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October 7 , 2005.
Is OpenOffice Writer better than MS Word?
OpenOffice Writer 2.0 vs. Microsoft Word 2003
Same Features Implemented Differently
It gets a lot more subjective from here. The ability to have your tools work for you the way that you want them to is really the ultimate goal of all software. Microsoft has a built-in advantage of having people expect their word processor to act like Word, whether or not is actually the best implementation. In most ways, Writer does.
You can give any Word user a copy of Writer and they can start using it immediately with no additional training. There are a few things that act differently, however. Strictly from a usability standpoint, most people, after trying both, have a preference for Writer, or no preference at all.
| |
MS Word | OpenOffice Writer |
|---|---|---|
| Styles | *** | ***** |
| Templates | ** | **** |
| Lists | * | **** |
| Tables | **** | *** |
| Headers / Footers | * | ***** |
| Indexes / Tables of Contents | *** | **** |
| Drawing | *** | *** |
| Auto-Correct / Spell-Check | **** | *** |
| Clip Art | ***** | * |
| Envelope Printing | *** | *** |
| Form Letters | **** | *** |
| Output Formats | ** | ***** |
Writer is Stylish
Style handling is probably the most important usability difference between the two programs. It's most easily thought of this way. Word suggests you use styles. Writer strongly suggests you use styles. Fortunately, Writer's style-handling is much better than Word's.
A style is nothing more than a defined format that has been given a name and that can be applied as often as wished. For example, a common style would be Heading 2, which by default in Writer is Arial font, size 14, bold, left justified.
You can modify existing styles or create new ones.
Word supports styles on a per character or paragraph basis. Writer uses styles in every aspect of the program. There are character styles, paragraph styles, page styles, frame styles and list styles. It's a very powerful concept and very useful when applied correctly.
Kind of Like CSS (Kind of)
For web developers, it is somewhat akin to CSS.
To be more clear about this, the same text will have a character, paragraph and page style. If it's a list or in a frame, it will have a list or frame style as well. The page styles include "Left Page", "Right Page" and "HTML", depending on your intended output format or medium.
This type of nested styles gives Writer some of the capabilities of a true desktop publishing program, much more so than Word.
Additionally, Writer's styles include options that Word doesn't have such as options for word-hyphenation.
Its list style options are particularly helpful, and something that Word would do well to emulate.
Word's Templates Work, but Break if you Let 'em
A template is simply a document that you use for creating new documents based on it. Seems simple enough. It should be, anyway. One problem with Word's implementation of templates is that it allows multiple templates to be applied to the same document. It also allows a document to have conflicting formats with its template, resulting in a corrupted file.
Word also allows you to make changes to the template from a document that is based on it. This is a recipe for disaster. If multiple users are working on several documents, a user can change a template through a document, which can automatically cause other users' documents to change.
If Word templates are used carefully, that is, make a template, make documents based on it, and that's all, then they work fine. It's unfortunate that "features" have to be avoided in order to use them.
Writer's templates work the way templates should. A template is created. New documents are created based on the template. If the template is changed, you have an option of updating the document with the template's changes. An option, as it should be.
Lists are Better with Writer
Writer's list capabilities far exceed Word's. The most common complaint I hear about using Word is that lists don't act the way users want.
Moving items around or nesting lists will easily confuse Word into mis-numbering the items. Adding graphics further confuses the issue.
Because Writer uses list styles, these problems are largely eliminated. Writer also has many more options for list formatting. For example, the list number can be a different format than its accompanying text. You can have additional characters before the bullet or number. They can also be positioned wherever you want.
Word's Tables have better Auto-Formatting
Word has a couple things going for it in table creation and management. It has many more auto-formatting options than Writer, and the auto-formatting will be correctly applied to new rows as they are created. Oddly, Writer's tables do not. If, for example, you have a summary row that's gray with the rest of the rows white and you add a new row at the end, the new row will have the color of the preceding one, leaving you with two gray rows.
