I’ve reinstalled Microsoft Office 2003 on my laptop.

When I reformatted my hard drive last week, I had decided to give Open Office a try. A bit of surfing suggested that Sun’s Star Office was slightly more polished and stable then the Open Office binaries, so I opted for Star Office instead. Since I qualify for the educational license, the software was free. (I didn’t spend too much time analyzing the different licensing options, so may be free for any individual-use as well.)

I spent a fair amount of time with the word processor and app, less time with the presentation app, and even less time with the spreadsheet app. I had no problem opening or working with my existing MS Office 2003 documents. I set up a few document templates, a presentation template, and created and worked with probably a dozen or so documents in the course of the week. Eventually, however, a number of small glitches and problems caused me to give up and switch back to MS Office.

Although all the Star Office apps are able to deliver most if not all of the core functionality of MS Office, the user interface is different. Commands and controls are logically arranged, and they behave more or less as you would expect them to. They are, however, different from MS Office, and that means a learning curve. This is a major shortcoming of the Star/Open Office. When Microsoft was trying to win users over to its office applications, they made sure that the transition from WordPerfect to Word and from Lotus 123 to Excel was as easy as possible. Because Star/Open Office hasn’t addressed this issue, individuals and organizations looking to switch to Star/Open Office will need to consider the costs of re-training all their staff. Some staff members will be able to make the transition on their own, so the only cost will be the lost productivity as they learn the new applications. Others will need more formal training, so there will be training costs in addition to lost productivity.

I did encounter a few problems with the applications as well. The installation program failed to associate its file types with the Star Office application. Several attempts to establish the associations failed as well. As a result, the only way I could open Star Office files was to first run the Star Office app, then go through File > Open. Less then ideal when you are used to being able to edit a document by simply opening it from your file system.

As I struggled with this problem, I realized that while Star Office allowed me to open MS Office documents, MS Office would not provide the same compatibility for my Star/Open Office document. While it should always be possible to get a copy of Open Office, it wouldn’t be a practical solution for everyday use. Every time I created a file in Open Office, I couldn’t help but think that I was digging myself into a hole that I would later regret.

The word processing software also had a few glitches. The full revision and change tracking functionality of Word 2003 is not supported. I was in the process of collaborating on a few documents, and I couldn’t see the revisions or comments made by myself or others. I couldn’t even find a viewer program that would allow me to view Word docs with the revision data. Even if I somehow found a way to access the revision data from my existing documents, I continue to run into problems moving forward. Since the university has purchased an MS Office license for me, I couldn’t really tell my co-workers and collaborators that I couldn’t use Word’s revision features.

There were a few other glitches in the word processor’s interface, such as the inability to specify page dimensions in one unit (ex., inches) and text spacing in another (ex., points). But it was the lack of compatibility with Word’s revision features that made me decide to switch back to MS Office.
Based on my experiences, I wouldn’t recommend switching to Star Office or Open Office unless you don’t have access to a copy MS Office.