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So I’ve opened Open Office Writer and Microsoft Word 2003 side by side here for the purposes of this review. Writer is clocking in at about 50mb of RAM while surprisingly Word 2003 is only taking up 23mb. This comparison remains favorable to Word when I open up a document with a few embedded pictures as well. Word moves up to 32mb and Writer jumps to 71mb. In Writer’s favor it returns to 62mb when I close the document, whereas Word stays at 32mb even after closing the document. I suppose if you have a tight resource budget this may be a point against Writer for you, but I have a laptop that was forged by Hephaestus and imbued with the power of the ancients. It fears no applications. So a few measly megabytes of RAM here or there don’t concern me.

Moving along to features, as the insistent red underlining keeps telling me Writer has an automatic spell checker. Word greets me with the same red underlining whenever I insist on typing “automagical” as well so the two seem neck and neck on that point. Moving from left to right across the top of the menu bar both can create new documents, both can open existing documents. Writer can open up about 3 times the number of documents that Word can. This doesn’t do a whole lot for me, but could be handy for anyone who does a lot of work with strange file formats. Both can save documents, both can save as “.doc” files and xml, and html, and all that. So that seems to be a wash. Both can send your document as an email through your default email client. Now I come to the first real difference I’ve seen. Open Office Writer can save my document directly as a PDF. I don’t need any Adobe programs, I don’t need anything special. I just click the little PDF button and TADA! My document is now a PDF. Word is woefully lacking here.

Both can print and preview, both have automagical spell check. Word has a “Research” button which doesn’t know who Shakespeare is. That seems to be a tool of very limited utility. All it wants to do is translate things from French to English for me. An interesting feature but not one I find particularly useful. Both have the Format paintbrush, both can embed links and tables, and both have built-in drawing tools. Writer has the text formatting tools in a tool bar on the next line, Word appears to have the same bar with identical tools. Both seem to have almost identical features. I’ve yet to find anything other than printing to PDF that separates the two. In fact, except for some minor differences in the look of the icons I doubt most people could tell the two apart.

One last thing to compare, Suggested Retail price of Microsoft Word: $229. Suggested Retail Price of Open Office Writer: $0.

To me it looks like a clear victory for Open Office Writer. The two products are almost completely identical. They read all of the same formats and Writer can export your document directly to PDF, yet Word costs $229 more. Absurd!

*This Post was written in Open Office Writer