Writer vs Word, who comes out the better choice?

[thefonebug]

I miss having the function available in Open Office that auto-completed words that I had typed before, a custom dictionary. I was in medical school and taking notes on my laptop (when no one else carried a PC, and hardly any phones back then) which made easy work of rearranging notes into a coherent outline, adding hyperlinks for demos referenced by the professor, and putting things in order if the instructor forgot to mention something and added it later in the lecture. Also, scribbling as fast as you can with pen and paper can make even your own handwriting difficult to make sense of. With a laptop, you have the option to look things up and adjust your notes for accuracy. In no time, the entire class was asking me to email my notes to them that evening. I was happy to help. It is a real time-saver.

What I really miss, and I've asked forever if and when MS would put this feature in Word. It's the autocomplete I mentioned. In medicine, there are a lot of big and complicated words. If I began to type "cardiopulmonary" for example, I would just get the 'c 'and 'a' typed and "cardiopulmonary" would pop up and I just hit enter and kept right on taking notes. Forever, I have used Open Office until last year. The laptop I bought had Office 365 on it and it hasn't cost me a thing so I began using it, believing it was probably superior and now I could benefit by using it and not losing money to get it.

So that's got me thinking. Please advise if I need to put this post in another area. Is Word really superior to Writer? Can anyone give some specific examples of why Word is a superior product to Writer by Open Office?

I'm considering going back to the free and open-source option but I'd like to know what I may be sacrificing by leaving Word. Also, what are some disadvantages to Word that I'd be thrilled with not dealing with if I switch back to Open Office?

On the flip side of the coin, what are the shortcomings of Open Office that might change how I feel once I begin using it?

In the past, the distant past, it was an issue to compose a document in Open Office and save it as a Word compatible file type only to have the people you sent it to reply back that the file was just nonsense as if corrupted, it did not translate well at all. I am pretty sure this is not even an issue anymore using the latest versions of Word and Writer.

I would appreciate any feedback I can use to choose which piece of software I would be happier with. Again, tell me if this post should be posted elsewhere, I was just using my last post as a jumping off point.

Thank you, everyone.

Kevin

"And In The End, The Love You Take Is Equal To The Love You Make."

[John_Ha]

I am surprised word completion is not included with MS Word.

Check out AutoHotKey which works in any application and can be used to replace "what you type" with "what you want to appear". For example, I type "zzad", where no normal word begins with zz so this must be something for AutoHotKey to change, and AutoHotKey replaces it with my address. So you define "zzhae" to be "haemoglobin" - the command in the file of definitions is :*:zzhae::haemoglobin

You can download a file of common mis-spellings so that AutoHotKey corrects, for example, "thnaks" to "thanks".

See [Tutorial] Differences between Writer and MS Word files for a discussion of file formats.

As for whether MS Word is better / worse than Writer - it seems to be a personal choice. I have used AOO for 20+ years and I have been extremely happy with it. I was obliged to use MS Word at work but I far preferred AOO.

[erbsenzahl]

Hi Kevin,

there is an autocompletion in OpenOffice or LibreOffice. You only have to ask for. In this forum, e.g...

I would appreciate any feedback I can use to choose which piece of software I would be happier with.
Is Word really superior to Writer?

It is on you to decide that. As you mentioned in your above comment Word and Writer have some advantages and some "disadvantages", it depends on you to valuate them for your own gusto. It also depends on your needs. There are some cases, in fact, where the use of Word is more suitable than the use of writer, for example if you get some forms in DOC or DOCX format, it may be impossible to edit them satisfactorily. In the other direction you may see similiar phenomenons if editing a Writer dokument on Word...

Fact is that OpenOffice/LibreOffice are for free and developed by a free community but not Microsoft Office. If being free is a grave value for you the answer of your questions is a simple one...

An English saying is, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, why not thoroughly doing that for yourself and then answer your question for yourself? Then you may ask others for refining your conclusion.

"And In The End, The Effort You Take Is Equal To The Effort You Make."

Cheers

Edit: By the way, why did you publish your question double the way (viewtopic.php?f=7&t=89602)? So important? So urgent? Any sensible reason?

[Hagar Delest]

I use MS Word and Writer at work (for slightly different purposes) for rather intensive work and main main comments are (not thinking very long so I may miss other points):
- Writer is much consistent for layout (especially headers/footers), for styles and lists (bullets)
- Writer is easier for text selection: it allows a per character selection whereas MS Word automatically select whole words, you have to make extra mouse movements to deselect characters
- MS Word is much more powerful for tables, it allows very complex layouts (sometimes giving weird results however), whereas Writer is rather basic for tables

Edit: Topics merged.

[john1320]

MS Word is much more powerful for tables, it allows very complex layouts [...], whereas Writer is rather basic for tables

Can you upload some examples of such complex tables?

[esperantisto]

- MS Word is much more powerful for tables, it allows very complex layouts …

Even a very basic thing such as text orientation is much better in Word text tables — simply right-click on a cell and you have a context menu to quickly define text rotation (and text alignment too). In Writer, I can’t rotate a cell text by 90 degrees counter-clockwise and keep line wrapping. I attach a DOCX file here to illustrate, see the highlighted cells.

[john1320]

Even a very basic thing such as text orientation is much better in Word text tables — simply right-click on a cell and you have a context menu to quickly define text rotation (and text alignment too). In Writer, I can’t rotate a cell text by 90 degrees counter-clockwise and keep line wrapping. I attach a DOCX file here to illustrate, see the highlighted cells.

Yes, now I understand.

Personally, for me, the main problems of Writer are bugs (however, I haven't worked with Word a lot, possibly there are a lot of bugs too) and a lack of smart "reading mode".

[Villeroy]

I don't know what a smart reading mode is. When I want to read a long Writer document, I either create a PDF from it or turn on read-only mode (Ctrl+Shift+M).

[John_Ha]

I miss having the function available in Open Office that auto-completed words that I had typed before, a custom dictionary.

See Some rules for Autocorrect which states that MS Word has AutoCorrect which can probably be used for autocomplete.

Google word autocomplete for more information.

[thefonebug]

I.m sorry. I followed your link but I did not see anything about autocomplete, just autocorrect. The posts focused on importing from MS Word to OO.

[John_Ha]

The point was that you can use AutoCorrect as an AutoComplete ...

I miss having the function available in Open Office [but not in MS Word] that auto-completed words that I had typed before ...

... but you don't need to because, if you Google word autocorrect you get lots of hits showing you how to use AutoCorrect in MS Word - eg see image below.

If this solves the problem, please view your first post in this thread and click the Edit button (top right in the post) and add [Solved] in front of the subject.

[thefonebug]

Thank you for that. I googled autocorrect and followed numerous links including MS Office pages. I don't see what your screenshot shows, specifically the tab AUTOTEXT. That seems to be my issue. What version of Word is shown in your screen capture? I'm using Office 2016 Pro and here is what I see when I follow the directions (File>Options>Proofing):

[John_Ha]

See https://word.tips.net/T001750_Using_Aut ... _Tips.html