New Post!: OO.o, Apple in the Press, Microsoft isn't All Bad

Yes, I am making a new post. It's been a while, I know. "Big deal, wanna fight about it." Yeah, so I like to make unattributed quotes of popular shows and movies. "Big deal, wanna fight about it?"

On to the next point of discussion: OpenOffice 2.0 was released today. For those of you who didn't know, you are not bound for all eternity to using Microsoft Word and Microsoft Office just beacuse everyone else does including all your teachers, colleagues, business partners, friends, etc. Why? Because there are other office suites and stand alone word processors, spreadsheet apps, etc. that can do just as good of a job. "But they don't read or save in Microsoft Office formats," you protest? Yes they do. Well some of them. You'd have to be a freakin retard to make an office suite or office application that can't read and write in Microsoft Office formats, because the reality is that they do hold a monopoly on the office suite (very unnecessarily). Now if you are looking for an entire office suite, I'll admit, your options are fairly limited. As far as I know, you're stuck with either OpenOffice (OOo, for OpenOffice.org) or WordPerfect, which may or may not suit your preferences/needs better than MS Office. If you are just looking for a word processor, though, you have more options. In addition to OOo and Word Perfect, I understand there are some other stand alone word processors, AbiWord being the main one I'm familiar with. Other than that, you'll have to look for yourself. Now as far as other stand alone office applications, I'm guessing they're out there, but I don't really care, so you'll have to find them yourself, you lazy bum.

Now, for those of you on the other end of the spectrum, in case you hadn't heard, OOo isn't perfect. Yeah, it's free which is sweet. It also works really well, on top of being free, which is even sweeter. It also does many things which MS Office does poorly, or cannot do, such as reading old MS Word formats (does poorly (which pretty much totally blows away the main argument as to why you just can't use anything other than MS Office. So what if everyone you know uses Word. If they have an older/newer version than you, you can't even open eachother's documents, even though they're made by the same freakin company. MS just wants you to spend money upgrading)), and exporting files to .pdf, among many others. Still, though, if you have a more sophisticated argument as to why you don't want to switch from Word than "everyone else uses it," I must admit, it is not perfect. With 2.0 it definitely is a lot prettier, and I'm sure they've fixed many things, but I'm not sure what they are. Anyway, my main gripe with OOo is their support for different languages. Yeah, when you download, you can choose to download packages for one of various different languages, so that's good. But once you've commited to your language of choice, you might remain somewhat in the dark as to how to make OOo compatible with producing documents in other languages (and in case you hadn't noticed yet, when I say OOo, I do theoretically mean the entire office sweet, but realistically, I'm only talking about the word processor since that's mostly what I use.) Now my first problem was how to type accents for Spanish and Portuguese. I was used to the MS Word shortcuts, which I admit now are really retarded (literally, they're quite inefficient, or slow). Anyway, I searched all over OOo's resources, and couldn't get a straight answer. Once I found it though, it was much simpler than I thought. All you have to do is change your keyboard mapping.
Don't worry. You can switch back and forth very easily. Unfortunately, this answer was not very easy to find. Then I was confronted with the problem of using spell check in different languages. Now, although OOo's support in this area is lacking, you could argue that it's still much better than MS, since they don't charge you for a freaking spell check dictionary which a damn 6th grader could compose. Still, if you don't mind paying money, Word's is much easier to install and use. Now I searched far and for an answer to this problem as well. It's not nearly as simple as it should be. Unless you are lucky enough to find the extremely simpler shortcut way which should be much better publicised but is not. Now, I'm not going to tell you the long way to do this, since it's pointless and retarded (literally, again). Here's how you do it. Once you install OOo, assuming you're in windows, go to c:-->Program Files-->Share-->Dict-->ooo. DO NOT TRY TO MANUALLY INSTALL DICTIONARY FILES. YOU WILL LIKELY FAIL JUST LIKE ME. Even if you know exactly what you're doing, there's a much easier way (oh and if you're in linux, you can probably find the equivalent folder, right? good. It's the same basic Process.) Inside said folderwhich I have directed you to, open the file called DicOOo.swx. Enable macros if prompted. Scroll down to the English part (unless you speak french). Click the button that says "Start DicOOo." Then click "retrieve the list" and select the spell checker dictionaries you want, then repeat for thesauri and hyphenation dictionaries. The rest should be obvious (I hope). Once it's done installing them, all you have to do is exit the OOo quickstarter. Now, even once you have your dictionaries of choice installed, it's still far from simple and not entirely obvious how to use them. On many sites I've read, they claim that you just go to tools-->options-->language settings-->writing aids, then click on the very top button that says "edit" and select your language of choice. This has not been my experience. Maybe I'm still not doing something right. I don't know. Anyway, before doing that, I've found that I must first go to ...-->language settins-->languages and select the language of choice as the "default language for documents" then go to the above steps. A) I don't know why some claim that the first step I mentioned (remember, though, the second step in the actual process) is sufficient. B) There shouldn't be two steps anyway. You should be able to select a particular language for a document, and it should make all necessary changes for you.

Now, despite this whole gripe with the spell check, OOo really is pretty good, so don't get me wrong. If you want to use it in just one language, you should have few problems. And if you want to use more than one language, if you do as I've instructed above, you should be ok (well, at least if you want to languages that use the latin alphabet. Still, I think the process of changing your keyboard map is basically the same even if you're using a different alphabet). So like I said, OOo is not perfect. I think that if they really want to gain a lot of users, they'll have to take care of the problems above, and other similar ones arising from a combination of poor design and poor support. Still, Word isn't perfect either. They feed off the fear that people have of using a word processor other than theirs, and they charge absurd amounts (any amount being absurd, IMO) for dictionaries (really just lists of words) that a sixth grader could compose. Literally, given the time, a sixth grader could make a list of words that exists in a certain language. It's not hard, and really not even time consuming if you split the task between people.

If you're still reading this, you're insane. Oh, there's more though. Gotta make up for weeks of not posting.

On to topic #2:
There was a post on slashdot today on an article by John Dvorak about how apple gets disproportionate coverage in the media because all the tech journalists happen to use macs. One blog post in response to this article expressed surprise that so many journalists use macs. Now, I did not have a specific idea that many journalists used macs, but I had long held the idea that macs had better software for publishing, design, print layout, etc. than microsoft. Judging by this /. post, I wasn't just imagining this. I dunno. Anyway, transitioning smoothly into topic #3...

So said articles carry the assumption that Microsoft isn't all bad and does deserve some coverage. Sure, it's obviously the largest tech company in the world, but it has a pretty bad reputation by now. I'm not saying it's all undeserved, just that there are some things which microsoft still does well. For instance, I've long thought that Windows Media Player is a mighty fine media player. PCworld seems to agree see #47. So despite all the MS bashing I've done on this blog, and in this very same post even, I must admit that MS is not all bad, just like OOo isn't all good. I just don't like that people feel that you have to be insane to go with anything else, simply because everyone else uses Microsoft. They do a lot of good stuff, just don't think you have to use Microsoft.

If you read this whole freakin post, you must love me a lot. Or you must be very very bored.

(I'm breaking my 4 tag limit because this post is obscenely long).

Filed in: Thoughts Tech OpenOffice Microsoft Apple