[microgood]

It really depends on what you are doing. If you are a small village in India that wants to become computer literate, Open Office is fine.

If you employ a power user you are paying a six figure salary, the cost of MS Office becomes inconsequential compared to its value.

[max americana]

Agreed. OpenOffice sometimes is flaky when it comes to user-friendly tools in the ‘actual’ Office. Used (or forced) by our boss to use it after the cheap company I worked for part-time started implementing it. One of our newbies then said he has a ‘copy” of Office (code for illegal download) and been using it since.

Now GIMP...love it. It’s used by tweeners to create their own banners and avatars, especially in the anime-manga world and I occasionally fansub so I use it as well. The learning process is less than Photoshop CS3 if you have the discipline.

[Still Thinking]

If you employ a power user you are paying a six figure salary, the cost of MS Office becomes inconsequential compared to its value.

True. I tried the latest version of OO, 3 point something and while it is good, I still rate it at about 90% the quality of Office (which I think has been in decline since Office 97). There were several things missing in Writer and Calc that I use almost daily in Word and Excel. Try searching for tabs in Writer, for instance. I've been doing that since Word for Dogs, I think. Certainly far back into the Windows days.

Now it could be that I'm just wierd, and OO is fine for what 98% of people use Word and Excel for, but for my tasks, it ain't there yet. Oh, yeah, I also hate how the recently edited file list is common between all the OO apps.

[N3WBI3]

“If you employ a power user you are paying a six figure salary, the cost of MS Office becomes inconsequential compared to its value.”

It again depends on the usage..

I know folks who make a six figure salary that could not tell open office from MS Office..

Your example is aimed at providing two extremes to make Open Office look like a tinker toy. In reality 95+% of MS Office functionality exist in Open Office. For everyone ubt extreme MS-Office power users Open Office is just fine

BTW Open Office is not always playing catchup with MS Office: Which product first allowed you to export natively to PDF? Open Office..

[B Knotts]

Certainly, if you find that productivity gains are greater than the ongoing licensing fees and licensing compliance costs (often overlooked, but significant if done right), then it may make sense to pay for the proprietary option.

For the majority of office software users, I seriously doubt that they are going to realize a significant productivity advantage from Microsoft Office vs. OpenOffice.org.

There is the retraining cost, but Microsoft, in their wisdom, made Office 2007 significantly different from previous versions of Office, so the Microsoft retraining cost advantage largely disappears.