# Word or Open Office?



## TheYellowMustang (Jun 5, 2013)

Anyone with experience in both writing applications?


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## Lewdog (Jun 5, 2013)

Word cost money and OpenOffice is a free version made by Sun Systems.  Word is better and has more features, but that should be expected of a program that cost a good chunk of change.


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## TheYellowMustang (Jun 5, 2013)

Lewdog said:


> Word cost money and OpenOffice is a free version made by Sun Systems.  Word is better and has more features, but that should be expected of a program that cost a good chunk of change.



Do you know what these features are? All I really need is the ability to type in words and change fonts and sizes. I think I'm gonna try Open Office. I tried copying Word from my old laptop, but it was such an old version that it didn't work on this Mac.


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## Lewdog (Jun 5, 2013)

TheYellowMustang said:


> Do you know what these features are? All I really need is the ability to type in words and change fonts and sizes. I think I'm gonna try Open Office. I tried copying Word from my old laptop, but it was such an old version that it didn't work on this Mac.



If that is all you are looking for, you should be fine.  I think some of the differences are the number of font types, some of the editing stuff like the thesaurus, and some other small details.  Sometimes you need a file converter program to switch between OpenOffice files and Word, and sometimes you don't depending on how new the Word program is.


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## Bloggsworth (Jun 5, 2013)

My only objection to Open Office is the length of time the program takes to load, but you can circumvent that by having a blank document on your desktop, double-clicking on that, then opening the existing document you actually want when the WP section of OO is open. OK, the print on screen is not as crisp when viewing a document in OO, but neither is it in other free/cheap applications, there is just that wonderful openness on the page in Word. You can, of course, set OO up to do everything in Microsoft's _Filename.DOC _format, so transferability is no problem.


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## TheYellowMustang (Jun 5, 2013)

Bloggsworth said:


> My only objection to Open Office is the length of time the program takes to load, but you can circumvent that by having a blank document on your desktop, double-clicking on that, then opening the existing document you actually want when the WP section of OO is open. OK, the print on screen is not as crisp when viewing a document in OO, but neither is it in other free/cheap applications, there is just that wonderful openness on the page in Word. You can, of course, set OO up to do everything in Microsoft's _Filename.DOC _format, so transferability is no problem.



I understand Word is better, it's just that when it's between 0 or 140 dollars, then.. well, that changes things. I think I'll try OO first 

Thanks!


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## movieman (Jun 5, 2013)

Note that Libre Office is now getting more development attention than Open Office. When Oracle bought Sun, they forked off from Open Office as they didn't know what Oracle were going to do with it.


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## Leyline (Jun 5, 2013)

Neither. Both are bloated programs I don't care for. I use Jarte -- a small, sleek, free word processor.


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## FleshEater (Jun 5, 2013)

Leyline, is it easy opening Word documents saved as .docx in Jarte?


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## Travers (Jun 5, 2013)

If you're running a Mac, you may want to try Scrivener. My flat mate uses it and swears by it.
It costs £31, but I'm sure you can get a free trial to test it out.


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## Leyline (Jun 5, 2013)

FleshEater said:


> Leyline, is it easy opening Word documents saved as .docx in Jarte?



Ha. I've never tried! Will report back. 

ETA: Yep. 106 page game walkthrough in .docx format opened right up in about a second.  A quick scan revealed no formatting glitches, centering and a bullet point list displayed nice and neat.


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## Leyline (Jun 5, 2013)

Travers said:


> If you're running a Mac, you may want to try Scrivener. My flat mate uses it and swears by it.
> It costs £31, but I'm sure you can get a free trial to test it out.



I love Scrivener, but I feel I should add that it's more of a story planning and structuring tool (and a fantastic one.) The word processor included is fine, but basic.


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## popsprocket (Jun 6, 2013)

I found Scrivener more prohibitive than anything else to the process of writing a novel. The way it keeps things split up and organised is great, but also makes things more time consuming.

