An Obstacle to Going Microsoft-free

I recently found a major obstacle to going Microsoft-free. I could switch to Linux, if I had the time to fool with it, at the moment, but it appears I am stuck with Microsoft Word, still. While I really like OpenOffice.org 2.0 (OOo), it doesn’t have native support for creating tables of authorities (a.k.a., tables of citations). That feature is only really of interest to attorneys, but, of course, that is what I am training to be. Once I realized this, I also realized that OOo doesn’t support tables of contents, when reading a .doc file.

Of course, I still haven’t found anything that really replaces Outlook, either, since I use more than just the messaging features (in fact, I use the calendar, notes, contacts, and more, quite heavily) and must be able to sync all this info with a handheld.

Unfortunately, as frustrating as I find MS products, I think I’m stuck with Office, at least, until OOo or some alternative catches up and integrates much better support for other major file formats like .doc.