Have never really paid much attention to desktop suites, but built my first linux box and threw Open Office www.openoffice.org onto the computer and it's awsome. I don't see why all small/mid size companies and individuals would ever buy MS again. I'm just as happy to download a better office suite for free than to buy one for $200. Really getting sick of microsoft.....

Because if you would have a company, I'm sure you would like to read and write the same documents that your subcontractors/clients/etc use.

Last I used OpenOffice it was far from perfect in dealing with MS formats, and if you have a business you can't send a customer a document with strange formatting. So you use MS Office, because all the other companies and clients are using it.

It does suck that MS doesn't release their document specs, but it's just the way it is.

You're right : that's why more and more compagnies and administrations drop M$ Office and use instead OOo.
OOo format will be the official format in Europe.

I never tried using Open Office, but I heard it's pretty cool. I only ever used Microsoft Office, which suits me well enough.

I use OpenOffice.org because it is free. It is important to note that I only use it for word processing; it is nice that it can save into the MSWord format that is standard. Although I have not test OOo's version of Powerpoint, Excell... I would not trust OOo with important projects in those area's simply because compatibility with MS's programs is not guaranteed.

I have used openoffice.
But others use ms word, so I have to use word.
Once a time I write a document in OpenOffice, and opened it in word.
The ms word die!
And even reinstall ms office is useless.
At end , I reinstall the whole system.
Terrible.

The Asian language support of OpenOffice still needs improvement. But for European users, I think OpenOffice is the best substitute for M$ Office. OpenOffice even comes with integrated pdf maker, which means that you don’t even have to pay for Acrobat. And there is a swf generated, also saving you money for Flash. OpenOffice has another advantage: It is compact. Unlike the gigantic M$ Office, it can be run on older computers.

Actually, I don’t really see why some businesses still let M$ suck their revenue. People are already using the LAMP system, Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP gives the best server platform in a low cost. It is more stable and more efficient than M$ server 2003, so why spend money to buy something of an inferior quality? Perhaps so businesses are too lazy to adapt to a new platform. But their laziness costs them money, and they will be urged to change soon…

wow, pdf maker is integrated into openoffice?
Good news, now I can turn back to OpenOffice.
Asian language support is just well for use.

We buy windows because there is some service deveopped in windows.
There is not enough linux programmer here.

Can you convert open office documents to LaTeX. In word if you use Mathtype when you can set the preferences so when you save to text the formulas will be converted to LaTex. I think some of the Visual Basic Macro features of words could be handy if I better new how to utilize them. Does open office have similar features?