APEX DS

OpenOffice comes with Linux, which is also free. Even though I had been wanting to move to Linux, I could not find the best time to learn to adjust to the changing. But since once OpenOffice can be run in XP as well, I switched from Word to OpenOffice in an instant and it was never dissapointing.

Now, I still don’t understand why so many people are still stuck to Word. OpenOffice is a better program with spreadsheet, presentation program, database, word processor and many additional programs. It is very similar to Word and it is free! Why would you spend your money on the program which is very similar to the one which is offered for free? Word has never done any significant progress anyway since 1998. Do not pay for something that you know the quality is just the same with the one you can get for free.

I just hope that OpenOffice will keep on developing the program and does not repeat Word’s history once they have many users. I have also heard about another open source program called Abiword. Hopefully more and more open source programs will be developed for us to choose so there will be more competition which result to a continuous development.

I used and loved Word perfect in the past when it changed the screen from blue to white. It was a flexible program and I followed each versions of it from the beginning to the newer ones which were definitely much more easier to operate. It was also a great program which had shortcuts to allow us to do easier formatting compared to Word.

But then Microsoft Office came to the market with its free bundle and people started to use Word and Excel rather than Word perfect and Lotus. Since Word and Excel were free and very similar to Word perfect and Lotus, schools and houses used them and slowly Word perfect and Lotus were lost in the competition.
However, once Word beat Word perfect, it started to lose its competition spirit. Now its price is so high and there are hardly any development in the last years. Today’s version is pretty much the same with the 1998′s version. The biggest complain about Word is the grammar checker. It has never been improved and therefore is not credible. Nobody is foolish enough to trust Word’s grammar checker. The problem is, even though with many disadvantages above, Word is used by everybody so that only few people are willing to leave it.