Unique advantage of Writer documents in education

[carpenpa]

I produce numerous documents for trainees at our hospital as part of their education program. As I use a Mac I have the option of using MS word, iWork Pages or OOO writer. Having tried out all three extensively I have found writer has the best feature set for this purpose. The first advantage is in linking to other documents. Only writer documents can link to both website files or other locally stored files opening them in their native application (usually a pdf). (Word will link to a pdf file but then complain that it can not open that type of file and pages will only link to locally stored pages files). Writer and work will create an index but this feature is missing in Pages. Writer will insert hyperlinks in the table of contents (could not see how to do this as easily in word) and these are preserved if you then export as a pdf (but not if you print to pdf). Also, when it comes to collaborating with others on a shared document I prefer the display of comments / notes in writer and pages to the format adopted in word.
So for me, writer blows away the competition in word processing. It is a pity that Impress is still a bit of a weak link.

[Hagar Delest]

Writer will insert hyperlinks in the table of contents (could not see how to do this as easily in word) and these are preserved if you then export as a pdf (but not if you print to pdf).

The print to PDF is a virtual printer that cannot understand the tags used by the application for the hyperlinks. Note that the hyperlinks in PDF is indeed a great advantage of Writer. Can't be done in MS Word (except with Adobe PDF suite perhaps).

[jennyshred]

Yes, in terms of popularity writer is still not in the dominant position with regards to word processing. As you have said you are producing lots of paper works for your interns regularly, so it is just necessary for you to be adept in all kinds of word processing. But somehow not everybody are into that position that is why they get easily satisfied with what is just available like MS Word.