Luke Ashe-Browne Open source, web technology and feeble attempts at eloquence

MS Office, OpenOffice and google docs, winner?

I think I'll start this off by saying I am very bias toward open software, I'm a Pyton and PHP developer, I run linux on the desktop, the server, and my girlfriend if she'd let me. I'm not obsessed, honestly.

So I've been writing a lot of documents of late, business plans, system descriptions, financial break downs, and just starting to do work on presentations  now. In these efforts I have had to collaborate with another contributor to these works, and we have gone through some trial and error to discover which methods work best when writing in a pair this way. In the end i feel there is a place for different parts of each option covering each of the required activities you undertake when writing, but more and more one option is winning out.

We started our effort with Microsoft word. We shared documents either through a network share in the office or bouncing them back and forward in email. Word itself was a little distasteful to me, especially the latest 2007 breed, I mean what is the deal with the "ribbon" anyway. It just seems like a way to confuse you in terms of finding your required control, with strange pop-ups for keyboard shortcuts when you use ALT+i to find the insert menu which many of us would be so used to doing when in need of a page break. But this ribbon, I mean why must Microsoft deliver such an utterly obfuscated interface idiom without any recourse to return to menu's, or even approach some form of searchability. When i drop down a menu, i can scan for the item i need, even dropping down what is clearly marked as a sub-drop-down item, to find the hidden facet i require. The ribbon is a globulation of blue, with little to identify menu groupings, you tab between a large flat space wasting surface which is so hard to navigate inside that it virtually requires you to know that the blue pixel in the middle of all the rest of the blue pixels is the one that is also q trigger for another hidden sub-drop-down menu,  and you have to use that at every opportunity, god forbid you would want to figure out the keyboard shortcut for this operation.

And then there's the collaboration aspect of word. Change markup, document difference merging.. sounds great, if it did any of that.

It was at this early second day of working that i just abandoned word and loaded everything into OpenOffice, a nice, conventional simple interface, doesn't look as pretty as word, but the controls are easy to access, the shortcuts are easy to remember, the fonts are, well, ok kinda stale and old fashioned, in fact most of the interface kinda feels like a 90's throwback, and this is the latest version 3. But it will do, it lets me type and work away happily and comfortably.  And hey version 3 even open docx, cool. The content indexing was even great to use, as the program pushes you gently toward using CTRL+[1-9] to set header levels in formatting which then directly map to the table of content indexing.

But then, incompatibility raised it's ugly head on this mis-fortunate born ugly program. Images laid out in word were spewed across the screen in an unpredictable order. Generally charts or diagrams created in word or excel were just a lots cause, skewed beyond comprehension.

My Next port of call,,, Google Docs...    To be continued..