My major gripe with Open Office, though, has always been it’s super slow start up time. I honestly used this as an excuse for not writing on many occasions. Instead, I would waste my time looking for a different word processor that would start up faster and still feel as solid and easy to use as OO (and be free). I never found one.

And now I don’t have to.

In Open Office 3.2 (see list of features), they’ve reduced the time it takes to open up a document from around 10 seconds to just about 6. And often times it feels like less than that. And even more importantly, it feels fast enough that I know I won’t have to wait for it to start up just to get to work.

An Aside

I just wanted to add that the reason I use Open Office instead of Word even though I have Word installed and registered on my computer is because I’m using a work computer. I use it for all my personal computing (only when I’m not working, of course), but if, for some reason, I were to lose the use of this computer as my writing instrument, I would be able to replace it cheaply and easily. I could get a cheap laptop for $300, download Open Office, download my files from DropBox, and be off and writing.