SQJ Taipei

Let me make this clear. I’m not a Microsoft aplogist. I just want tools that help me get my work done.

But we’ve got to give credit where it is due… right?

When I was working in the computer industry… I attended a cool seminar given by Microsoft where they demo’d Office 97 and whatever server package was coming out then. I was pretty blown away and they even gave me a copy of Office 97 PRO at the end of the seminar. I used it WELL and upgraded to Office 2000 and thought it was good… then got a GREAT deal on Office XP which was also pretty good. But… it seemed like so much more than I needed in so many ways… and I began to get irritated by “bloat”. A term that people often apply to software that adds extra features to the point of excess.

Actually, I probably started getting irritated about bloat way before that, but I finally decided to do something about it and stop upgrading. OpenOffice.org made it simple. Version 1.1.4 was very stable and did just what I needed. Apart from a very rare occurence, I was able to open and save and create MS Word documents and MS Excel spreadsheets. There was also that small matter (!) when my team leader had used the real MS Word to attach some comments to a document that I sent him that I’d created with OpenOffice.org… when I re-opened it I didn’t see his comments… a conversion problem… and he was getting more and more frustrated as I didn’t respond to his comments in a timely fashion! Then OpenOffice.org 2.0 came out and I liked it too… except that it seemed to take FOREVER to open and the computer would hang during use occasionally. My laptop and desktop were not very speedy so I just chalked it up as a hardware deficiency.

But then I had a chance to use MS Office 2007 a couple months ago.

Goodbye OpenOffice.org.

Call me a MS fanboi if you want… I’m sure SeanC will… but I love Office 2007. It opens WAY faster than OpenOffice.org and has never hung the system or crashed. I still wondered about bloat… but didn’t care all that much because I just want stuff that helps me get stuff done and Office 2007 helped me IMMEDIATELY. Also… Office 2007 hides most everything that I don’t really use so I don’t even see all that stuff unless I want to.

I still love what OpenOffice.org is doing… and trying to do… and I’m a HUGE OpenSource fan… HUGE… but when it comes to getting stuff done… I just can’t count on it right now.

All this to say… Here’s a good post about the “bloat” (or lack of) in MS Office 2007.

Office feature bloat is no skin off my nose by ZDNet’s George Ou — In his recent blog entry, fellow blogger David Berlind is all over Microsoft’s “Office bloat” and is convinced Google is in a better position to understand users’ needs for an Office application. Despite the fact that Microsoft collected 1.2 billion data sessions to design its new Office 2007 user interface, David still feels that Google [...]

ht: ChuckzBlogII