Experiences with OpenOffice 2.0 Writer

As as alternative to MS Word, I've been using OpenOffice 2.0 Writer on my Windows machine for about four days now. I had tried other free alternatives to Word before, notably AbiWord. But none of those experiments have lasted longer than a few days. AbiWord, for example, doesn't display all fonts at the same size and spacing as Word; I care about fonts, and I need precision. Also, AbiWord occasionally crashes on me outright. OpenOffice has been stable. Its memory footprint is reasonable, at about 30 MB (a bit smaller than Word), and its performance seems snappy enough.

In the time I've been using OpenOffice Writer, I've produced and edited documents of only medium complexity. I do use columns quite a bit (see my back articles for why), fonts, and list indenting. On the other hand, I haven't been using features like mail merge, tables of contents, footnotes, or embedded tables. No macros, either. But then, the last time I touched one of those features, or did something with a macro, was, oh, 2001, and I suspect the same may be true of you, dear reader.

One important note about file format: when saving documents from OpenOffice, it still seems wise to use the standard .doc format. I would naturally use the Microsoft-Word-compatible XML format instead, of course. By being a plain text format, it's more transparent, potentially readable by other tools, and it starts to wrest us away from those hoary old proprietary binary formats which lock users into one platform. Bring it on.

But sadly, OpenOffice's support for the XML format is flaky -- by using it, I quickly lost a couple of words from the top of two columns. As an additional unruliness, OpenOffice frequently opens XML documents as read-only, for no good reason. So I'm sticking with .doc for now.