Twice now I’ve had it hopelessly corrupt a file on me. (What is it they say about “fool me twice, shame on me?”) Saving isn’t enough with this ungodly piece of shit. You need to run ten minute backups of the file you’re working on so that OpenOffice can’t kill it. The latest accomplishment of this pig astounds me: I opened a document and had OO open up a second window, so I could edit one part while looking at another. At some point, I close the window in which I was editing. Poof, the changes I made in that window were erased. You probably think I accidentally deleted something, right? Nope. Going back through the undo history, my changes just weren’t there. Things I’d done before the changes that were lost were undoable, so something fishy clearly happened. You also probably think I stupidly opened two windows using two different instantiations of OO, so that one overwrote the other. I didn’t; I used the “New Window” function. I suspect there is some bug with how OpenOffice handles two windows on the same document.

If this stupid blog does one thing useful, it will be to save just one person from using the complete waste of space that is OpenOffice. I can’t tell you how much I’d be willing to pay for Microsoft Office if I could go back in time and use it instead of OO, but I can tell you it’s a lot more than Microsoft charges for Office. What’s really embarrassing is that using a “community developed” version of office software is exactly the kind of stupid, false economy for which I railed against desktop linux.