MS Office 1, OpenOffice 0
So last night (earlier this morning) I need to write an envelope. My handwriting is atrocious at 1 p.m., and it’s 12 hours worse at 1 a.m., so I turn to my word processor to do it for me.
On my current, new, laptop, I don’t have MS Office installed, but I do have OpenOffice 2, so I fire that up to see what it can do.
I find my way down to the envelopes composer, type in the addresses, and then try as I might, I cannot find the exact envelope orientation I need for my printer. I find one that, by all rights, should work, put an envelope in the feeder, and click print.
What happens next is that the envelope feeds through, then a plain piece of paper gets the envelope text—evidently, the envelopes are printed only after the main text (of which there is none). Two or three iterations of trying to get the right order (remember, it is 1 a.m.!) and I throw up my hands in despair. Why can’t it just take the envelope first?
I go to the other computer in the office, with MS Word 2007 installed, and go to the Envelopes wizard. It looks like the one I’ve used countless times since I started using it in Office 2000, enter my addresses, select the correct envelope orientation, insert the envelope in, and go. Time start to finish is about 2 minutes, including changing the default fonts for the envelopes. (I’m no fan of Arial to be honest.)
It isn’t that OpenOffice does it so wrong, or can’t be convinced to do it right, it’s that Microsoft made it easy and straightforward to do it right—if I want the envelope to be attached to the document, I can have that, or I can just print it out by itself. (There’s a big “print” button there on the envelope wizard.)
Some things, believe it or not, Microsoft does right.