Thoughts on MS Office

Tuesday, 13 April 2010 18:24

Filed under: Design

I've recently switched back to Microsoft Office from OpenOffice.Org. At least for a little while while I'm looking for a job. I gave up on Office somewhere during my final semester at university in 2006 because Office 2003 was too buggy and kept corrupting and losing my research. I was ready to go postal.

This is not a comparison of Office against OOo, but by thoughts about the current state of MS Office.

For one, the ribbon is a major change to the interface. All the formatting stuff I was so used to with Office 2003- is much harder to find. I consider myself a power user of office suites, and as a designer, I like to get in and finagle the bits as much as is allowed. I like to mess with the kerning, and the leading, and the type scale, and all that jazz. I will get used to it and learn how to access those beloved properties. But I miss them right now.

And Word has always been a very poor page layout program. As it should be. It's not a page layout program. it's a word processor. But I'm quite pleased (so far) with how much more page layout functionality they have introduced since I last used it.

Take my resume for instance. I've been making mine in ODF format and exporting them as PDFs and occasionally as Word XP files. But in my most recent resume design the format is so wonky and based on linked files that it just wouldn't export to a usable Word file anymore. Also, a number of job sites and recruiters have requested .DOC formats of my resume because they are more readily parsed by their automated programs. So instead of maintaining parallel branches of my resumes, in the interest of time, I've switched to back Word for now.

I'm really amazed at how much more flexible Word has become for designers and page layout. It's still no Adobe Illustrator or InDesign, but it shouldn't be. I love OOo and hope it keeps up both with its interface and with format translation. It loses its competitive edge by not being able to play on the same field with the industry leader.