Good ol' MS Word for me.


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## Sam (Jun 6, 2013)

It really doesn't matter what you use. All else failing, a pen and notebook will do the job.


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## Non Serviam (Jun 6, 2013)

What Sam said is correct, and my writing projects are stored in .txt format because that's (a) easier for the layout guy when the time comes for him to do his job, (b) smaller, and (c) always safe to send and receive (you can't possibly conceal a virus in a .txt).  I know of publishers who won't accept emailed submissions unless they're in .txt format.

I use Word at work and LibreOffice at home, and I'm quite convinced that LibreOffice is the better word processor.  It has more features, a more intuitive interface, an easier learning curve than Word, stores files in more kinds of format, and converts things to .pdf in a single click.

The reason Word is faster to load is because it puts a launcher into your systray that speeds it up.  However, this also consumes system resources, so having Word on your computer slows down everything else.

Disclaimer: My dislike for Microsoft's products reached its Apex when I bought my current laptop, which came pre-infected with Windows 8.  Windows 8 was the last straw for me and I removed it from my system by formatting the hard drive; my current operating system is Linux Mint.


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## Staff Deployment (Jun 6, 2013)

Word has a neat little trick where you can split the viewport down the middle and edit two sections of a document at once. It's also got these really dense tools and easy integration with Excel and Powerpoint, et cetera. But I only use Word for school projects. Otherwise, Pages works fine, albeit with limited formatting tools. I cart it around with me on my tablet. Very easy.

The last time I used OpenOffice was years ago, and it felt really soulless and empty, but I don't think that's a legitimate complaint. It's free, and it does all of the basics perfectly.

Leyline's program of choice "Jarte" is intriguing. I may look into that.

* looks into that *

[spoiler2=SO MUCH BLOOD]There's no blood (disappointingly).

The site reeks of pre-aughts web-design, but their list of features is impressive and their critical reviews seem overwhelmingly positive. I may investigate further.[/spoiler2]


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## movieman (Jun 6, 2013)

Non Serviam said:


> The reason Word is faster to load is because it puts a launcher into your systray that speeds it up.  However, this also consumes system resources, so having Word on your computer slows down everything else.



Libre Office takes about three seconds to start up on my laptop. The big problem with Open Office used to be that it loaded Java on startup, which was a horrible time sink, and loaded much faster if you disabled Java in the options. Libre Office doesn't appear to have an option to disable Java so I presume they just removed it completely.


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## movieman (Jun 6, 2013)

Travers said:


> If you're running a Mac, you may want to try Scrivener. My flat mate uses it and swears by it.
> It costs £31, but I'm sure you can get a free trial to test it out.



Or Windows or Linux.

It's also worth noting that they usually give a 50% discount to anyone who 'wins' NaNoWriMo, and the free trial lasts for a month so you can try it out by writing the NaNo novel. I think I paid $20 for my copy as a result.


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## Non Serviam (Jun 6, 2013)

movieman said:


> Libre Office takes about three seconds to start up on my laptop. The big problem with Open Office used to be that it loaded Java on startup, which was a horrible time sink, and loaded much faster if you disabled Java in the options. Libre Office doesn't appear to have an option to disable Java so I presume they just removed it completely.



Oh, really?  Takes exactly seven seconds to open on mine (I just timed it).  Two and a half seconds, the second and subsequent times I open it, but first time after boot, seven seconds.


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## JosephB (Jun 6, 2013)

Adobe Premiere takes about 20 seconds to open. You have a sip of coffee, pick a song on iTunes -- or otherwise stop and smell the roses. Life is short -- but it's not _that _short.


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## Non Serviam (Jun 6, 2013)

Absolutely, that was what I was saying.  I use LibreOffice for preference and a seven second startup time is a non-issue for me.


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## JosephB (Jun 6, 2013)

I was agreeing with you. Of course, we bill by the hour so maybe we should itemize that on our invoices -- "Application Opening Time." It could be another great way to nickle and dime our clients.


