At the risk of turning a “journal of miscellany” into a “journal of technology,” I probably shouldn’t leave the discussion of using the best tools for the job without a word or two about why I like OpenOffice.org. I mentioned that little tidbit in passing during my last post, so perhaps an explanation is in order.

Probably the easiest thing to do is refer you to the OOo Web site. A few minutes spent there and another few minutes poking around the page for OOo Writer will probably give you a pretty good idea why I use it, why I almost never fire up Microsoft Word anymore — at least when I’m away from my “day job” at the newspaper. Unfortunately, the newspaper is still a Microsoft Office office. But at home, whether on desktop or laptop, I turn to OOo over MS every time. (Well … almost every time. Late last year, I toyed briefly with MS Office 2007 and really liked some of the things I saw. But when it came time to convert my free trial to a paid license, there just wasn’t enough there to make me take the leap.)

The benefits of OOo are clear. It’s free, but as fully-featured, complete and robust as MS Office or any other office suite costing hundreds of dollars. It’s open source, which is never my sole deciding factor in choosing software but is always worth a few dozen brownie points. It uses open standards, which is a critical issue for me, yet it’s completely compatible with MS. In other words, if you send me a file created in Word, I can read it and edit it without any problems whatsoever, and I can create files that you can open and read.

I love the fact the OOo gives me genuine alternatives for Word (Writer), Excel (Calc) Access (Base), Paint (Draw) and PowerPoint (Impress). Note those words: genuine alternatives. OOo is not a “lite” version of MS Office. It is not a pale imitation or a pared-down copy, looking similar on the surface but stripped of vital functionality underneath. It is as big and powerful as MS, and in many cases even more powerful. In Writer, for example, the use of style sheets is a tremendous leap forward for anyone who needs to format large and complex documents. And for me, just the ability to export as a PDF file with a single click has saved lots of time and more than a few headaches.

Is it easy to make the switch? Definitely. Getting started is a three-step process: download, install, use. You’ll probably stumble on a modest learning curve when it comes to tapping some of the more advanced features, style sheets being one. But the documentation is good. So is the help available on the OOo forums. In my transition, I never ran across any question that I wasn’t able to answer with a brief search.

In short, OOo is an ideal tool for just about anyone, whether you’re trying to make a statement or make a deadline, whether you’re a rebel who wants to thumb your nose at the tyranny of Microsoft or someone who just wants to keep your nose to the grindstone and get your work done as quickly and efficiently as possible.

I like OOo so much that I joined their community marketing project (gee, can you tell?). But as with anything else I talk about here, your mileage may vary. You might give OOo a spin and think, “nope, not for me.” On the other hand, you might just feel that little electric thrill of discovery that I felt, the excitement of realizing that you can suddenly do the job better than before, of knowing that you will no longer have to suffer (or pay through the nose) to be a prisoner of propietary standards.

Is it worth a try?