Open Office Experiments

After a few days of working with Open Office's word processor, it was time to turn to the spreadsheet. I don't work with spreadsheets much at home, but I do have a few specialized uses for them. One of those is a campaign manager for my Mutants & Masterminds campaign – I use it to track past, current and future events in the campaign. Each entry has a column for event name, date, weather, type of event (e.g. blog post, crime, super activity) and a brief description.

My first few days on NeoOffice haven't turned up any major problems, but I have encountered a couple of foibles. Most of these are personal preferences, but I think most heavy Word users while find them to be similarly annoying

Firing up NeoOffice and using it to write a few quick documents, the first thing I noticed was how slick and Aquafied it was -- it feels like a Mac OS X native application, which is a major advantage over Open-Office-under-X11 approach that I took earlier.

Open Office is a free, open-source alternative to Microsoft Office. Based on Sun's Star Office, Open Office has been around for a number of years, and has proved fairly popular with the geeks, particularly those who dislike being beholden to Microsoft, Apple or any other proprietary software developer. It's the predominant office productivity suite on Linux, and comes bundled with distributions like Ubuntu.