Microsoft Office vs. OpenOffice

A couple weeks ago I wrote about OpenOffice a free office productivity program from Apache. After testing it out on my new computer I chose to go back to Microsoft Office. It’s not that it was a bad program in fact there were a few things I prefer about it over Microsoft Office. However, I know my way around Microsoft Office And there are a couple things I prefer about it and a few thins it offers that OpenOffice doesn’t offer One key point is Microsoft Word offers a cover page, I can chose from several preformatted cover pages. These pages are great in that they are preformatted with an image, title, and other text which I can easily customize with my own images, etc. They look nice without me having to do a lot of work. I am basically lazy anything that saves me work is a plus. As a Microsoft Partner I do get a discount on my software. Though free is nice I’ve chosen to go back to what I know. One thing I wish Microsoft would change is the way it handles custom dictionaries. With Microsoft I basically have to go in and add words manually to the extra custom dictionaries while with OpenOffice I can right click on the word and select which dictionary I want to add it to. As many of my names are made up i.e. not real names. I use a custom dictionary for each book or series of books. I also have a custom dictionary for my computer stuff there are a lot of computer terms that are not in the Microsoft Dictionary. Surprising what a computer company leaves out. One last point I wish to make is about the Auto Correct function. On my iPad it can be a pain in the rear. In word it can save me a lot of work. The iPad wants to turn “its” into “It’s” all the time. But with Office I can program in special short cuts for instance one of my activities it “All Things DOS” I have customized Auto Correct so that when I type “atdos” it will automatically change it to “All Things DOS” the thing to look out for her is it will always make the change so don’t use something that you might need to use latter.