A couple of people have mentioned using the free software called Open Office in place of Microsoft Word, so it occurred to me that people might be interested in knowing how the two compare in use. This is by no means a full review of either package. Rather, it is just a few observations I've made while trying out Open Office. I will add to this topic as I come across other points worth noting.

Microsoft Word is referred to henceforth as simply Word. The version used in this comparison was Word 2003, and was used on Windows XP.

Open Office Writer (the word-processing element of Open Office) is referred to henceforth as simply Writer. The version used in this comparison was from Open Office 3.1, and has been used on both Windows XP and Mac OS. It appears at first glance to be functionally identical on both platforms.

Comments: Word allows a comment to be associated with an entire block of text, and shows the association by highlighting the entire block and linking it with a balloon-style comment in the margin. Writer shows the comments, but does not highlight the entire block. Furthermore, when it re-saves a Word document that had such comments, the association with the block seems to be broken, and the comment seems simply to be linked to the end of the block. This sometimes results in a loss of clarity as to exactly what the comment is about.

Bookmarks: These are slightly less intuitive to use in Writer than in Word. For example, to jump to a bookmark in Word, you just type Ctrl-G (or select Edit>Go To... from the menu, if you prefer using a mouse), select Bookmark as the thing you want to jump to, and select the name of the relevant bookmark from a dropdown. Ctrl-G doesn’t work in Writer (either on Windows or Mac OS), nor is there an obvious menu option. You have to open up the Navigator window, then find Bookmarks in its list and click on the bookmark you want. It is also harder to move the position of a bookmark to a new place in Writer. In Word, you just say Insert>Bookmark..., select an existing bookmark and click Add, and this redefines that bookmark to be wherever the cursor is currently located. In Writer you have to delete the bookmark first, then re-type its name. I often use bookmarks to save my place when I’m doing a read-through of my work, so ease of their use is quite important to me.

File size: For some reason, the Word-format “.doc” files saved by Writer are sometimes about twice the size of their Word counterpart. I have a story that I originated in Word, then loaded into Writer to work on using my MacBook (and Mac OS). When I saved the file back, it was twice as big as it started. Loading it into Word and re-saving it produced something about the same size as it originally was. (This doubling of file size doesn’t happen all the time, and I haven’t seen it happen enough to suggest the circumstances under which it might occur.)

"Symbol" use: (Referring to non-alphanumeric, non-punctuation characters - in this case the copyright symbol.) The first time I loaded my document into Writer on Mac OS, I immediately noticed that the copyright symbol had turned into a strange character that resembled that "bed" logo that's used on road signs to mean that a hotel is available. I changed it back to a copyright symbol, but then when I copied the file back to my Windows system and opened the file in Word, the symbol had changed yet again - to a little black heart. I changed it back, and the next time I loaded the file into Writer on Mac OS, it was okay. So I don't know whether the first time was some kind of glitch, or a genuine difference between the two packages or the two operating systems. Or maybe my computers "knew" that the story had an element of romance in it (beds and hearts, you know).

Alex Hazel

I have a query about Word vs Open

I use word at work, open at home. There is always a difference in the wordcount. Open is always more than word.

I've identified one cause, if you change anything in open it saves it in the wordcount until you 'accept' the changes. This accounts for some of the wordcount difference. Any ideas why?

It's not normally too much of a problem but it is for my nanowrimo wordcount and also with my non-fic book as I have to write within a specific wordcount.

Without doing some investigation of my own, I can't answer your question with certainty. However, I can offer a couple of thoughts.

Firstly, have you tried checking the wordcount in Word with change tracking enabled? I know, from recent software development work that I've been doing, that pending changes within a document can result in both sets of text (i.e. the original and the modified versions) being visible to software that is looking at it. This suggests that, if Word is tracking changes, it might also give a higher word count before you accept the changes compared with after. Can you turn off change tracking in Open Office? I haven't tried that aspect of the software yet.

Secondly, a few years ago I wrote myself a little program to give me a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of word count. I discovered, then, that the word count that was being reported to my software (by Word) was different to what I was seeing when I used the word count facility from within Word itself. What seemed to be reported to my software included all punctuation marks (i.e. a full-stop or a comma was counted as a "word"). I had to get around this by making my software count the spaces between the words. I wonder if this "feature" of Word is somehow affecting the way Open Office sees the word count? I don't know what the Word file format looks like internally, but maybe it makes the counting of words difficult to do with accuracy. If so, the fact that Open Office uses the same format would affect its ability to count words accurately, too.

