The first thing I notice is a new icon under my clock. I need another one of those like I need another asshole, but let's investigate. Quick Starter. Sounds zippy. I can startup whatever program I want or just open a document and let OpenOffice figure out which program to use. Cool.

Test One: Open, Edit and Close my Excel sheet. It worked. It opened eventually. I had to spread out a couple columns because the new font (did you ask me if I wanted to change fonts?) was wider than my old one. Every time I deleted something I got a pop-up about how and what I wanted to delete. This may be useful to some but to me it's annoying. Delete the highlighted cell, all of it; make it empty! Ok?? Saving... saving.... saving.... knit myself a sweater... saving... walk the dog... saving.... My first impression is that I like Excel better but if I didn't already own it I could make do with a free program that does the same thing. It is probably much faster saving files in open format, so it might not be so bad. But time is money and I already bought Office 97 so I'll probably continue to use it.

Test Two: Open my Access database. The first time "the connection to the database source could not be established. An unknown error occurred. The driver is probably defective." Well, kids, it's YOUR driver. I like that you can admit defectiveness so quickly. --The second time I waited a good long time before hitting Ctrl+Alt+Delete and discovering our old friend Not Responding had come to visit. The third time I tried, that defective driver was back at it again. Fuck this; I'll stick with Access. Please don't claim that your software opens MS Office formats if it really can't. That's just stupid. I poked around the web site and found a very complicated incantation that involved getting a jet engine from Microsoft... hey, I thought we didn't need Microsoft? What gives? Ok, forget it. You will never capture the serious business user or the average home user with stuff that doesn't work right the first time. I already have something installed that opens Access databases. It's called Access.

Test Three: Write. I'm writing this in a text editor (I'll tell you why later) and I'm not going to even try OOo Writer because I'm already 33% unable and 33% unwilling to use the OpenOffice suite. That's 66% against so I no longer give two fucks whether I can write with it or not. Even if I could, I can't use Base to pull in mail merges, which is something I need to do now and again. In all fairness, I used Writer to open my text file, add a couple lines (these lines) and spell check this blog. Then I saved in HTML format. You know what? It did alright. I already have five or six other programs that can do the same thing, but really. Not bad. I'm going to go look at the HTML code and see if there's any goofy crap in there. If the code is simple and clean, I could recommend this as a WYSIWYG editor. (The code isn't as clean as one of MY HTML pages, but it probably doesn't matter much. It took me about 5 mintues to go through and remove all the junk that does absolutely nothing but increase load time and waste space. I usually don't use style sheets and no one can tell because the style is built in.) I wonder how a picture looks inserted here.

Wednesday & Jack

That's a link, not a picture. Try it again.

Nevermind. There went six minutes of my life I'll never get to use. If it were Word I'd have that picture displayed by now. Doing my own HTML code with an image source tag, I'd be done by now. Grumble Grumble. I can insert every other damn thing, but I can't insert a picture. Fuck. I probably can, I'm just tired of trying to figure out how. It's not just like Word, then.

I could almost change my mind if I weren't still a bit miffed about that Access debacle. Now I can't show you a picture of my cats without clicking you off to another page.

You never get a second chance to make a first impression. Sorry, OpenOffice. As much as I hate big corporate monsters who act like they own me, my computer, my free will and everything I create using their products... I'm going to have to stick with Office.

Everything I read was all seamless this and compatible that... but it's not. Not for me. So I'm giving you my honest opinion. I'm going to un-install it now and hope that my world goes back to the way it was an hour ago.

What's that you say? I jump to conclusions too quickly? I'm too judgmental? I won't give it a chance? Listen, I'm busy. I don't even have time to have sex. Do you think I have time to dicker with software? I installed it and tried it because it sounded good. That was me giving it a chance. OpenOffice has been installed on my computer for over an hour. To me that's like going on two bad dates; I gave it a chance.

You know what else I don't have time for besides figuring out how to make stuff work and getting a bit of nookie? I don't have time to learn new software when I'm so busy actually using the old software. Where's the menu, where's the button, how do I do such-n-such. I spent a long time learning that stuff YEARS ago and now I know. Why would I want to start over again? Sure, almost everything is the same as it is in Office, but not everything. I know Office 97 so well that for most things I don't even touch the mouse; I hit a couple ALT keystrokes and it's done.

That Base thing, for the brief moments it was functional, didn't look much like Access. This is why I don't upgrade! I don't buy new stuff until the old stuff won't work or gets used up or whatever. I don't go out buying cars just because there's a newer one with a couple buttons moved around and I don't upgrade software unless I need to do something that I can't do with the old one. I upgraded to 98 SE so I could use USB cables. If not for that, I'd probably still use Windows 95. So that, in a nutshell, is why my computer is so antiquated. It's running lots of memory and has a pretty zippy processor, but Microsoft already has my money so I'm going to keep using the software I bought until I can't use it anymore. I don't see much changing in the data or word processing categories anytime soon so I think I'm safe for a while.