Word processor woes
Topic for the day.... why is MS Word is the de-facto standard?! I've used that software for years now, at college and at work and never thought so much about it as I do these days since I've started using Fedora as my default workstation. Here is what is my evaluation....
The good:
I like the interface. Its good to have keyboard shortcuts for almost all your regular work; and given some patience you can even understand specifics such as how to get your templates and auto-text to function as you want them to. Its a good editor for documents which are less than 100 pages long. On Windows, I did not know of any utility which came close to offering the functionalities I would get in word.... at least a couple of years ago AbiWord and OpenOffice were not in the same league, I felt.
The bad:
For all the convenience to create the document, it offers nothing but major inconvenience to share it once your work is done. There is no default PDF export function available. The word document format is not made available for others to be able to write/edit a document made in Word using any other software. For the same reason, MS Word does not allow you to save your work in any open format which would be handled better by other editors. In other words, a pure and undiluted monopoly. If I need to give a document out to others, I have to hope that they have MS word installed on their system.... and preferably the same version as what I'm using. (I've seen colors get screwed when an Office 2000 doc is opened in Office 97).
The downright ugly:
This link may come as a surprise to some MS users. That the word format stores some information about the document creator was known to me (I think I know how to instruct word to store correct information for the creators), but that it would include text from other open documents was a surprise. I don't know under what conditions this happens, but ignorance is certainly not bliss in this case.
If you are reading this and still not convinced, I think this article on the GNU site may do a better job of explaining it....
Topic for the day.... why is MS Word is the de-facto standard?! I've used that software for years now, at college and at work and never thought so much about it as I do these days since I've started using Fedora as my default workstation. Here is what is my evaluation....
The good:
I like the interface. Its good to have keyboard shortcuts for almost all your regular work; and given some patience you can even understand specifics such as how to get your templates and auto-text to function as you want them to. Its a good editor for documents which are less than 100 pages long. On Windows, I did not know of any utility which came close to offering the functionalities I would get in word.... at least a couple of years ago AbiWord and OpenOffice were not in the same league, I felt.
The bad:
For all the convenience to create the document, it offers nothing but major inconvenience to share it once your work is done. There is no default PDF export function available. The word document format is not made available for others to be able to write/edit a document made in Word using any other software. For the same reason, MS Word does not allow you to save your work in any open format which would be handled better by other editors. In other words, a pure and undiluted monopoly. If I need to give a document out to others, I have to hope that they have MS word installed on their system.... and preferably the same version as what I'm using. (I've seen colors get screwed when an Office 2000 doc is opened in Office 97).
The downright ugly:
This link may come as a surprise to some MS users. That the word format stores some information about the document creator was known to me (I think I know how to instruct word to store correct information for the creators), but that it would include text from other open documents was a surprise. I don't know under what conditions this happens, but ignorance is certainly not bliss in this case.
If you are reading this and still not convinced, I think this article on the GNU site may do a better job of explaining it....
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