Hi TK,
It is true that most people use a small subset of the available commands
available to them in office applications most of the time. But most
people do eventually use many of the balance of the options sometime or
other during their computing experience. Sooner or later they will get a
spreadsheet with a macro, use an add-in or want to do a date or time
calculation that uses the analysis tool-pak, etc. Most won't know they
even touched upon something different - it just happens and they go on
their way. Over time over a large population all of those extra features
become essential at some point even to the most basic user. Steering
basic users to a possible future incompatibility at some point could be
a disservice. They won't have the tools (Microsoft Office) and user
skills at hand to deal with the incompatibility.
As for bloatware, nothing I know of tops OpenOffice. Instead of being
modularized like the Microsoft product, the whole openoffice suite is
loaded into memory at once. Even if you never use a Word Processor,
database or Presentation Program you have to load it every time. It has
its own programming language (more useless bloat) and many special
save-as features (maybe not useless but still bloat), and code that is
so convoluted that hardly anyone outside of Sun Microsystems employees
is able to work on the project.
As far as competition in the spreadsheet market goes, OpenOffice is just
an overhyped annoyance. It has very little to offer other than it's
"free" if you exclude the value of the user's time and what you have to
give up that exists in Microsoft's product.
There is some real competition that I am sure that Microsoft is keenly
aware of, and it comes from Google.
Have you checked out spreadsheets.google.com? This is where the real
competition is. Google spreadsheet offers highly desirable features that
are not part of Microsoft Office. If I were to suggest an alternative to
Excel, this one has my attention.
As for spelling and grammar, I agree with you that it is still up to
people to know and use the rules. I hear lots of talk about the "digital
divide" but there is also an education divide between people who know
the rules and those who don't. Spelling and grammar checkers only help
those who know and use the rules.
With regard to double-space after period I've heard a variety of lame
excuses for using single spaces. Microsoft Word no longer automatically
"corrects" this "error" by default.
In case you think Microsoft has me brainwashed, just check the headers
of my newsgroup postings. You'll see that the vast majority are from
Thunderbird, which I think is superior to Entourage for Newsgroups. On
the other hand, nothing beats Entourage as an email client, and as a
project manager it has the entire field to itself. Nothing else even
comes close. On the other hand, Google calendar has already supplanted
Entourage as a calendar application in my office.
Instead of making cheap knock-off copycat software like OpenOffice,
Google is doing it right. They are building competing products that have
useful new features. If Microsoft's empire is to be toppled, that is the
way it will happen.
-Jim Gordon
Mac MVP
Yes, I agree MS versions are very good programs. However, many users
use only a small percentage of the functions of Word and Excel. I say
this because I have been the internal trainer for office apps for one
of the national restaurant chains based here in Dallas.
And for those people who need the basics I steer them to the
alternatives. I do that because I believe MS needs to realize there is
SOME competition out there. I have used Word since DOS version 5.5. I
do not see a product that has matured. I see a program that is bloated
with code that may or may not work always. I once asked a coworker
[during Multimate's heyday] how she could type so fast and get the
volume of work out that she did. It was intimating to sit in the cube
next to her. She said I just type, spell check fixes my typos.
Fast forward to when MS has their own integrated Spell Checker. I sent
an employee to the community college for a short course on the MS
Office apps. For her final assignment the instructor handed out a page
to be typed. There were deliberate mis-spellings in the page. The
test was to have the same number of errors when they were found by the
spell checker. Then the instructor had everyone mark all the errors
that existed that spell checker didn't catch. She wanted everyone to
know that it was not the most reliable tool, and the personal spelling
skills still counted. She was an employee of Microsoft btw.
How many rules of typing have you found that MS has re-written in the
application? When I took typing back when I was taught to space twice
after the period in a sentence. Even if you do that in Word (which I
do) MS takes 'em out. Yes it is a little thing, and certainly not the
basis for any decisions.
Jim said:
Hi again,
OpenOffice by Sun Microsystems and it's offshoots are capable programs,
and have some compatibility with Microsoft Office, but please don't
oversell them.
[snip]
You get an awful lot from Microsoft for your money, and the free/cheap
OpenOffice stuff has a LONG way to go before it achieves parity with
user interface and compatibility before I would ever seriously suggest
it as an alternative for Microsoft's Office product, even for a basic user.
-Jim Gordon
Mac MVP
Tim,
When get an external harddrive it is formatted as Fat32 so it is
read/write for any OS, i.e. XP, OSX, or Linux. It is a great storage
for you to use. If you are basic user of MS Office, as inexpensive as
the student version is, an very suitable alternative is ThinkFree
Office. You can purchase it for $49. It has all the functions you are
probably using now on the XP version. Since you are crossing over from
XP versions, you will like that the short-cuts in ThinkFree are the
same as the XP version of MS Office. The Mac version of MS Office has
different shortcuts.
You will love how simple a Mac is to use. I flip back and forth
between the two and I am a long term Windows user. I use my Mac iBook
as my tool of choice.
TK
TS Mathews wrote:
TS Mathews wrote:
[snip]
Thanks so much...you have made my decision for me. From your comments about
file compatibility, I'm sure all of mine will easily convert as they're very
simply spreadsheets--I drive a transit bus and scan our shifts so it's
nothing more than shift number, routes, start and end times, work time,
break--if any--and a couple of other minor items. In short, nothing more
than a bunch of letters and numbers with no calculations of any sort. My
Word docs are similar, mainly letters to and from the family.
Thanks again for the info.
Tim
