Steve Litchfield

I really had had it with Microsoft Office this time. Specifically the monster that it Outlook. Slow, over-complex and cumbersome. Into Windows Control panel I went and clicked on Programs | MS Office | Change. I unchecked Outlook and away went the routines. After two minutes of crunching, it popped up a message that I needed to insert my original Office CD. I guess I could have done, but I was utterly outraged by having to insert a CD in order to install some bit of middleware in order to uninstall an application. What kind of software madness is this? In fact I was so annoyed that I felt compelled to remove the whole Office Suite in disgust. After all, Word, Excel and Powerpoint had gone years ago - I use Open Office very happily - but enough is enough and I wanted Office's bloat and inelegance out of my life and off my hard disk. I went back into Control panel and this time opted for 'Uninstall'. And waited. And waited. 15 minutes later, the progress bar had reached 50%. ...

Interesting to see ex-Microsofter Johansson ditching a DRM-heavy Microsoft app in favour of a non-Windows DRM-free solution for playing back multimedia . Especially interesting since I'd been struggling to get anywhere with Microsoft Office 2007's stupid approach to first 'activation' of its own trial version and then unfriendly handling of legacy Office 2003 files. After my teacher wife and I had torn our hair out in frustration, I simply installed the free OpenOffice 2.3 and peace was restored, with files being opened and saved properly - and we also knew where to find most of the functions rather than playing the new Office 2007 guessing game.

Great to see Google release the third component of their free online Office Suite - try it here . In my test, it opened a large test Powerpoint presentation perfectly: With Google also giving away StarOffice, and with OpenOffice itself, all free, who on earth wants to pay Microsoft hundreds of dollars/pounds any longer for their bloated Office suite?

Heartening news to hear that the one OpenOffice-dismmissing IBM has signed up to help develop OpenOffice . I've always been a fan of OO and have hated the way Microsoft make it so expensive for ordinary folk to do basic word processing and spreadsheets and with horrendous activation schemes. And now OO looks set to go from strength to strength.