I’ve bought myself a new laptop (last Thursday evening actually…), and during the set up the decision had to come about what to install as my word processing software - use Works that came with the laptop or spring for another copy of Word/Office. I’ve posted before about how much I dislike Office 2007 and the ribbon device (the UI is so different from every other vendor’s application, yet consisent across Microsoft applications that it feels like a concerted effort on microsoft’s part to get peopel used to another propretary interface), so I wasn’t sure what to do.

During my investigations into Ubuntu (which I’m not using on this laptop - unfortunately the 7.04 release doesn’t run properly - more on that in another post) I started messing about with Open Office instead.

And now I’ve made the change permanent - this brand new laptop has Open Office installed as the primary and only suite of office-type applications. There is a learning curve to deal with, mostly as I’ve been using Microsoft-style menus for so long that I use keyboard shortcuts, most of which aren’t mapped exactly in Open Office, yet for day to day work I think Open Office has the edge, especially with the built-in PDF export functionality. I can even import all the old Word and Excel documents I have, and save out if I need to.

So, all the functions I need from Microsoft Office for the bargain basement price of - free!