One final thought: what versions of Word and Open Office are you using? Word 2007 has some significant (and rather irritating) differences from earlier versions, including a completely different file format.

Alex

I've just done a comparison between Word 2003, Word 2007, Open Office 3.1 on Windows, and Open Office 3.1 on Mac OS. I established the following:

Word 2003 and 2007 give the same word count. They both allow you to specify whether the count should include footnotes and endnotes, and by default it does. The statistics displayed also show the number of pages, the number of characters (both with and without spaces), the number of paragraphs and the number of lines. These were all consistent between both versions of Word.

Open Office 3.1 gives a higher word count than Word, and it's the same count on both Windows and Mac OS. It doesn't say whether this includes footnotes and endnotes. There is also a character count shown, but it doesn't say whether it includes spaces or not. This count, too, was higher than Word's count of "Characters (with spaces)".

All of these packages thought the document had been modified after counting the words, even though I had done nothing except count words.

I could not see any obvious reason for the difference in word count between Word and Open Office. They were all looking at exactly the same file, and the file wasn't altered (or even re-saved when prompted) between counts. Here are the statistics, in case you can see anything obvious:

Word: 41,583 words; 186,615 characters (no spaces); 227,014 characters (with spaces); 1,252 paragraphs; 3,665 lines; 154 pages.

Open Office: 42,735 words; 227,110 characters

Open Office therefore sees 1152 more words, and 96 more characters than Word. If anything, the latter is even more inexplicable than the former. (I don't know how significant this is, but the word count difference is exactly 12 times the character count difference.)

The only suggestion I can offer is that the two pieces of software have different definitions as to what constitutes a "word". The document I was using also had comments in it, that I had added while reading it through. I wonder whether Open Office is counting the words in those, whereas Word is not? Or maybe it is counting hyphenated words as two words each?

Alex

That's interesting about word counts - I use open office at home and word at work but had never thought of comparing the counts.

Open office you can choose to include the headers and footers, but it only includes a recurring header once (if that makes sense) but I don't know about footnotes. I wonder if it recognises single punctuation marks eg - for instance, as a word, where Word doesn't? I probably use 1000 dashes in the course of a doc, and if you asterisk between scene changes that total could be higher.

The extra characters - could this be that Open Office is counting blank carriage returns as a character where Word doesn't?

Also through printing at work and writing at home I had noticed that the pagination changes quite drastically sometimes, which is frustrating when you've been asked to send a certain number of pages. I can only assume that the open office doc file doesn't transfer the page formatting quite correctly to Word.

[off to investigate further!!]

This is fascinating - I use Open on my netbook, and do find that things get royally chewed up if I transfer a document to and from between it and my desktop where I have Word (and these days 2007).

Word count matters crucially, of course, in competitions. I'm afraid I can't remember the details, but a friend compared the same story across seven or eight word processors a few years ago - only a 5000 word story, as I recall - and found a difference in the count of up to 10 or 15 either way. Which of course could take you under or over the limit. And with online submissions become more common, it's all to easy for them to check, using some other programme than yours...

Emma

The first time I experimented with Open Office, using one of my stories, I noticed a few inconsistencies between it and Word. Unfortunately, I didn't make a note of what they were at the time. I was more careful this time, hence the topic.

I wonder whether anyone else has noticed other differences between them?

My reason for trying out Open Office again is that I've basically given up on Word after having to use version 2007 at work. Microsoft have mucked about with the user interface so much that I can't find where half the features are buried now. You can't buy Word 2003 any longer, and that's the last version whose user interface is recognisable to anyone from a Word 97/2000 background.

Alex

I'm just doing a search to see if anyone else out there in cyberland knows why the two packages give different word counts. I came across the following thread on the subject:

http://www.nanowrimo.org/fr/node/3415857

It doesn't really add much to what's been said here. I'll carry on googling (now there's a good idea for a film title )

I also found the following article about differences in general between Word and Writer:

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/OOoAuthors_User_Manual/Migration_Guide/Writer_and_Word

More anon.

Alex

I found this other thread on nanowrimo.org:

http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/node/3403266

There are two suggestions that seem likely candidates, although other possibilities are mentioned there:

Firstly, apparently older versions of Open Office had a bug whereby they counted hyphenated words as two words. (Hah!)

