In my work as a marine surveyor, Y have to write reports quite often, some of them, lengthy. They are all typed in Word with tables to place pictures as the text requires to illustrate.

With enough RAM when the pictures are a lot, the performance is good.

Knowing the shortcuts you can produce a quite good report in little time.

And the formatting of massive documents is simple if you know the tricks and have the styles previously defined.

It works for me.

 

However, MS Word is an evil work of the devil himself and should be shunned whenever possible. MS Publisher does much less then Word and thus a much better job.

Great inputs, guys!, I highly recommend OPEN OFFICE! When it comes to cutting and pasting nothing beats open office. Aaargh I should start a thread saying how much I love Open office.

 

Hello,

As you might know the "open office" is now called "libre office" :
http://www.libreoffice.org/

Bertus

 

It's true that MS Word is terrible when it comes to pasting images in your document. I haven't worked with OpenOffice in the past, so I can't judge its performance on that field.

What I know is that MS Word and OpenOffice have terrible compatibility between each other. If you are planning to make a document for a 3rd party, be sure to learn what software they use beforehand.

 

Hello,

As you might know the "open office" is now called "libre office" :
http://www.libreoffice.org/

Bertus

I can't tell if you are being sarcastic or not?

Open Office, the original, is alive and well, and hasn't had a name change.

http://www.openoffice.org/

I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop since Oracle bought them though. I will miss Sun Microsystems.

 

I have to agree: MS Paint is also a great tool. I no longer do schematics in it as even the free download of ExpressSCH from ExpressPCB does an acceptable job much faster. However, I still use it for quick line drawings such as set-up sketches.

If dimensions are important, I jump to Autocad.

 

Hello,

It seems that Oracle will not do much on development off Open Office.
The source code is LGPL and is used by libre office for further development.

I use Suse linux and the software upgrade kit changed the open office to libre office.

Bertus