaks to create a new type of page. Instead, you simply apply a different page style. You can also link a paragraph style to a page style. While OpenOffice Writer can be used to create complex layouts, Jean's view was that it may not be suited to high-end publishing.

Jean's demonstration showed that OpenOffice.org Writer is quite powerful and may be emerging as a good alternative to Microsoft Word. However, those intending to move to OpenOffice Writer need to approach it with the understanding that it is a very different software from Microsoft Word.

Related links

• The OpenOffice.org website
• Jean's website about OpenOffice.org