After nearly five years of exclusively dealing with OpenOffice (OO) Writer as my word processor, and developing code behind it, I am heading back to Microsoft Word-land. A lot of the differences between the two may or not make a difference in how easily I return to MS land; I remember some of the things that OO lacked at the start that really bugged me.
I am really looking forward to a robust support and help environment (can anyone say Intellisense?), the very large support infrastructure of developers and the MSDN availability online. I will miss the ease of access to the inner workings of OO's .xba code files and the ease with which I could even access the base XML of a .odt file. After all, an odt is simply a zipped file of xml and other supporting documents. To access the base XML, all a user has to do is change the extension of the .odt to .zip and open it up. All the information about the document is now readily available in a simple XML format.
I don't know if that accessibility is there in the newest version of MS Word, but it was sadly lacking in the last version I coded against. In that version (2003) the files were binary and unaccessible. Most unfortunate.
So long OO, the run's been fun, and I'll still be using you on my own computer, but for work, it's off to Microsoft. It's time to stop looking at ThisComponent and start looking at ActiveDocument again.
I am really looking forward to a robust support and help environment (can anyone say Intellisense?), the very large support infrastructure of developers and the MSDN availability online. I will miss the ease of access to the inner workings of OO's .xba code files and the ease with which I could even access the base XML of a .odt file. After all, an odt is simply a zipped file of xml and other supporting documents. To access the base XML, all a user has to do is change the extension of the .odt to .zip and open it up. All the information about the document is now readily available in a simple XML format.
I don't know if that accessibility is there in the newest version of MS Word, but it was sadly lacking in the last version I coded against. In that version (2003) the files were binary and unaccessible. Most unfortunate.
So long OO, the run's been fun, and I'll still be using you on my own computer, but for work, it's off to Microsoft. It's time to stop looking at ThisComponent and start looking at ActiveDocument again.
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