Word Unviewer

[davidn]

I find it difficult to conceive just how installing Word Viewer (and then the mountain of compatibility packs on top of that when I realized that it couldn't actually View anything much) made Windows completely lose my program and icon associations for TXT files and wouldn't allow me to put them back until it was scrubbed from my hard drive. Microsoft have a unique collective ability to do things not quite as well as any software that's available for free.

Now I've just got to see if I can put DOCs back to OpenOffice again as well. It's not perfect by any means, but at least you can put it on your computer without ill-effects.

Comments

[starfishchris.livejournal.com]

I find OpenOffice quite awful to use. To be fair to Microsoft, at least they know how to design an interface worth a damn - 99% of open source fails miserably at that, with rare exceptions like Firefox. The epitome of their mentality seems to be reflected by Gnome and KDE - absolutely awful and unintuitive 'one way to do it' mentality vs. everything you could possibly want to change, hidden in a 500-page-long preferences dialog. Also, this. (http://xkcd.com/619/)

On that note, I'm going to install Windows 7 now.

[davidn]

I'm not quite sure just how much of Microsoft's interface niceness just comes from my familiarity with them... for example, even though it's meant to be easy and nice and all that, I find OSX very... distracting to use because I keep on trying to do things that just don't carry over to it (the biggest missing part that I've noticed is that you can't open files or pull them around at all from a File Open dialog - you can do one thing only, and that's open them in the application that the dialog belongs to, while Windows' just acts as a miniature Explorer).

Nevertheless, I admit that I think that Microsoft Word is better than OpenOffice (dot org) Writer.. nice as it is to have a free alternative, I think I would probably struggle using it exclusively at this point.