"Mike Hall (MS-MVP)"
wrote in message
...
Anne

I did like WP 7 but later versions of WP are not as
good, and ...
To the OP..

Maybe buying Lotus Smartsuite (too old) and WP (too
arcane) is not such a good idea.. I have heard less
than favourable reports for OpenOffice, so if funds
allow, buy Office 2003 or stick with what you have..
....

From the peanut gallery:
OpenOffice is "good" for a Word intermediate user,
poor for advanced, but "good to great" for less than
intermediate users. IMO at least. I consider myself
intermediate but not quite advanced. The MVP tests
seem to agree with me (I'm -not- an MVP).

It's definitely a ymmv for many, with cost being the
driving factor of course. I made a pretty good effort
at using OpenOffice, and was impressed, and still do
use it occasionally for specific tasks it's useful for,
like saving to a PDF file, speed for simple things, and
fast open/close times. But, that said it's not ready
for "MY" prime time yet. I don't speak for others.
So, though I keept it installed, and use it for a
few various things now and then, some more often, I am
still with Office in a big way. It's not free, but it
does what I need it to do and, being so well versed in
it, I do have some set ways and enough experience to
know that quite a few things I do in Word are harder or
even less intuitive to accomplish in OpenOffice (Write
et al). That's not a cut against OO, just an
observation; often the "intuition" factor in OO beats
MS right out of the water, but, again IMO, it's just
not able to do everything I want to do yet in the ways
I need to do them.
So if I had to give one up, I'd have to give up OO
at the moment.
I tried OO for web authoring too, with all its bells
and whistles, some of which I really liked, but ...
though it's more intended for writing web pages than
Word is, it still didn't make it. Old Word97, albeit a
simplistic authoring tool, did better IMO, when
combined with FP and a little HTML knowledge. I was
finally able to wean myself from WD97 et al when I
discovered N|VU and now use neither MS or OO for web
authoring. (nvu.org if you care).

I guess, all in all, if you could almost but not quite
use Wordpad for all your needs, you're a great
candidate to check out OO. If you actually use a lot
of Word's features though you may not be so happy with
OO. And, if you're interested in downloading OO, be
aware; it's a huge download but at least it's free and
very functional.

My two cents

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