Until now, I had somehow missed Microsoft’s "Why Microsoft" videos, explaining why users should choose Microsoft Office over OpenOffice.org. The title of the series alone warns you to expect bias, but you might not expect are the high number of errors, omissions and misleading statements in the videos. In fact, there are so many that it took me over twenty minutes to view the six minute video on Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org Writer, since I had to stop after almost every sentence to take notes about my problems with what was said.
The video’s narrator, Jake Zborowski, a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft, starts by explaining that he is going to show you "a few of the many examples of what you miss when you choose OpenOffice.org over Microsoft Office." He goes on to compare Word and Writer in five areas: styles, visuals, search, spell-checking and grammar, and sharing documents. To make the video more personal, the narrator focuses on the experience of two users, Dave, an OpenOffice.org Writer user, and Holly, an MS Word user.
Styles
Styles are a strange area for the video to focus on, because, on the whole, Word is designed for manual formatting, while Writer is designed for styles. Not only does Writer have far more categories of styles than Word, but each style also contains far more options.
Unsurprisingly, though, these inconvenient facts are not mentioned in the video. Instead, it shows a few seconds of Dave using the Styles and Formatting floating window, and then moving to the toolbar to change a font size manually — something that most people using styles would rarely do.
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