vs.

After reformatting, I was all psyched about trying to use this alternative to Microsoft Office. Seemed full-featured, fully compatible with MS Office documents, free, open source, and legit - all this gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling inside.

Well, I've been slowly opening up my old MS Office documents into OpenOffice. Today I opened up my third document and to my dismay, it was not displaying correctly. There are three lines of text that I want printed out aligning to the bottom margin. In MS Word it'd be somewhere under Page Setup. I could not figure out how to fix this within 15 30 45 minutes, even after using Help (I'm not afraid to ask for help!). And THEN I remembered that my old copy of MS Office is actually legit (thank you UT student discount!). I tried one more thing and OpenOffice is crashing as I type. Sigh ...

This kinda sucks, as OpenOffice seemed to have a lot of cool goodies. Ah well. Back to MS Office it is ...

Afterthought: I was gonna keep OpenOffice on anyway for one reason and one reason only: it has this really cool grid thing in its page setup that prints out sheets for practicing my Chinese writing on (I'm pretty sure this wasn't OpenOffice's original intent?), the really old-school ones with the space to the right for the BoPoMoFo - it got me all nostalgic. I actually stopped everything I was doing because I've wanted to write out the Heart Sutra in Chinese for a long time (weird, yes, I know - just another of my "Things to Do Before I Die"). However, this would be a silly reason to keep the whole suite, so the thing is out tha door - I can easily draw something up like this in MS Word. Sorry OpenOffice!