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## Tettsuo (Jun 6, 2013)

Non Serviam said:


> Disclaimer: My dislike for Microsoft's products reached its Apex when I bought my current laptop, which came pre-infected with Windows 8.  Windows 8 was the last straw for me and I removed it from my system by formatting the hard drive; my current operating system is Linux Mint.


Both a fellow Windows skeptic and a Linux user!  Ubuntu is my distro of choice, and Libreoffice is my word processor.

I find the functionality of both Word and Libre to be equivalent.  Of course, the difference in price is what's important.  Free or a hundred bucks?  I'll go with free.

If you must have a specific font, you can purchase that font.  You don't need Windoze for that.


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## patskywriter (Jun 6, 2013)

I use Bean, which is a free program. It's simple and elegant, and I like the word and character count at the bottom of the page.


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## shadowwalker (Jun 6, 2013)

I use the free version of Atlantis Nova, although I'm contemplating buying the full version. But frankly, if I had a correcting typewriter I'd be just as happy. I don't need a lot of bells and whistles to write.


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## Lewdog (Jun 6, 2013)

Kevin uses an etch-a-sketch, once the screen gets full, takes a picture with his cell phone, erases the screen and repeats.  It's not a very good system for editing though.


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## movieman (Jun 6, 2013)

Tettsuo said:


> Both a fellow Windows skeptic and a Linux user!  Ubuntu is my distro of choice, and Libreoffice is my word processor.



I recently switched to Mint: it's basically Ubuntu with the suck removed.

I rather liked the old Ubuntu Netbook Remix because it made much more efficient use of the screen space on my netbook, but when it evolved into Unity it became such a performance hog on a lowly Atom CPU that any benefit it provided was eliminated by the wait for things to happen. And on the laptop with a bigger screen it was a disaster.


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## ppsage (Jun 6, 2013)

I use oo and word, on different computers. Neither is latest release. oo is a bit slow to load after a logout, otherwise equal or faster. My biggest complaint is that it uses a navigator pane instead of an outline view.


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## FleshEater (Jun 6, 2013)

Leyline said:


> Ha. I've never tried! Will report back.
> 
> ETA: Yep. 106 page game walkthrough in .docx format opened right up in about a second.  A quick scan revealed no formatting glitches, centering and a bullet point list displayed nice and neat.



Solid!

I have Open Office now at home and don't like it. It makes writing suck. At work I use MS and love it.


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## TheYellowMustang (Jun 6, 2013)

Okay I've tested Open Office now, albeit just for a few minutes, and I've noticed two things:
1. Big documents are a pain to handle on it. For some reason scrolling becomes impossible..
2. When I ctrl+click a word there are no synonym suggestions or definitions available.

These other programs you're discussing - Libre Office, Adobe Premiere, Bean, Atlantis Nova etc - do these have the same "problems"?

I want a program that can handle 100k long documents and that has a good thesaurus (nothing fancy, just something like Word has) and that is cheaper than the Microsoft Word package... 

- Spoiled writer ..


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## Robert_S (Jun 6, 2013)

I haven't used a true word processor for a while now. I"m currently using Scrivener and love its project based approach. I do use OpenOffice's Spreadsheets for other things, but not a WP anymore. I have the trial version of Final Draft, but haven't loaded it up for trial yet. I think I'll keep using Scriv for short stories and any novels I may want to tackle, but if FD8 works as I need it to, I'll switch over when I get the money.

As for a thesaurus, I use Thesaurus.com | Find Synonyms and Antonyms of Words at Thesaurus.com.


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## shadowwalker (Jun 7, 2013)

Atlantis doesn't have a thesaurus - at least in the free version. I'd caution against wanting one anyway - too easy to plug in a word when you don't understand the real meaning (Oh there's a neat sounding synonym!). A thesaurus should be used only when you know what you want to say but the word momentarily escapes you. JMO


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## JosephB (Jun 7, 2013)

shadowwalker said:


> Atlantis doesn't have a thesaurus - at least in the free version. I'd caution against wanting one anyway - too easy to plug in a word when you don't understand the real meaning (Oh there's a neat sounding synonym!). A thesaurus should be used only when you know what you want to say but the word momentarily escapes you. JMO



It's a tool -- but it's not like it's a chainsaw or anything -- so why be concerned about the people who don't know how to use it?


