Abiword – Jaye Em Edgecliff

I am determined to meet my release date goal — though I’m realistic enough to know that I could end up as much as a day or even a week off.

Why?

Microsoft Word 2010.

I’ve used Word in the past, and hated it. I hated it most when I could save a file in it, come back to the same machine and install and open the file that machine and install had created and the file opened … but things weren’t as I’d saved them (formatting and such were lost), but I could open the same file in something else — Star Office being a preference at the time — and most of the previous formatting was there. I didn’t use Word for ages. Back then it was Word ’97 and 2000, if I recall correctly.

Now I use Word at work. And I’ve been typing my stories in it when I can’t use iWork‘s Pages instead. Yesterday it decided to be quite cruel. I went to open Love or Lust to do that days editing … and the file self-destructed. 1.2Mb suddenly was 128kb. And the last backup of my changes was 2 days prior! Ugh.

I never have had a problem like this with WordPerfect, Lotus Works, Star Office, LibreOffice, Open Office, AbiWord, Pages, Claris Works, and easily a dozen others whose names I’ve long since forgotten. Only Microsoft could mange to, in over a decade of development, make a problem worse rather than better (if less frequent).

I’m not happy. I’m glad I do not have to pay money to use this garbage. I will be trying to work double time to make up for the set back and then do so beyond to give myself headway in case something else goes wrong.

LibreOffice 4 review (itproportal.com)
How to Write a Book: Tools (doxsey.net)
Getting Started with Documents To Go on a BlackBerry PlayBook (helpblog.blackberry.com)
12 Ways LibreOffice Writer Tops Microsoft Word (eogn.com)
SoftMaker FreeOffice (pcmag.com)

So I’ve found exactly one reason to use Microsoft’s Office program Word. If it’s possible to have headers and footers that are different on one set of pages, or even a single page, than the rest of the document — including restarting page number count — in Pages, LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Abiword, and others I’ve never found it.

I did a lot of my typing of both Love or Lust and Ready or Not at work where I can’t use Pages (thank you Apple for Pages on iCloud coming soon), anyway, but normally I would just open them in Pages at home and Word at work and not worry about odd little artifacts creeping in until the final version. Sadly I thought I had got to the final version before I noticed I’d missed some serious typos. Well, by then I need to keep the .DOCX file unsullied for my CreateSpace print edition (the whole reason to need the variable footers & headers settings).

Well, to keep to my editing schedule I’ve installed Office 2011 on my Mac so I might work on my days off instead of just at work (my original plan for dealing with this unexpected extra proofreading run). I must say, as much as I detest the Office 2010 at work for being unintuitive and horribly lacking in any aesthetics to speak of (very awesome icon, and far cooler than any Windows version I’ve ever encountered, but that’s about it). I’ll grant, though, that the reviews saying it’s infinitely stabler, smaller, faster, and generally a better program on Mac than on Windows is quite true. It certainly is much more usable on the Mac than on the PC, but Pages is, with the aforementioned exception, infinitely more so. Suffice to say, unlike previous situations where I was able to obtain legitimate free copies of their software or OS when I felt that I had overpaid, I think that I paid a fair price by getting it Free. I might even have, had there been a trial version to check it out first, have paid as much as us$5 or so for it. I think, though, I’m far happier with the $20 for Pages (in fact, I’d gladly have paid the full us$79 that it was back under the iWork ’09 name and still called it a bargain).

For those looking for word processing that gets out of the way, lets you get the job done, look at Pages. If you need to do weird, esoteric things to the document — export it as a Word file from the file menu then go to work or visit a friend or get to Kinkos or something where you can open it in Word to do the weird esoteric thing to it before upload or printing.