OOXML backwards compatibility led Microsoft to ODF

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Yowza! Hey, calm down!: Calm down, will you? I didn't call MSO 'crap', CreepinJesus did: "OOo exact copy of MSO" and "OOo is crap"; if OOo==MSO and OOo==crap, MSO==crap in Euclydian mathematics!

It's not logical, and I called him on it.

Now, my own experiences with MS Office:
- Office 97: as long as it was correctly supported (up till 2001 or so), it was good, the best product one could ask for, and I loved it.
- Office 2000: the best reason ever to use Office 97. Really, until SR-3 came out, it was CRAP!
- Office 2002/XP: that one copied OOo's stylist, and was indeed very good functionality-wise; however, when I started typing my thesis (with styled paragraphs, headers and footers, some footnotes, a few images, some charts, a few flow charts and differently styled source code extracts), it kept crashing at the drop of a hat (it had its latest Service Release installed at the time, and the machine was otherwise clean and stable); I switched to OOo (1.1.0) right then, as it allowed me to type a few hundred pages this way without worry (no crash).
- Office 2003: I must admit I didn't use it a whole lot, but it did look nice and quite a bit more stable than MSO XP; still, since documents created with it appeared identical under OOo 1.1.3 (down to the shifting-from-save-to-save frames I added to some pages), I wasn't really willing to install it on anything other that the machine I had at work: I couldn't justify its cost. When OOo 2.0 came out, I simply got MSO 2003 off my radar apart from Access, which was a very nice tool to have to toy with database extracts.
- Office 2007: well, that one is a pig, bringing to its knees any 3 year old system I ran it on, without bringing in enough feature I found interesting, and crashing on those I actually appreciated (in Access, mainly); with OOo 2.x getting from slow, drab pig (release 2.0.0) to fast and sleek (release 2.4 includes revamped colors for charts, a new Tango icon set, better theming support, and many performance improvements), I really couldn't justify switching; moreover, I'm a bit of a power user, and the ribbon interface is too... awkward for me.

Now, of course OOo ain't perfect; MS Office does have some features that people may find interesting that don't have a counterpart in OOo.

It's just that OOo's MS-compatible feature set and its exclusive ones match my use much more closely than MSO does. Since, on top of that, I can use it on both my Windows and Linux systems without any problem, and that it doesn't cost me an arm and a leg for each installed system, you'll understand I'm strongly supportive of it:
- much better styling support than MSO (stylist, navigator)
- ever better PDF export
- much lighter on resources (disk and RAM)
- intuitive graphs creation (OOo Draw)
- powerful graphical capabilities (native OpenGL support)
- more flexible language options (user-installable dictionaries and interfaces)
- data sources are more flexible and powerful
- platform-agnostic
- valid HTML export, Wiki export, XHTML export
- it doesn't have Clippy
- updates are free

Some things I appreciate in MSO for is:
- mass mailing is faster past 50 copies or so
- it has more cliparts
- the VBA IDE is very powerful
- some wizards allow some actions to be done faster (creating a page footer)
- its Help system (not Clippy!) is slightly more complete and much easier to navigate; Posted by: Mitch 74 Posted on: 05/24/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use