This week, while working on a project during my off hours, I was confronted with the oh-so-common situation of being sent a Word document in order to make some changes and comments. Grrr... I only use Windows at work where I am forced to do so; at home I am a firm believer in using OSX for my main operating system. I'm not going to get into all of the reasons I went the Apple route, but for now it will suffice to mention that I haven't used anything UNIX since college (spent my time learning the ins and outs of NT administration for my job), so I am excited to have a BSD subsystem with which to play in addition to the pretty and insanely functional Aqua interface (it's a GUI and it's a conversation piece!).
Getting back to my predicament, I haven't purchased MS Office v.X, which cost around $500 last time I checked, so I was stuck. This document needed to be edited sooner than I could go purchase Office, or AppleWorks with the Word filters, or whatever. A glance through VersionTracker was under way, but before I browsed all the entries I remembered OpenOffice.org so there I went. (Maybe OpenOffice is listed on VT, but I have yet to go back and find out one way
or the other)
I salivated at the chance to pop the hood of my shiny BSD-based Mac, install some X11, and then tinker with the system until I could get OpenOffice to work. Unfortunately, I was to be denied the satisfaction. The X11 installer took only one or two clicks, and was done in a matter of minutes, while the OO installer was pretty much the same. Hats off to OpenOffice.org for outdoing many other open source projects' installation processes, and hats off to Apple for the ease of installation of their X11 on Jaguar.
Running OpenOffice was equally simple. The OO group bundles a small script that will launch X11 for you if you don't already have it running, and then it will launch OO- all in a double-click. And once it was running, I could edit the Word document with ease. I'm not much of a word processing user, so I can't say I ran it through its paces, but what little I did use was intuitive and quick. Couple this ease of installation and use, with Apple's rumored forthcoming office apps, and a future version of OO that has a native Aqua look and feel, and we have the beginnings of an office suite revolution. Long live competition!
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