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Taking a Vacation from Microsoft
By Jeffrey the Barak
Published November 2004

Don't get me wrong, I must begin this article by stating that Microsoft make the most impressive software in the world and anything else must strive to compete, but having said that, Aaargh!

I've always been a fan of Microsoft Word and back in the Windows 3.0 days I used to joke that Word was my favorite computer game. In recent years I have practically run my whole business with Microsoft Outlook, using it as the email client (averaging 50 in plus 50 out daily) and as my personal organizer, synchronizing most recently with my Palm Tungsten T2.

However, recently I noticed that 50 times a day as I began to compose a new email or just reply to one, I would suffer a delay, not a huge delay, but something I had to wait for. The hourglass would sit on the screen, the hard drive would make a little noise and then I would be able to continue after a few seconds.

I figured out that it was Word that was slowing me down, but even choosing not to use Word as the email composer within Outlook, there was this pondering slowness to my beloved program. Also, I had to admit to myself that upgrading made it worse. From Office 2000 to Office 2002 to Office XP2003, it would get slower each time. Each Office upgrade also brought more bugs. The worst was the thing that changed the way I worked. Up until Outlook XP I would select a contact, right click and send an email to that contact. This would make Outlook XP crash so I had to go the other way, opening a new mail and clicking on "to:" etc.

And then someone planted a seed of naughtiness in my mind. The I.T. people at my wife's company advised their thousands of employees to switch from Internet Explorer to Mozilla's new Firefox 1.0 as it would cut down on their security headaches. I tried this browser and preferred it. The coolest feature for me was the instant font zooming using ctrl+ to go bigger, ctrl- to go smaller and ctrl0 to restore the original size. With my eyes, this was the one feature among many that really impressed me. At the same time, Cnet.com came out and recommended it over IE as the best browser for Windows.

So with that going on, and Outlook and Word being royal pains in the nostril, I decided to take a break from Outlook as well.

For everything except email, I just switched to Palm Desktop. I use a Palm anyway, and even those who don't can get Palm Desktop for free. It is many times faster than Outlook, especially during a hot sync and believe it or not, I actually prefer it now that I stopped ignoring it and regarding it as a program to have and never look at.

For email, since Mozilla did so well with their free Firefox browser, I downloaded and installed Mozilla Thunderbird, also free. Yes I could have used Outlook Express which is free with Windows, but I was a bit upset with Microsoft by now.

So is everything great? No it's not. Because my contact addresses are now in one program, Palm Desktop, and I use another program for email, Thunderbird, I have to add new addresses twice, once for each program. But this is somehow less annoying than those little delays that Outlook was sending my way all the time.

So now I have this Windows desktop with no Outlook icon and no Internet Explorer icon, and it really feels maverick and different.

So what about Office? Apart from Outlook, the only program components I use are Excel and Word. I never did like Access and never had a use for Powerpoint. So now my web technician has mentioned that he is trying to use OpenOffice instead of Office, whenever possible. I researched it and it would seem that Calc may be as good as Excel for my simple needs, and that Writer may be better than Word.

I must admit that even in the heavily overweight Office XP, Excel is still a very fast program, but my beloved old Word is painfully slow. Well I suppose that if I didn't have Microsoft Office I would definitely try OpenOffice first, because it is free! And yes, I am curious to try it anyway.

So the big question is, how did Office evolve into a product that runs slow and is so full of bugs? It certainly is impressive that there are so many intricate features in each component program, but perhaps they should sell an "Office Light", for people who need the basic features and do not run the fastest chip or have the most RAM.

Anyway, I am enjoying my vacation from Microsoft, especially since the flight and the hotel were free.

Research and download OpenOffice free here
Research and download Palm Desktop free here
Research and download Firefox and Thunderbird free here

Update February 2005

I have two new computers now so the decision had to be made. Do I pay all over again for Microsoft's expensive Office suite? Well somehow, I managed to install Office XP again on my new desktop. I assume it's because they let you put it on one laptop and one desktop, and my old primary PC was a huge Dell laptop. But my new second PC is an Acer Tablet and I could not use the same copy of Microsoft Office on that one, even though the old Dell is with me no more.

So I installed OpenOffice on both the new Gateway desktop and the new Acer tablet. After all, I'm only interested in Word and Excel at this point, and Writer and Calc seem to be fairly nice, albeit slightly different. To cut a long story short, the current latest release of Calc is not going to work for me, but Writer isn't too bad. Why?

Well let's look first at Writer. So far, the only major problem is encountered when editing complicated documents containing tables, tabs and highlighted colors. All else seems fine and saving as a Word document presents no issues for Microsoft Office users to open the documents. The export to PDF feature is a built-in star if there ever was one.

But Calc is another story. It's almost great. Like Writer, the file sizes are smaller and the opening is faster, but what doesn't work for me is the sort feature. In my case, and I'm probably unusual here, I have a huge database or two in spreadsheet format, and one level of information, namely status, is indicated by colored backgrounds across entire lines. When sorting the data in Calc using the A-Z button, the colors fail to sort, so a lot of important information is instantly scrambled.

Apart from the background color, the data sorts just fine, but as I said, the color has a lot of meaning in my case and I don't want to swap it for a less obvious new data column. Anyway, perhaps the next release will fix that and then maybe I'll dump Office. As for now, my decision is to work with my files on the Acer tablet PC in OpenOffice only when I'm traveling and I will just have to avoid doing any data sorting during my trips. Once home, I'll save the file as an Excel file and carry on, on the desktop.

I will not be forking out another heap of cash for another issue of Microsoft Office. But if you have to have your Outlook and you don't like change, you will have to keep paying, or instead stop buying new computers.

Update February 2006

So shoot me, I'm back with Microsoft. Why? Firstly Internet Explorer. So many of the sites I need to visit every day refuse to be compatible with Firefox, that it just isn't worth switching back and forth between browsers all the time, so I stay with Internet Explorer.

Secondly Thunderbird, I used it for fifteen months, lost my data twice, and finally switched to Outlook Express, to make synchronization to my new Palm's email easier. But I think I prefer Outlook Express!

Palm Desktop: Still faster and simpler than Outlook and never a hint of a technical problem, never ever ever.

Office, I think I'll keep buying Microsoft Office every few years. Open Ofiice is not well received by anyone you share with, and Calc cannot do what I need with colors for information and sorting etc.

Jeffrey the Barak is the publisher of the-vu and by no means a software expert himself.

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