I, for one, would prefer an external writing checker tool.
The development for it could be entirely focused on English grammar checking, for example, so with some love and a lot of time it could become quite a neat package. With that kind of feature pulled out to another program, it could also get away with other neat features like a plagiarism check.
These office suites are not modular enough; they pack way too much into the same place.
OpenOffice gets the job done, but the Linux desktop for example needs a word processor that (for one thing) actually tries to fit in with the desktop. (For example using the native colour picker widget - or a colour picker widget - at least!).
It's pretty weird, come to think of it. Neither Microsoft Office not OpenOffice have a GUI that blends with anything else in their respective platforms. On MacOS, though, we have NeoOffice (OpenOffice with some attention payed to GUI) and the Mac version of MS Office, both of which blend well.
Kind of dumb, hm?
I use OpenOffice daily in both Ubuntu and Windows, but I have never been impressed with its appearance. It is a shame, as OO obviously took a lot of work to get this far and it does everything pretty well, but it needs a lot of work to actually look like a seriously decent word processor.
You could say that looks don't matter, but there is a problem when the word processor has its own Themes which must be applied if somebody wants it to look like it uses their desktop's icon set. (Almost every other application on my computer uses my current icon set, except OpenOffice which must be changed separately).
This is an accessibility issue! What if a vision impaired person relies on Gnome's various themes for the vision impaired but can't use them in OpenOffice because it stupidly (and unnecessarily) uses its own icon set?
It also consumes space for no reason.
As for good features: It processes words and it does most of what MS Word does, sometimes better.
I highly recommend OpenOffice as an alternative to Word (Word is horrible as well), but I'm not saying it's the be-all-end-all (yet).
The development for it could be entirely focused on English grammar checking, for example, so with some love and a lot of time it could become quite a neat package. With that kind of feature pulled out to another program, it could also get away with other neat features like a plagiarism check.
These office suites are not modular enough; they pack way too much into the same place.
OpenOffice gets the job done, but the Linux desktop for example needs a word processor that (for one thing) actually tries to fit in with the desktop. (For example using the native colour picker widget - or a colour picker widget - at least!).
It's pretty weird, come to think of it. Neither Microsoft Office not OpenOffice have a GUI that blends with anything else in their respective platforms. On MacOS, though, we have NeoOffice (OpenOffice with some attention payed to GUI) and the Mac version of MS Office, both of which blend well.
Kind of dumb, hm?
I use OpenOffice daily in both Ubuntu and Windows, but I have never been impressed with its appearance. It is a shame, as OO obviously took a lot of work to get this far and it does everything pretty well, but it needs a lot of work to actually look like a seriously decent word processor.
You could say that looks don't matter, but there is a problem when the word processor has its own Themes which must be applied if somebody wants it to look like it uses their desktop's icon set. (Almost every other application on my computer uses my current icon set, except OpenOffice which must be changed separately).
This is an accessibility issue! What if a vision impaired person relies on Gnome's various themes for the vision impaired but can't use them in OpenOffice because it stupidly (and unnecessarily) uses its own icon set?
It also consumes space for no reason.
As for good features: It processes words and it does most of what MS Word does, sometimes better.
I highly recommend OpenOffice as an alternative to Word (Word is horrible as well), but I'm not saying it's the be-all-end-all (yet).