I’ve said several times on this blog that I am a strong believer in open source software. I’ve found that it’s pretty easy to find open source replacements for most of the things you need to do on a computer on a daily basis. Then past year has shown that this applies just as much to students as anybody else, as I went the entire year using Open Office as my suite of choice for schoolwork. Overall, I found it to be much better than Microsoft Office for just about everything.
I will admit that OO came up short in one place. I found that for reasons of collaboration, it was generally better to use PowerPoint from beginning to end than to convert between an Impress file and PowerPoint repeatedly. However, for everything else, OO proved to be just as good, and often times less frustrating, than Word. Here are the highlights:
- Styles: OO Writer is awesome at creating and defining paragraph styles, which really comes in handy when you are formatting your 25,000-word plus capstone project. Sure, Word has styles too, but they just seem to be far less intuitive and harder to use than in Writer.
- Footnotes: The reference-handling abilities of OO Writer were incredible. I had dozens of footnotes to keep track of in my paper, some referenced from multiple places. Even when I moved entire sections of my paper around, OO Writer kept track of everything without fail. I’ve never done anything this extensive in Word, so I’m not sure how it compares, but OO Writer did everything I wanted easily.
- Keyboard shortcuts: OO Writer allows you to create custom keyboard shortcuts, something that comes in handy for inserting all those footnotes. Yes, Word does this as well, so it’s a wash when you compare the two, but still, it’s nice that Writer didn’t forget this important ability.
- PDF Creation: You can now rather easily create PDF documents from Word, but in OO, it’s much more comprehensive, allowing you to specify how the PDF opens, how many levels of bookmarks show in the sidebar, copy protection, and more.
- Macros: For my project, I created two spreadsheets, one in Calc and one in Excel. I’ve been doing VBA programming for about ten years now, so I expected the Excel version to be easier to write. Not so. The macro capabilities in Calc were better than Excel; there were some things I could do easily in Calc that I labored mightily to do in Excel, much to my surprise.
There are differences between the two, and like I said, PowerPoint is still better than Impress if you need to share the file with several other people for group editing. However, all in all OO served me very well, and I think I’ve put it through the wringer enough to demonstrate that it can be used by the student in place of Microsoft Office.
Now, if they made a replacement for OneNote (something I’ve never used, but I hear all sorts of awesome comments about), they’d be set.