Gamma Testing: OpenWriter

So, I've been trying out OpenOffice lately. As I said somewhere else recently, I've been using computers for a long time during which I've been using Microsoft Word since the very beginning. And I've been looking for an alternative ever since. MS Word's the gold standard, of course, but, well, I might not be a first adapter but I do love new stuff that promises to be better. OpenOffice, a freeware alternative to MS Office really fits my budget at the moment (Which is to say since it's free it's not going to break anyone's bank. And I don't mind investing the time and effort needed to adapt to a new platform. Again.) and my friends rave about it so I figured it was worth a looksee. Mostly, I've been using it for OpenCalc, the spreadsheet program for various and sundry reasons.

But recently, I've discovered something about the word processing program, OpenWriter. Namely that as an extremely flexible format it's great for creating content for webpages. As I'm a newly minted blogger this is a great thing for me. For the past week or so I've been creating my posts solely in OpenWriter (with the exception of the images I occasionally post which are manipulated separately. But they can be imported into OpenWriter and slapped into a manuscript with ease.) as opposed to the combination of Word, Notepad, and Blogger's rich-text editor I was using before.

Now, this is important to me because by virtue of when I created this blog I was shunted into the new version of Blogger – known as Blogger Beta. It was the default for blogs created after a certain point in November, after all, and mine was no exception. Having never used Blogger before the differences between the versions seemed trivial to me and if this is going to be the format going forward I figured it best to put up with any of the bugs and get used to it now rather than learn the old way and then have to switch when it became outmoded. I've heard arguments for and against Blogger Beta and I'm really not going to get into it (yet.) because all I can say is that it's working for me fine so far. But one of the key disadvantages of Blogger Beta is that a lot of the utilities made for the original Blogger have had some difficulties translating over. And the plugin that lets people create Blogger content in MS Word and port it over seamlessly is one of them.

Didn't really slow me down as I just brute forced things but posting from MS Word into Blogger's post creation panel gave me some nightmare formating problems. I run an older version of MS Word that doesn't play so nicely with the web because, hey, it still works and, until now, I don't do most of my writing for the web. But MS Word adds a bunch of formating to any documents it creates – often needlessly so. I'd have to convert it to plain text and then paste it into Blogger (or cut out the middle man, so to speak, and just work straight in a plan-text editor like Notepad) and then add in all the links and typography that I'd want. It wasn't much of an added step but it's one that I can cut out now. OpenWriter converts to Blogger-ese just fine without any additional plugins. Indeed, it converts to any other format with ease. But unlike Blogger's rich-text editor it has a lot of bells and whistles that can be used when editing a body of text like this. The real gears and such aren't really applicable but it does, for instance, allow for much better editing of hyperlinks. And, well, I link like my life depends on it so it's a nice touch.

OpenWrite has a lot of nice touches and improvements for me over the MS Word experience. I can't really describe exactly what I find so refreshing and different when comparing the two programs but I do know that I like OpenWriter better. It's just simple, clean, and easy to use. With everything I want from a word processor. And a lot of what I don't want removed. It's missing a few features from MS Word that I liked – such as a built-in thesaurus, for instance – but I can live without them. Especially because OpenWriter's much more stable and a lot less of a resource hog than my aging copy of MS Word on top of everything else.

I still have several works in progress that are developing in the MS Word format but, at the moment, I'm trying to transition to using solely OpenWriter. Still, don't rush out and get a copy on my say-so, I'm going to give it a weak recommendation, for now, until I can learn how to use it and experiment a bit more with the deeper features. Like the spellchecker and formating and the like. Really, I'm just using it as a more feature-rich version of Notepad at the moment. And I have absolutely no clue how to really trick a piece of text out in this particular sandbox. I've heard that MS Word has more features along those lines but, well, I don't really use them there either. So, OpenWriter's working for me right now but I'm still figuring the cockamammie thing out. I'll try and keep you informed about how that's going.