Star Office and Superglue

Amazon is a strong supporter of open source projects and so a Microsoft fan like me has to struggle a bit getting used to Firefox and Staroffice (Think about the looks I get when I ask Windows instead of Linux). Now, as a Manager, all I need is a speardsheet ( can't live without), a text editor and a presentation tool. So I would be delighted as a six year old getting a Chocolate Icecream if MS office is given to me. Somehow it looks like I have to adjust with star office atleast for sometime due to some reason, which I have to find out.

Well... I made up my mind and started using star office spreadsheet. Not that bad ... I had almost all the functions that Excel gave me (though I am yet to try the advanced functions). So happy that I need not go for MS office, I started using the star office text editor. Man...Hatred at first sight ... I hated the damn thing as soon as I opened it just I don't know why. Then again I consoled myself and started typing despite the protest from my fingers. I press Shift+F3 to change the case, CTRL + ] to increase the font, CTRL+SHFT+C to copy the format - Nothing works... Do I need to unlearn all the shortcuts I learned in Word to get used to this damn editor.

When star office has taken care to provide an option of saving the doc in the Word format to prevent the customers from lock-in syndrome ... Wait .. Wait ... What is this lock-in syndrome? Well... Lock-in is how you apply the glue to the customer's back and stick him to your campany's tools ... Its a good way to avoid customers from switching to competitors (in MBA lingo, increasing the switching cost) ... Now the customer knows this and if he sees you running to him with the superglue in your hand, he is going to run away from you ... Get what I mean? If I see that I can save the staroffice documents only in staroffice format, I know that I will be locked in staroffice to edit the documents and I would smell the superglue. So staroffice entices me saying that I can use staroffice but still save in word format ...

Coming back to the point ... What was I saying ... yeah ... staroffice shows as if it is not locking me by giving options to save in word ... but it is indeed locking me by making me unlearn the Word shortcuts and learn their shortcuts ... Now if I have to switch back, again I have to learn and unlearn ... Man ... Sun has to implement the shortcuts atleast to get the poor souls like me ... There may be some options to get the word shortcuts in staroffice but I don't have time to search for that (read the previous post that I am in office only till 6:30 PM) ... So ... Sun... Please save me ... I don't like your superglue ...