Secondly, there is apparently a remaining bug which makes it count an opening quote as a separate word. Unfortunately, I can't think of a way of testing this possibility without having to manually count them. Does anyone know of a feature within Word or Writer that will count occurrences of a given character?

Does anyone know whether there is an official definition for how words should be counted? If there is one, and it's reasonably easy to implement, I might be able to find time to put together a little program for doing an accurate word count. Although the consensus from the thread I referred to above seems to be that Word gets it right, and that it's just Open Office that is wrong.

Alex

Maybe not so relevant for non-techies, but open office is lots of fun if you like playing with things. ODT (Writer documents) are actually zip files of XML, so you can write your own export filters in XSL to, for example, convert a screenplay into a series of recording scripts, or to extract all stage directions to a separate file. It can be a bit buggy as OO has some odd ways of managing styles etc. but, if you are a tech nerd or other class of geek that enjoys writing 10000 line scripts with only a single error message for debugging, the possibilities are endless...

ODT (Writer documents) are actually zip files of XML

As are the new ".docx" and ".docm" file formats from Word 2007.

Alex

Secondly, there is apparently a remaining bug which makes it count an opening quote as a separate word. Unfortunately, I can't think of a way of testing this possibility without having to manually count them. Does anyone know of a feature within Word or Writer that will count occurrences of a given character?

Well I just opened Open Office and typed in a new document "Time for tea." Sure enough it counted 4 words on the word count. So on this basis it seems as if every single chunk of dialogue does indeed add an extra word to the count, as per the nano thread.

Unfortunately I can't think of any way to count the number of pieces of dialogue short of going through manually. You can't even search for the " character within open office as far as I can make out - at least when I put it into the "find" engine it returned no matches, even though the doc is full of them.

Looking at the open office support forum the left quote issue is a known bug but as far as I could tell, only in documents originating in word and then resaved in open office.

All my docs are created from scratch in open office (as was the test document I made)... so I'm stumped as to why this is a problem for me. Anyone else find their original open office docs are being affected?

<Added>

I lie - I've just found other threads referring to the bug appearing in scratch docs.

It's still tagged for resolution down the line so at present the only solution seems to be to use single quotes. Or Word. Chiz.

You could use Word to do the word count, and Open Office to do the real work. Of course, that doesn't help anyone who wants to steer clear of Word completely and hasn't got a copy.

Re. searching for the " character: it could be that yours have been turned into "sexed" or "smart" quotes (i.e. the opening and closing ones are made to look as they appear in print). These are different characters to the plain double-quote character, so wouldn't be found with a search for the latter. In this situation, Word will treat the smart versions of the quotes as if they are the plain ones, and will find them. Maybe OO is different.

I just tried using Word's "Find and Replace" facility to search for double-quotes in my document, and selected the "Highlight all items found" option. This gives a count of the number of matches, as well as highlighting all of them. However, it does find both opening and closing quotes, so the count given will be twice the number of opening quotes (assuming I haven't missed a closing quote out anywhere).

Alex

<Added>

I just tried that "Find and Replace" thing in OO. Firstly, as you said it doesn't find the quotes at all. Secondly, even with characters it can find (e.g. the letter "e"), it highlights them but doesn't give a count of how many it found.

So notch up two more differences between Word and Writer.

I am entirely ubuntued so don't have a copy of word at home, it entails emailing a copy to work and counting there, which is an arse. Strangely the weird quirks of open source only make me love it more, and become even more committed, it's like being in a disfunctional relationship, the hate becomes part of the love

I did find a way to count the left quotes in Open Office (not that I'm a total saddo and becoming obsessed by this or anything!)

You're right - they are some sort of smart-version that the search doesn't recognise, but what you have to do (in the unlikely case that anyone else is interested in doing this also) is highlight a double quote in your work, then click on "find".

The "smart quote" character then comes up pre-entered in the search, and you can then search for it. Unfortunately I couldn't find a way to get it to display a tally, so you then have to choose to "replace all" with nothing. A dialogue box flashes up with the number of replacements and you can then either subtract that number mentally or, if you're lazy like me, reapply the word count to the mutilated document, and you get the correct number of words. Then obviously you press "undo" to revert to the properly punctuated doc.

It does recognise the difference between left and right quotes, so the number of replacements is only the number of left quotes, you don't have to divide by two (luckily).

What a palava - and after all this I've discovered that my WIP is 2.5k shorter than I thought! I am not sure whether to celebrate by adding another scene