Venting

~I just spent 2.5 hours working on an assignment for one of my classes, which involved creating database queries in Microsoft Access 2007. Boring, you say? Indeed it was, but the reason I'm writing about it is mainly to vent. Micro$oft Office 2007 has got to be the most god-awful piece of crapware ever to disgrace the hard drive of any computer unfortunate enough to load it. It's a re-design of the many previous versions of MS Office, but features an "improved" interface that replaces the menus at the top of the screen with colorful icons and tabs.
Some people like the new interface, finding it intuitive and easy to learn. I am not one of those people. This is not an issue of not adapting or being set in my ways; rather, this is resistance to an infantile piece of junkware that forces me to wade through constantly-shifting tabs, ribbons, and icons with no logical placement. While working through the assignment, I frequently found my hands shaking with barely-suppressed rage from the extreme frustration of not being able to find things, which had been so easy to locate on earlier versions of the software. This is NOT a good change.

As if that wasn't bad enough, MS Office has somehow become the "industry standard", which means that professionals are expected to use it and be able to receive files using MS Office formats. All of this for the fine sum of $150. Yes, that's right, you're forced to pay $150 in exchange for a bloated suite of garbled software. Or your company pays comparable fees to "license" the software, and is able to install the programs on only a certain number of computers.

Fortunately for the sane people of the world, there is an alternative, a very, very good one: OpenOffice, which is open-source software originally created by Microsoft rival Sun Microsystems. OpenOffice can do literally everything that MicroSuck Office can do, without the bloated "extras" and absurdly unintuitive icon-based interface Aside from being completely free to download, OpenOffice is open-source, the computer code for open office is freely available (so any programmer is free to modify it, as long as they don't profit off of it). On my home computer, I run StarOffice, which is based on the original form of OpenOffice.

StarOffice comes with "Writer" (a word processor), "Base" (a database program, which I would have vastly preferred to use over MS Access), "Calc" (spreadsheets), "draw" (for art and charts) and "impress" (slide show presentations). You may note that these are suspiciously similar to comparable programs in MS Office (Writer=Word, Base=Access, Calc=Excel, Impress=PowerPoint, etc). They can even read and save files in Microsoft formats (so StarOffice Writer can save in .doc format, which can be read by MS Word), so I don't need to worry about not being able to send and receive files to and from those poor unfortunate souls still using MicroScrew Office.

Another interesting piece of software I've been using recently is Google Docs, a free online document service (it's still in Beta testing, but works fine). For a recent class project, I created a "Google Presentation", which is basically the same thing as a PowerPoint slide show. I was then able to "share" the presentation by sending "invitations" to the email addresses of my groupmates, who then became "collaborators" able to edit it. It's hugely convenient, because the presentation and the tools used to edit it are all online and can be used at any time, eliminating the need to trade files by email. I've done the same thing for a group paper, and it's worked out great.

So for those of you still stuck in the dark ages of monopolistic, overpriced office software, do yourself a favor by going open-source: download StarOffice or any of its many freely-available variants. You won't have to worry about paying to "upgrade" the software every couple of years to pad out Bill Gates' paycheck, or put up with "Office Assistant" ever again.