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Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Equal Features

I don't think he's a convert yet because Rafe Colburn doesn't seem to have taken much time looking at the word processor component of OpenOffice.org. He thinks there is no change tracking.

Writer doesn't support revision tracking, the killer feature in Word that is required for collaboration with other people. I don't think any open source word processor can claim to replace Word until it has support for revisions, preferably in a Word-compatible way.

As the great LinuxJournal review he's commenting on (also discussed on Corante) points out, feature arms races are actually a shallow measure of goodness,

Understand that I'm not talking features here. True, with its PDF and Docbook export filters alone, version 1.1 of Writer leaves MS Word playing catch up. However, features are an arms race in which superiority rarely lasts for more than one version. When I say that Writer is the superior piece of software, I'm talking about the basics, the everyday functionality that can't be improved without massively rewriting the code.

but by his own measure Rafe should find that OpenOffice Write can comfortably replace Word because not only does it have effective change tracking, it's interoperable with Word (I use it regularly in association with OMA documents) and what's more the open OO.o architecture makes it extensible - more on that when the (non-Sun) project I saw this week stops being confidential! Look under "Edit | Changes" for the change tracking.

posted at 5:09 PM (UK) | |