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## shadowwalker (Jun 7, 2013)

JosephB said:


> It's a tool -- but it's not like it's a chainsaw or anything -- so why be concerned about the people who don't know how to use it?



Because part of the purpose of a writing forum is to help inform?


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## TheYellowMustang (Jun 7, 2013)

shadowwalker said:


> Atlantis doesn't have a thesaurus - at least in the free version. I'd caution against wanting one anyway - too easy to plug in a word when you don't understand the real meaning (Oh there's a neat sounding synonym!). A thesaurus should be used only when you know what you want to say but the word momentarily escapes you. JMO



I agree. I would never use a thesaurus to find fancy words I don't normally use or hear, but I have a habit of "forgetting" words that I actually know (the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon).


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## JosephB (Jun 7, 2013)

shadowwalker said:


> Because part of the purpose of a writing forum is to help inform?



If I was reading someone’s work here and I saw an imprecise word, I’d certainly make note of it. But it doesn’t seem like a problem you can address prophylactically. So let me put it this way -- why worry about it beforehand, when the person likely doesn't even know he's misusing the Thesaurus? Let him use it -- the problem will probably come to light at some point. Without the thesaurus, the writer will never learn to use it properly -- and I think we can all agree it’s a valuable tool. There’s more than one way to skin a cat -- and some ways are better than others.


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## shadowwalker (Jun 7, 2013)

JosephB said:


> If I was reading someone’s work here and I saw an imprecise word, I’d certainly make note of it. But it doesn’t seem like a problem you can address prophylactically. So let me put it this way -- why worry about it beforehand, when the person likely doesn't even know he's misusing the Thesaurus? Let him use it -- the problem will probably come to light at some point. Without the thesaurus, the writer will never learn to use it properly -- and I think we can all agree it’s a valuable tool. There’s more than one way to skin a cat -- and some ways are better than others.



I'm not saying don't use a thesaurus. But having one pop up with synonyms is too much of an easy temptation, IMO. It's better for writers to learn how to use it properly to begin with than try to change a bad habit afterwards.


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## Pluralized (Jun 7, 2013)

Like any good discussion, it seems the answer is _it depends_.

For my money, I haven't found anything that Scrivener won't/can't do. I can't imagine keeping a word doc with 100k in one big scroll. That sounds like a tough way to manage your work. Scrivener's word processor is simple to use, but powerful when it needs to be. Plus, it's worth every dime if you can shell out the initial cost.


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## JosephB (Jun 7, 2013)

shadowwalker said:


> I'm not saying don't use a thesaurus. But having one pop up with synonyms is too much of an easy temptation, IMO. It's better for writers to learn how to use it properly to begin with than try to change a bad habit afterwards.



I know what you're saying. I was addressing the the point you made that my take on it was somehow unhelpful. 

You're right that there's only one way to use it properly -- that's if you know the words in advance. But using program without a Thesaurus isn't going to force anyone to expand his vocabulary -- and a writer might inadvertently learn both new words and how to use it properly if one is included in with the program. Very often people learn more by making mistakes that other people who know better can point out. I know I can spot a Thesaurus abuser a mile away -- I'm betting you can to.


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## shadowwalker (Jun 7, 2013)

JosephB said:


> I know what you're saying. I was addressing the the point you made that my take on it was somehow unhelpful.



I don't recall that.


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## JosephB (Jun 7, 2013)

Really? Because it wasn't all that long ago.


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## Sam (Jun 7, 2013)

shadowwalker said:


> I'm not saying don't use a thesaurus. But having one pop up with synonyms is too much of an easy temptation, IMO. It's better for writers to learn how to use it properly to begin with than try to change a bad habit afterwards.



