is OpenOffice.org a superior tool?
Breaking the Word Processor Curve
Bruce Byfiled makes a compelling case for OpenOffice, as more than just a replacement for word. I'm a long-time OpenOffice user, but to be honest I mostly use it to open office files and do most of my writing in vim or on my PalmPilot, so I may not be the best judge. But this article explores a few features of OpenOfccie that are superior or just more stable than their m*s Office equivalents.
When you first switch to Writer, this claim that Writer beats Words may seem hard to swallow. And no wonder; you're too busy learning the new menus to get beyond the fact that everything's only half-familiar. And if you're an unsophisticated user who has yet to learn (to steal the title of Robin Williams' book) that the PC is not a typewriter, you might never notice. However, if you're an advanced user for whom style, structured text and long documents are all part of word processing, then the claim soon becomes self-evident.
Understand that I'm not talking features here. True, with its PDF and Docbook export filters alone, version 1.1 of Writer leaves MS Word playing catch up. However, features are an arms race in which superiority rarely lasts for more than one version. When I say that Writer is the superior piece of software, I'm talking about the basics, the everyday functionality that can't be improved without massively rewriting the code.
