Have you used the publisher equivalent? It's some of the most unstable Officey application I've ever used. Objects on the page would randomly disappear and the program had to be manually killed several times while my team and I were working on a poster for our research topic. All of them, including a huge open source/Linux proponent, commented on how trashy Open Office was.
Maybe it was an out of date version and we were all unaware of it?
What annoyances are you referring to? I'd rather have things like clippy (which you can trivially turn off) and have the software work (most of the time... I'm not saying it's perfectly stable) than unstable software that doesn't have any of said "annoyances."
I've never used the publisher thing, so I can't comment there.
I have a lot of problems with Word and Excel, but to name a few that really get me:
- Windowing is totally broken (it's a bad combination of MDI and non-MDI). Excel is worse, but Word annoys me too
- Copying files between Windows/Mac versions of Office often causes random crashes
- If you click in the wrong place on a "comment" (which we use a lot), it scrolls you to the top of the document
- The "undo" stack on Excel is threaded between the documents, so if you edit document 1, then document 2, and need to undo changes in document 1, you also have to undo your document 2 changes
- The "undo" stack on Excel is cleared when you save a file. So if you make a change and save it, then realize you screwed something up, you're 100% out of luck. You can't undo past the save so you've lost all hope of getting it back.
- The way copying/pasting on Excel is totally non-intuitive. I can't count how many times I copy text, type a header for the new text (such as "Top 10 attacks") and try to paste, only to find out I can't. This is because if you make any changes, your copy disappears. You also can't cut/paste special; you have to copy, paste-special, and delete the original.
I use Word and Excel every day at work, it's a necessary part of my job. And believe me, those few major things (and a whole bunch of little minor things) is a great way to make a good computer user (one who's used to the conventions that Word and Excel break) go totally insane.