When I started writing, most of the new words I learned were pop-up synonyms from Word. I looked up their meanings and applied them to my work where necessary. 

You aren't giving people enough credit. Sure, maybe an average Joe (no offence, Joe) might misuse them, but a person interested in writing will no doubt discover the proper usage -- if they have any pride in their work at all.


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## shadowwalker (Jun 7, 2013)

I guess I've just seen too many new writers who mis-use the thesaurus to take anything for granted. They actually state they use it to find a 'better word' and don't actually look the new word up to see what it actually means.


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## Sam (Jun 7, 2013)

If you ask me, that problem isn't directly related to using a thesaurus. Those writers you speak of are a misinformed few who believe that using 'better words' somehow makes them a writer. They use every synonym they can because they equate highfalutin language with quality writing. You can easily infer that they've swallowed a thesaurus when you read their work. Every sentence will have two or three ten-dollar words. 

For the rest of us, we use a thesaurus to learn new words that we'll use in the right context and not because we want to show off.


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## Bakslashjack (Jun 7, 2013)

$10 words sound stilted a lot of the time and that's not good. Other times the reader wont understand, and that's even worse. Clarity can be a major obstacle in any language, even without using calcitrate when you mean kick.


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## Non Serviam (Jun 7, 2013)

Sod that.  Use the best words for the job.  Intelligent readers are prepared to look up words they don't know, and dumb readers aren't worth having.

One of the first stories I ever sold began: _It was a statue of some primordial Venus----an epitome of steatopygous muliebrity_.


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## Staff Deployment (Jun 7, 2013)

"The statue had a big butt."

Non Serviam cannot lie.


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## TheYellowMustang (Jun 8, 2013)

Sam said:


> If you ask me, that problem isn't directly related to using a thesaurus. Those writers you speak of are a misinformed few who believe that using 'better words' somehow makes them a writer. They use every synonym they can because they equate highfalutin language with quality writing. You can easily infer that they've swallowed a thesaurus when you read their work. Every sentence will have two or three ten-dollar words.
> 
> For the rest of us, we use a thesaurus to learn new words that we'll use in the right context and not because we want to show off.



I haven't read Fifty Shades, but I came across this article:
The 50 Worst Synonyms in Fifty Shades of Grey -- Vulture

Is this the synonym-syndrome you're discussing?


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## Sam (Jun 8, 2013)

TheYellowMustang said:


> I haven't read Fifty Shades, but I came across this article:
> The 50 Worst Synonyms in Fifty Shades of Grey -- Vulture
> 
> Is this the synonym-syndrome you're discussing?



There's nothing wrong with most of those synonyms. I'm not a great believer in dumbing down writing, and that's exactly what that article is advocating. Why on earth would you change 'protracted procedure' to 'dragged-out process'? That's just patently ridiculous. Why would you change 'immaterial' to 'it doesn't matter'? It's three words where one fits the sentence perfectly. 

What I'm talking about is people who drop ten-dollar words in every sentence because they think it makes them look smart. I have absolutely no problem with using a ten-dollar word. I have a problem when it's used entirely in the wrong context.


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## Robert_S (Jun 8, 2013)

I try to keep in mind that each synonym has a connotation that infers a different visual.

Chafe and abrade mean the same thing, but give a different visual or idea of the kind of damage.


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## Mae. (Jun 8, 2013)

I vastly prefer word. Though I do enjoy freeware, I feel Open Office has a weird interface. It can be very stressful when working on long documents.

I like using Google Documents more, especially since I like sharing my work with friends. I can give them the link to the document, they can read it, make edits, and leave comments for me. I like working with other writers too, I can see them write in real time. It is similar to word in many ways as well.

Then again, Google has already been integrated to my lifestyle. I do enjoy knowing that my work is on a secure server. Even if my computer crashes, I'll still have it.


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