Long Nguyen

Nobody needs to install Word

In this post, when I say Office, I am referring to a writing tool (like Word and Writer), a spreadsheet tool (like Excel and Calc) and a presentation tool (like Powerpoint and Impress). If you get impatient and want to know what are the softwares I am talking about, just scroll to the end of this article.

Microsoft Office has been used for years whether it was in a legal or illegal way, but why pay or do something illegal when it can absolutely be free and legal?

That is a question that came with the existence of OpenOffice.org. It is an office suite that gives a little less than Microsoft Office, but it still has a whole lot of stuff you will never use. This goes for any office tools. There are so many things in Word that you don’t know of and that you will never use.

After opening Microsoft Word, what do you do? You probably start typing and you keep typing until you’re done with your text. That probably involves nothing else but the keyboard. From time to time, you play with the indentation and italicize and bold things up once in a while. You might want to lower your level of stupidity if the quality of your text always depends on spell check and grammar correction. To make things a little prettier, you might change the font and its size. You might also play with colors. From time to time, you insert a table because it is appropriate for what you are doing. But that’s it. It’s all you do with Microsoft Word. Oh yeah, I forgot, you probably also save your file of course.

To be honest, I don’t know why anybody would willingly pay over a 100 USD just to do that, unless that amount really feels like 1.00$ to you.

By being free, OpenOffice solved the money part and just like Microsoft Office, you can do a lot of things that you will most likely never do. The inconvenient is that you have to download an installation file that is almost 100 mb in size. So, hopefully you have a broadband internet connection.

So whether you are paying for Microsoft Office, getting it illegally or downloading OpenOffice, you still have to install that and all the crap that comes with it which all takes up space on your hard drive. I can definitely neglect the 219 mb that Microsoft Office and the 146 mb that OpenOffice would take on my computer if I had them installed on my computer. It would be nice to free up that much space. It’s enough for about 60 mp3s of 4 minutes. Photos taken with a digital camera dwell around 1 mb these days. It means that getting rid of Microsoft Office gives you space for about 200 more photos. That’s a lot of memories of family, friends, events, places, …

In both Office Suites, I think the most used softwares by average users (people at home who check their email on their computer more than anything else and students and people looking for jobs), are probably Word, Excel and Powerpoint for Microsoft and Writer, Calc and Impress for OpenOffice. Maybe some people use Outlook, but most people are still primitive so they either use Hotmail or Yahoo Mail. Yes, I do hate those two services, but that is not the topic.

So far, I have talked about getting rid of your Office tools, so you’re probably wondering how the hell you are suppose to be productive if you have nothing to work with. Since you are reading this, there are two things you have that will allow you to do everything you used to do with your Office tools.

As a side note, I would like to point out that I used the words “everything you used to do” and not “everything you can do”. Indeed, I am writing this assuming that you do no more that the stuff I mentioned in the third paragraph.

The two things I am talking about is your internet connection and the browser you are viewing this text in.

For a while now, writing and formatting text, creating spreadsheets and making presentations have all been possible through the browser. An advantage of using your browser to do all that is that you don’t need to install anything, so you don’t worry about whether to install a typical, full or custom installation. Your browser is already installed and you probably use it like you use a chair, meaning that using it comes naturally.

If you’re the type of person that worries about having too many open windows, you might want to use Mozilla Firefox which has tabs.

All your files will be online. This is an advantage for people who don’t just work at one computer or stay at one place to work. This online thing comes in handy, because it allows you to share files privately. So no more worries about attachments when sending emails. Humans have a tendency to use things for more than their purpose. It’s like DVD that was never meant to store anything else but videos. Email really is for text and not the best tool for transferring files. For that, there is something called FTP (File Transfer Protocol).

I used the word privately. I means that although there is sharing involved, only those you allow to view a file are able to view a file.

You can also look at past changes and come back on your steps if needed. It means that after a while of writing, if you want to see what you wrote two days ago, you can. And if what you don’t like what you just wrote and you prefer what you wrote two days ago, you can revert back to what you wrote two days ago. Microsoft Word 2003 has this feature, but it is pretty well hidden in the interface.

Your text is saved periodically. In Word, your work is saved every few minutes. It works just as well online.

Most keyboard shortcuts work online. Those are shortcuts like ctrl+b to bold, ctrl+i to italicize, ctrl+u to underline and ctrl+s to save.
It’s all very user-friendly. In some services I will tell you, it looks a lot like Microsoft Office, so there’s is no learning to do, just do what you always do, but in a browser. In some cases, you will see that it is even simpler than Word or Writer.

After everything I have read on this topic I am discussing, some people are concerned about security. Real world or virtual world, security always has its place doesn’t it? I don’t know about this, so all I am going to say is that, hopefully, you wouldn’t be stupid enough to keep sensitive information online. I leave it up to you to define sensitive information.

Some people are concerned about the computer they use to do these things online. The only thing I can say is that my 600 MHz computer handles it all well.

Finally, what I have been writing about all along.

For spreadsheets, there is irows and numbler. For writing, there is writeboard, a tool that looks a lot like notepad, except that you can bold and stuff and it’s online. There is also gOffice and Zoho Writer which I have never used.

If you like to have a very big suite with every type of files in one place, there is ThinkFree. You can write and make spreadsheets and presentations. Right now, I am writing this post using its text editor just for the hell of it. I’m typing, using shortcuts to make things in bold, italics, and underline. I am also copying, pasting, making links, playing with indentation and placing images all in this browser window. Nothing else needs to be opened. I am both writing this and looking at the website that triggered me to write all this.

When I opened ThinkFree’s spreadsheet and presentation tools, my jaw dropped. It was astonishing how much it looked like Microsoft Excel and Powerpoint. Then I noticed Quick edit and Power edit options for their writing tool. My jaw dropped again. The Power edit option is just like Microsoft Word. I am currently using the Quick edit option because it loads faster.

I reserved my personal favorite for last and that is Writely. Writely was bought a few weeks ago by Google, but it still delivers great service, except that like Gmail, users must be invited. Since the first time I used Writely, I never used Word again, or any writing tool that has to be installed on a computer. Writely loads very quickly and it is simple. It’s doesn’t include all the crap that comes with every installation of Microsoft Windows and Office. The whole user interface is much more intuitive than other services, even more intuitive than Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.

There are no reason to work offline, but as I have stated there are a lot of reasons to work online. The only drawback I can see is that your internet connection is down, but I don’t see it as a problem since there is always a place, personally where I can go to get what I need online. Online productivity is unlikely to overcome the likes of Microsoft Office, because there offline access to a file will probably always be a requirement to users, even though is less convenient to share and edit collectively.The likes of Writely definitely solve the sharing and editing collectively part, but aside from that, most users aren’t interested.

Personnally, the reasons I use Writely is because I can have access to it wherever I go and I have one less Microsoft product (the other ones just only Windows and Age of Empires). Besides, I would rather have only my browser opened than my browser and some text editing tool.

Filed by Long. at April 29th, 2006 under Internet, Software