Seriously, the names in OpenOffice.org are pretty bland – “Spreadsheet”, “Word Processor”, “Presentation”, etc. However, that’s pretty much the only fault I could find so far.
Word Processor
Earlier today I was visiting my family. My brother wanted to write a resume, but being completely new to the working world, he obviously needed some help. By complete coincidence, my parents didn’t feel like paying for Microsoft Office, so he has to use OpenOffice.The word processor is very intuitive and works just as well as Word. The only two difficulties I encountered were bullet formatting, which involved some guesswork with the horizontal rulers, and table formatting, which I’ll elucidate now.
Despite the fact that every company demands unformatted text resumes submitted online, I still like to make my resumes reasonably attractive in case I need a hard copy – this means screwing with tables, cells, and line colours and thicknesses. In MS Word, there’s a handy table toolbar with some drawing tools – namely the pencil, eraser, and the paintbrush. These tools allow users to select and manipulate individual line segments. OpenOffice’s Word Processor lacks this feature, and instead users have to select cells (individually or in groups) and and manipulate them. This is just as effective as MS Word, but a fair bit more cumbersome.
Overall, the resume turned out nicely and I only spent about five minutes troubleshooting the cell borders.
Spreadsheet
I mainly use spreadsheets to track my workouts and schedules. I found OO.o’s spreadsheet very easy to use and I transitioned from Excel seamlessly. It easily imported my old workout XLS files and doesn’t seem to have had any problems. In addition, the formatting worked as desired and took no extra time. OO.o’s macros worked as expected and definitely added some time-saving convenience.
They’re actually called “Calc,” “Writer,” and “Impress”