of all, let me say that my school provides me with a computer and nearly any software I would like on it. MS Office is considered standard, and 2007 is rapidly being added to nearly all the computers on campus. A couple years ago, when I had my older Tablet PC (the Lenovo X41), my hard drive was filling up. A 30GB drive was filling up rapidly with all the software apps I was installing, music and video files I had, and the growing number of documents I was managing.
As an aside it blows my mind that a 30GB drive filled up so fast! It seems like not long ago a 1GB hard drive was more than adequate!
Anyway, as my drive filled up I was trying to find ways of reducing the number of bloated programs I was using. Turns out MS Office XP was one of them. This was when I was first on my open source kick so I tried out Open Office (OO). I was very impressed and found it an easy switch to make. I liked the commenting in Word better than OO word-processing, but other than that I felt it was an easy switch. So I de-installed MS Office from my computer and went completely to OO. I tried to get others on campus, including the IT department, to look at it. What a cost savings for the school if we switched to OO. As with everything else I do, it seems that the school was not ready to embrace that so they continued on their Word trek and I went my way. What the heck, OO could convert documents to and from the .doc (and .xls or .ppt) whenever I needed so what was the big deal?
I continued on my merry way until last spring when I started running into people using Office 2007 and the .docx format. It got very frustrating, mostly because a majority of the people using it had no idea what they were doing or how to save their documents in a format others (including those with older versions of MS Office) could read. By this point I had my new computer with a 105GB hard drive. I had done such a good job of maintaining a lower memory footprint that I easily, at the time, had over 60GB of space available on there. So I took the plunge and had IT install MS Office 2007. I pretty much ignored except to open the occasional .docx document it until a couple weeks ago when I started collaborating with a teacher who only had it installed. To make our work easier I agree to start using Word 2007.
I tend to jump in with both feet when I do something new. Like when I decided to type up my problems for my Calculus BC class I decided to use LaTeX even though I had never really worked with it before. I am not an expert now, but much better at it. Or the time a couple years ago when I read about the Dvorak layout keyboard and decided to try it. I switched all the keys on my laptop (which is my primary and only computer I use regularly) and went about training myself on the new layout. A year and a half later I continue to use it and type at least as fast, perhaps a bit faster than I used to with QWERTY.
Anyway, the point is that I started using MS Office 2007 for all my documents to get a feel for it. I still love the commenting, and the ‘ribbons’ at the top of the page have really grown on me. But the coolest thing I ran into about 5 minutes before writing this blog. When you open a new Word document you can choose to create a blog entry, and it will even connect to your blog and upload it for you. So I have the complete power of Word able to work directly on my blog. I am typing this in Word now. It allows me to add graphics like those below easily.
Or, as in the first word of the entry I can use 
to make a point.
I have been happy using Open Office, and I still recommend it, particularly if you are on a budget – either financially or in terms of computer memory. It definitely does almost anything that a standard user of an office suite would need – and it does it well. But I really like Office 2007.
