Using OpenOffice for a Master's thesis:

In case someone is wavering, uncertain whether to commit to OpenOffice for a
large project, perhaps my experience completing a Master's thesis in geology
using OpenOffice may convince them.  I just completed my final thesis: it was
600 pages long and included 830 color photographs, 171 color figures, and 16
tables.  I carried it all with me in a 57 mB file on a USB key in my pocket.  I
used OpenOffice to edit it on a Windows 2000 machine at work, a Windows XP
machine at school, a Mac OS/X laptop, and a Fedora Linux machine at home.  Under
each operating system OpenOffice opened the same file and edited it flawlessly.

I tried different packages before choosing OpenOffice for this task: 

Word processors: MS-Word was unable to handle my graphics properly and it often
cut off printed text and graphics at the right page margin for no reason.  Word
also fought me tooth and nail as I tried to format pages that followed my
graduate school's guidelines.  It honored the page margins I set up but refused
to put the requisite number of lines on the page.  OpenOffice gave me more
places to tweak page and paragraph settings, and I ultimately used a line
spacing of 197% to make my double-spaced 11 point text lines end at the proper
bottom margin.  I tried Mac-specific word processors (AppleWorks and Nisus
Writer) but they were unstable, quitting without warning after I attempted edits
that moved around inserted photos.

I discovered that OpenOffice was exceptionally adept at redefining the keyboard.
 I carry a lot of mental baggage from WordStar and other antique editors, and
with the amount of typing I had to do I wanted to be able to use familiar
keyboard combinations to move around in the document, delete things, etc. 
OpenOffice let me define a pleasant hybrid of old and new keyboard combinations,
and a public domain utility let me move the Control key back up to just left of
the “a” key, where God intended it.  Typing was a breeze after that.  I was
pleasantly surprised that I could move the same keyboard redefinition file from
one operating system to another without change.

Spreadsheets: Microsoft Excel was good at creating trend lines in XY charts, but
a bug prevented x-axis labels on my charts from printing after I tipped them at
45 degrees.  The OpenOffice spreadsheet suffered from no such problems.  I wound
up using OpenOffice for most charts because it was so well integrated with the
Draw package (see below).

Graphics: I planned to use Canvas and Illustrator on the Mac, but they, like my
Mac-specific word processors, had a tendency to quit without warning.  I had
started out using Canvas to adjust the contrast of the photos, but discovered
that OpenOffice revealed a bitmap-editing toolbar whenever I inserted a photo. 
It let me adjust the contrast as I positioned the photo, saving a tremendous
amount of hassle.  The drawing package in OpenOffice also proved competent at
handling file formats and saved my bacon on one occasion.  I needed a
landscape-oriented illustration to appear on a page with a landscape-oriented
caption, but with a portrait-oriented page number.  I know there must be a
proper way to do this in OpenOffice Writer, but the quick solution I hit upon
was to type the caption in OpenOffice Draw, rotate it 90 degrees, then copy and
paste it into Writer.  I'll find a better way someday, but this simple technique
allowed me to meet a critical deadline.

Other pluses: I had to provide draft copies to my professors during the
inevitable revision process.  The office color printer took a full day to print
the thesis with its appendix full of color photos, so printing a complete copy
each time I submitted a fresh draft to each one of my advisers wasn't practical.
 The solution I hit upon was to print the first 130 pages (where most of the
revisions were occurring), and to provide a PDF file on CDROM that contained the
entire thesis and all images.  Creating a PDF in OpenOffice was painless—they
even include a toolbar icon for it.  I also liked the fact that none of my
thesis advisers could directly edit the thesis in PDF format (leaving me in sole
control of the final document).

I did not use OpenOffice's bibliography database, because I could not figure out
how to make it duplicate the formats I needed.  I also learned early on that
choosing fonts specific to a given operating system is a bad idea if you plan to
edit the same file on alien machines.  I wish that the help files in OpenOffice
were fleshed out a bit more, but I have to admit that I usually found answers
online with little searching.  Jean Weber's book on OpenOffice.org Writer
(O'Reilly Community Press) cleared up much of my confusion about page templates.  

It is nice to know that, after taking a couple of years of my life to create a
document, it now exists in a non-proprietary format compatible with any
operating system!

-Scott T. Schad