I haven't tried SoftMaker Office, but I'm a long-time OOo user, as well as a long-time MS Office user. I find approximately equal levels of frustration with both! Usually in different areas though. OOo is slow and that's probably one of my biggest complaints. It's also a bit clunky. 3.2 has sped up a bit, so you might want to check that out if speed was your main concern in the past. It's still not MS Office speed though.
I have also gone through a shift from MS Office 2k, to OOo 2.x-3.x, and back to MS Office 2k3/2k7 organizationally, and it has shown me some interesting things. I feel pretty confident now saying that there are a similar number of problems with both and in fact interestingly enough we had users complain about some features missing in MS Office that OOo had (particularly in Excel vs. Calc). the vast majority of issues though come from file interchange and format differences, which is true of both MS Office and OOo. It's pretty frustrating that this is the case, and I'm frankly a bit surprised that these issues remain so prevalent. MS's refusal to accept ODF as a standard pretty much guarantees that this retardness will continue, along with the continued default install of apps like MS Works in which you apparently cannot set the default save format as anything by the proprietary WKS. Ugh!
Frankly I'm tired of the whole "Office Suite" paradigm and the traditional document authoring model. Why should I need a separate, sophisticated design tool like InDesign if I want to make my document look really nice and print well? And if I do work in InDesign, why do I lose all spelling and grammer checking? Why does my document authoring team have to edit a document which gets sent to the designer for entry into InDesign, after which the document authoring team have to pass all changes through the designer, instead of doing them directly in a referenced document? Why is document formatting so quirky and hard to control, even today? Why is presentation template support still so limited? (MSO 2k7 was the first notable progress on this IMO) Why if I'm authoring a document for hand-out and presentation is it not easier to combine the two and maintain updates across files (e.g. reference a bulleted list from Word in Powerpoint and have it dynamically update as you edit the latter)?
Imagine if you will a single document development application, with intelligent "modes", customizable workspace and workflow systems, sophisticated (but easy to use) referencing and instancing systems, and a "view"-based methodology for interpreting your document into different models. For example, highlight a block of text, right-click and specify as slide 1 of a presentation, then go to the presentation layout and further edit with transitions, etc. If you have changes to make, do them in the document edit layout and they're automatically reflected in the presentation.
Really, can't they do any better than this?
- Oshyan
