I’m a Mac user so this gives me two major options for office suites: Microsoft Office 2008 and iWork ‘08. I chose the obvious mac-headed option and chose iWork.

The compatibility that iWork has with Microsoft Office is astounding. If I need to bring a presentation or word .doc to school all I have to do is choose export from the file menu and it works flawlessly. Well.. not flawlessly.

When saving documents iWork has a windows compatibilty checker that verifies that your work will actually save as you want to. It may say that a font is a non-standard windows font or say my image formatting cannot be exported. And it doesn’t just leave you sitting with those problems (unlike the .docx > .doc converter built into office 2007). In the case of fonts it offers you with a variety of windows compatible fonts that are similar to the Mac font you have chosen. If I have a unsupported image it gives me two options: 1) Save and rasterize all modifications you made to the image. 2) Save with original image. So this enables me to retain all the Mac-like shininess in a bland PowerPoint presentation.

So I do use iWork as my main Word/PowerPoint replacement, but I did grow rather fond of Google Docs on my OLPC.

And yes, I too believe that Macs do not really belong in a business environment just yet.

As a result though, I resorted to trying Buzzword and Openoffice for two of my projects this week (an English Critique, and a Science Paper).

Buzzword seemed to be a little bit easier to use and format with. But the fact that it was online was a tad bit annoying because I am right click happy, and I believe Buzzwords uses flash, which doesn’t allow you to right click. The application itself still had all of the options that I needed except for Times New Roman (which is needed for MLA) and it was a little awkward setting up a header. It also did feel that the program was a little barren option wise, though it does provide all of the essentials.

Openoffice does have all of the options as Microsoft Office, and it is an actual program that can be saved to the hard drive, which I believe is a plus. My problem with Openoffice is that it is similar to Microsoft Office, but it works slightly differently as far as formatting, and menu layouts are concerned. But these slight differences just drive me crazy since I am so used to Office 2003. It also takes slightly longer to set up an MLA format in Openoffice. The main issue that I had was that I couldn’t find a dialog box to change the margins, and so I had to use the rulers on the side of the page. It worked but using the rules always makes formatting feel a little weird.

All in all, I think opensource word processors are great if your hard drive dies out of the blue, and you only need to use them to write a few more papers before summer. The main flaw with these word processors is that they are more challenging to set up an MLA style paper on, which simply can’t happen given the school’s MLA based policies.

For full time use, I still love Microsoft Office. Since I took IT as a Freshman, I was extensively trained in all of the Office Applications, and I simply feel more comfortable with the way that Office does things.

In my opinion the change from Microsoft Office, to open source word processors is similar to America using our system of measurement as opposed to the Metric system. Both systems of measurement work, and one is not necessarily better then the other. They are just different from each other. Some people may like these differences, while others simply can not accept them.

I think that the standard is Microsoft Office, and that we should stick with it.

MD Student