> On 9/7/06, Ling SM wrote: > > > > Openoffice writer (have not tried its preadseet, etc), you > can export > > direct to pdf. Free, and as it is, it is more than enough > to replace > > microsoft office. > > "More than enough"? This might be true for personal use. Lots > of company invested heavily on customized templates and applications. > > To me both MS Office and OpenOffice are bloated... Much > simpler application will do the job for most people and most > companies. But people keep updating their software and > hardware following the steps of Microsoft/Intel and others... You can't have "it's bloated" and "customised templates"... What is bloated? It's the old 20% rule, you only use 20% of a package, but everyone uses a different 20%. Find any review of a word processor on the web. You will find two thing common to all of them, one is "does this product suck?", and right before that you'll find 300 paragraphs on the word count feature. Word count? For anyone who is not a writer (more specifically a journalist), word count is bloat. Journalists care because they have a limited amount of space to fill, any extra gets cut off. If the word count bit sucks or is missing, the product gets a bad review. Period. I don't think Word is bloated. I want styles, outline view, document map, templates, grammar check, versioning, master documents, autocorrect, mail merge (especially to email, that's handy), fields (nice if database actually worked), tables (with gritted teeth), columns, bookmarks, sections, security, macros and all the other stuff no-one else uses. Word count can go, that's just useless bloat :). In truth, I think most people would be happy with WordPad. Tony -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist