Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

I have to wholeheartedly disagree with you, safrecko, on the statement that "if price is a non-issue, Office 2003 is King."

I have both OpenOffice.org (because it's my preference) and Office 2003 on my computer. I wish it didn't have to be that way, since collectively they take up about a terraflop of disk space and make Adobe CS look conservative on RAM.

I have used Word 2003 for one feature only, the comments, because a client was using them. I find that I'd rather be without a feature than have it implemented so poorly (I find Acrobat to be much better at that). Word has also been terrible at maintaining styles, working with images and diagrams, and generally just about everything I've had to do on the project.

I have also used Access quite a bit to model new databases quickly and easily, but I find that with the 2.0 release of oOo, the Base app is great -- not to mention when I'm through modelling the database I don't just have a model, I have a working MySQL db instead of an unusable Access POS I have to convert.

Microsoft is trying to create a "platform" with Office and the main problems with that are:

-without all the components, it's not really a platform successfully anyway, and there's nothing on this earth that'll make me go back to Outlook.

-some of us, even for fairly advanced office app uses, do not require a "platform," we want a word processor, a spreadsheet, and whatever else.

A final point: Personally, if I were an Office 2000 user and didn't want to spend the money or disk space to upgrade, I would find those ads calling me a dinosaur infuriatingly insulting and would take my business to someone who I thought would treat me better in 2 years.