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Peter on Tech

After all, somebody has to point out the obvious!

What's your Office?

StarOffice 8 next month. Microsoft's Office system is bloated. Maybe. It's pricey. Maybe. (There's always the cheap Student/Teacher version with three licenses that nobody cares if you qualify for anyway.) But really, I live in Outlook. And between the integration of the various pieces, specialty parts like OneNote, and Microsoft-only features like ink support on tablets, it's actually pretty hard to switch. OpenOffice definitely is no FireFox, which in turn again isn't the whole solution, if you need things like ink support in the browser itself.

Are there actual Tablet PC users out there who openly prefer something like Star/OpenOffice or even WordPerfect's products, despite losing things like ink enhancements?

Published May 04 2005, 01:00 PM by peter

Filed under: The Softer Side of Ware

Comments

Bastian said:

Well, I got Word 2000 with my hardware purchase, Outlook 2002 with my Smartphone and OneNote 2003 from my university. Ridiculous? Yes.

However, as I've already got a version of Outlook and Word, I won't spend any money on buying MS Office. I would love to (inking, you know!) but I don't want to afford.

I am running StarOffice 8 (the beta) on my tablet. Yes, it's quite slow and I can't ink on my slides. But spending a couple of hundred EUROs just for inking some comments is really not worth it.

We get StarOffice from university and if they wouldn't give it away for free I would use OpenOffice. Yes, although I've got a TabletPC.

StarOffice does what it needs to do. And for Tablet-related stuff I use OneNote which is superior to any product out there in terms of inking and note taking.

May 4, 2005 5:59 PM

peter said:

Bastian, you raise a good point: not everybody is in an either/or situation. And sure, the ink features in Word/Excel/PowerPoint are pretty much fluff, so alternative replacements are probably just as good. At the same time, by the time you get hooked on Outlook and OneNote, you are pretty much using half of Office anyway. OneNote definitely doesn't have a free competitor these days, and depending on which features you use often, Outlook may not really either.

May 4, 2005 8:47 PM

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