In their latest versions, both Writer and Word use a floating window entitled Styles and Formatting for applying and managing styles. By contrast, beyond including Themes for basic page layout and page borders, Microsoft Word has no concept of page design at all. The largest trouble spot is the pre-defined Left and Right page styles, which add blank pages to even out the page count - a feature useful in hard copy, but easy to miss when exporting to PDF. Writer’s page styles are especially useful for designers beginners are often baffled by them. Write automatically uses many styles in each of these categories, but the ability to tweak them gives Writer basic to intermediate desktop publishing capabilities. Moreover, Writer extends the concept of styles to frames, lists, and page styles. The only advantage that Microsoft Word has is that its dialog includes a keyboard assignment for a style, something that in Writer requires opening a second dialog after the style is defined. However, Writer consistently allows more control, offering settings for hyphenation, automatic page breaks, and the last line in a fully justified paragraph. Like most word processors, both OOo Writer and Microsoft Word have paragraph and character styles. In general, Writer pressures users to format with styles for anything beyond the simplest, shortest of documents. By contrast, in OOo Writer, by formatting manually without using styles, tasks such as adding a different header or footer become a matter of laboriously adding page breaks. Microsoft Word supports them, but users sacrifice little except their own time if they format manually. Styles allow users to define formats once and then apply them to multiple blocks of text. While hardly surprising, the results offer a concrete example of how open source tools are not only equalling but starting to surpass proprietary ones. Both are adequate for most users’ purposes, so I focused on functions that power users are likely to want:Īt the end of each category, I give my verdict about which program has the best combination of features and usability. Accordingly, I compared the beta of OOo Writer 2.0 with Microsoft Word 2003. Now that OOo is starting to be used in business, a more detailed look seems overdue.

At that time (OOo) was barely known, so I confined myself to highlights. Up to : Finding an Alternative to Microsoft Word” - my most quoted article.

Openoffice drawing object autotext