Multiple readers pointed out, more politely than necessary, that OpenOffice does in fact have a Title Case menu item. I mentioned in my Anybody But Microsoft column that it didn’t because that’s not one of the options in the menu under Format > Change Case, as are Upper Case and Lower Case. However, OpenOffice puts Title Case under Format > Character > Font Effects (tab) > Effects dropdown > Title. Oh, you can also find it by highlighting some text and hitting F11 to open the Styles and Formatting popup. This is handy for some things, but Title Case is way down a long list of options. Let this be a lesson to the Microsoft haters: just because someone isn’t Microsoft doesn’t mean they’re smarter than Microsoft. I contend OpenOffice dropped the ball here, but maybe they can fix it quickly.
Why do I say hiding the Title Case like this is stupider than Microsoft? Because OpenOffice already has the menu real estate reserved for case changes. It would be one thing if there were no Format > Case options and OpenOffice forced you to use the F11 Style popup menu. But since they have Upper Case and Lower Case on a menu item, why not Title Case? Group decisions rarely mean great decisions. Secondly, several readers pointed out that OpenOffice uses more system resources than Microsoft Word. Absolutely true. When I open several documents in OpenOffice I may be using as much as 150MB according to Windows Task Manager. I’m now testing AbiWord, another free word processor that’s an excellent Word replacement, and two large open documents require 93MB. Microsoft Word with two short documents only takes 36MB. AbiWord is more efficient than OpenOffice but has fewer features. Of course, OpenOffice and AbiWord fans point out that Microsoft does the resource reporting, and they don’t trust Microsoft. Some also believe Microsoft continues to leverage undocumented code in Windows to make their own applications run better. I can’t say if either is true, but I can say many people believe this. One critical difference between Word and OpenOffice and AbiWord? Only two of those three excellent word processors run on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh systems. Hint: neither product name starts with a “w” or came from Microsoft. Soon I’ll test some commercial options to Word and let you know what I find.