Word also has an interesting ability to draw tables where you literally free-draw your table with a pencil tool. I'm not convinced of its usefulness, but it's clever, nonetheless.
Headers and Footers make sense in Writer
Word has an extremely strange implementation of headers and footers. They are invisible unless you select View>Header and Footer. After you have entered your desired text or field, and go back to page editing, they become invisible again. This makes absolutely no sense in a WYSIWYG program. Many a new user, has floundered, trying to figure out how to perform this simple operation.
Writer does it properly. You select Insert>Header (or Footer). You then enter it. Simple. In addition, Writer has a broad range of formatting options not available in Word.
Writer has more Index Options
Word is able to competently create table of contents and indexes, but Writer has much more powerful options.
In particular, it allows you to use a file of key words that will create your index markers. This seems so obvious in retrospect, that it's surprising that Word cannot do this.
You can also create columns and, yet again, format with far more options than Word does.
update 10/24 - Danila Medvedev writes to let me know that Word does have a similar keyword index feature. He writes:
" You can use a key words file with word to generate index marks. You create a file with a two-column table - first column is the word as it should be found, the second - how it will look in the index. It's done from Insert/Index and Tables/Index/Automark."
Thanks, Danila!
Drawing
The drawing tools in Writer and Word are very similar, and neither stands out as being particularly compelling. Simple shapes, text balloons, flow charts, lines, these are all available. Word has a pseudo 3D text tool called WordArt; Writer has a near-identical tool called FontWork.
Both are quite suitable for simple tasks.
Word's AutoCorrect is slightly better
Word slightly noses ahead of Writer in this category, only because its default settings are more closely tuned to catch the errors an English language writer will make.
I wrote a simple program that typed a page of text with a variety of common errors such as two capital letters in succession at the front of a word, lower-case "i" for the first-person pronoun, transposed letters in common words, etc.
Word caught 25% more errors than Writer.
I'm confident that by adjusting the AutoCorrect options, the two programs can be made to have similar accuracy levels, but it's doubtful that many people ever use any settings other than the defaults.
Clip Art from the Web
Microsoft has a clear advantage in this category. The amount of commercial art that Microsoft can acquire dwarfs the amount of open source material. Word can retrieve clip art from Microsoft's "OfficeOnline" which contains thousands of images of every imaginable subject.
Writer has a gallery of images, mostly backgrounds an bullets, but will probably never be able to match the amount available commercially.
update 10/24 - Scott Carr, Documentation Maintainer for OpenOffice.org writes:
"Good breakdown. One of the reasons we haven't been adding Clipart is because of download size. (Currently around 71Mb for Windows.) For Clipart, we have been using http://openclipart.org/ "
Thanks, Scott!
Form Letters
Form letters are created be most businesses at one time or another and by some businesses all the time. Both Writer and Word have wizards to help in setting up a form letter, and both work pretty much the same.
Word has a slight advantage for two reasons. It can directly import information from an ODBC connection. It can import Outlook information.
It isn't really fair to consider the second option as an advantage, seeing that they are both Microsoft products. However, in a real-world situation, you may need this ability.
It has to be pointed out that Writer can also do both of these things if additional steps are taken. Outlook data can be exported to a CSV file, which Writer can use. An ODBC connection can be set up with Base, OpenOffice's database program, which then can be used in Writer.
These workaround's, while straightforward, may be outside the typical office worker's knowledge base.
Writer's Output Formats
Writer is better in every way in this category. It's own format is simply compressed XML that can be extracted and viewed with any text editor. It can also save to PDF, with bookmarks and links. HTML output is excellent, with straightforward syntax and clear code. Other formats it can export to include DocBook XML, AportisDoc XML for Palm, Microsoft Word 2003 XML, PocketWord and, of course, Microsft Word DOC.
Word, by comparison, has a proprietary format. It can save to HTML, but the code is overly verbose and obtuse, making it next to impossible to edit later. Of course there is no PDF support.
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