OpenOffice is a joke. Microsoft Office is the gold standard for businesses, and no real company is going to switch over to some open source program that might not be around in a year. Office 2007 is an amazing product, and all indications are that Office 2010 is going to be even better. A perfect complement to the outstanding Windows 7.
Microsoft has been going downhill ever since it decided to FIX Windows 3.11
There were one or two deal breakers and one or two serious annoyances each for me in Calc and Writer. Can’t remember all of them but one example was searching on non-printing characters (paragraph mark is ^p in Word, tab is ^t, and there are numerous others). Plus, I couldn’t get it to print on envelopes to save my life. In Calc, one issue had to do with Drag-and-Fill or Cut-and-Pasting cells. Can’t remember what exactly.
Now bear in mind I can’t stand Word 03 or 07 either. I actually went out and bought a copy of Office ‘97 which is the one I’ve liked best so far (although I never used 2k).
Hello Mr. Ballmer, nice to meet you.
MS Office quit improving at about MS Word version 3. Everything since then has been bloatware. But I’ve put up basically because I have to - it’s what most companies, including those I’ve worked for, have standardized on.
But version 2007’s insane user interface is what drove me to OO for use at home.
“no real company is going to switch over to some open source program that might not be around in a year.”
I’m not sure I understand this as well as I would like to. Are you saying that the OO software will magically disappear from my computers in 12 months? I figure that since it reads and writes .doc and .xls files that it doesn’t really matter if it evaporates, but I suspect it won’t.
I think the newer versions are able to deal with .docx and .xlsx files already, making upgrades unnecessary for the next several years, assuming that the xml format becomes an industry standard.