OpenOffice at it's best

In all fairness, I was never a big MicroSoft fan, and much of the reason behind that was their Office Suite. When I started using word processors, it was sooo obvious that the WordPerfect suite was far superior to the Word program, and this was in 1992-1994 something. Of course, a more sucessful advertising campaign brought more money in for development of the product, and in the end Word Perfect seemed to just slowly disappear from the scene. Sad really.

Now, there is a whole generation of people that thinks word processing is equivalent to the usage of Word. This is very bad since generally, if something is not well desined from the beginning, adding bells and whistlesto it will not make it much better. Word is a prime example of that. No matter how much they work on digital assistants (you know the window you kill as soon as you open a newly installed Word) and Word art (who ever thought this was a good idea??), the effectiveness of basic editing of documents is fantasticaly bad. The wrong things are too easy to do, and the tools that support proper editing of documents for professional use are ver bad or not working.
And by this I mean structured formating and templates (and handling of them) vs. the marking and putting in bold, italics sillyness, the default jumping around of images in the document while editing the text, captions not nescessarilly ending up on the same page as the image or table they belong to, and so on. Many of these examples around, and for anyone with a LaTeX background like me, it is just soo stupid. (And yes, I switched to LaTeX when I had to put 6 images under one image caption on one page for my Masters dissertation, and this on 8 pages. Imagine what happened when I started editing the text above those pages in Word...)

Of course, most of what is lacking in Word is also lacking in OpenOffice ans similar suits. I fail to see how making a free version of a bad idea would be a good idea. Like making a free and community created version of the MacDonald's product line, all equally unhealthy and lacking of vitamins. Just a bad idea when it comes to basic document editing. The proper setting up of style sheets should be enduced as a mode of editing, rather than "put in bold, italics" behaviour".

Of course, when comparing MS Office and OpenOffice, OpenOffice wins hands down by the inclusion of a very capable database engine, and a database frontend and reporting engine that is good enough for most basic applications. Also, the ability to make dynamically created ODF documents using OpenOffice and R (through the odfWeave package) makes the whole system even more attractive. At least for me.