Re : I hate OpenOffice

Really, I don't know what you have to rave and rant about. The best
office suite ever, in my extensive experience) was Lotus SmartSuite and,
while not having quite all the bells and whistles of the Lotus product,
OpenOffice comes pretty close. I think I can say this with confidence as
I started out with IBM's "DisplayWrite" about 30 or  more years ago, and
it, for its day, was very good indeed, the nested menus getting around
the drawbacks of not having a "proper" GUI available. I then moved on to
SamnaWord which was bought out by Lotus, revamped as AmiPro and later
reincarnated as the text editor in SmartSuite.

I find that OpenOffice is : reliable, powerful, easy to use and has very
helpful tips and an extensive manual if one gets stuck or hits a problem
(very rare). One can generate ones own style sheets (or templates), set
up any amount of "private" dictionaries (for storing esoteric words,
foreign words, musical terms,  medical terms and so on), one can set up
single- or double-sided documents, print on any of the system's
printers, have the odd paragraph with a non-standard layout, change
characters ad lib., have left- or right-aligned or justified or centered
text, set up headers and footers, include footnotes which are
automatically numbered and too many other things to list in this
rebuttal!

If you are looking for the "perfect" text editor, then you probably will
be aggravated. But, as I said, if you can adjust to the power of a
particular editing suite, then there is no end to that which one can do.
I still think Lotus had the best text editor, but in my opinion,
OpenOfficeWord comes pretty close. And where else does one find such a
sophisticated,  powerful application which is free????

There's also AbiWord but I, personally, have not found it as powerful as
OpenOffice.

The database part of OpenOffice takes some getting used to compared, for
example, to Lotus Approach, but once one has figured out its quirks, one
can build up complicated databases and lay out pretty data entry forms
and suchlike.

Well, that's my "rant" on how good this free software is. Patience,
patience are the keywords I think!

CroombeFP



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