I'll stay with my MS Office. Used both but like MS Office better due to knowing the program better. It loads quicker, I like Word or whatever to open right away. I don't like when I have to wait for a program to open.
Also there is PowerPoint, I like PowerPoint, I use PowerPoint weekly, PowerPoint is a very good program for what I do(don't want to have to learn a new system), did I mention that I like PowerPoint.

Just my opinion. I think people should try OpenOffice if they like it, then they should use it. Life would be very dull if we all did everything the same way.

Lynna

No contest, Office is so far ahead it's not funny. Actually Office is the best product M/S have, if only their o/s was as good!

For the amount of Word Processing I do, and speed of my typing, it doesn't really matter to me which one I use. I have Open Office installed because after a HD crash, I couldn't re-install Office, so I opted for Oo.org's version 2. It has some nice things about it. It loads slower than Office, for sure, but again, most of my work is done with another text editor for html "projects", so that isn't a big issue. It will load quicker if it is enabled on start-up, but since I use it so rarely, I have dis-abled the start-up function to conserve utilities and space.

I think the Spreadsheet graphics are nicer to work with in Oo.o. But, again, I am not a regular user of them. In fact, I usually need a refresher course each time I do something with it... lol.

I completely ditched Microsoft Office and no longer support people who uses M$ Office. (I don't even own a business, or earn money from it anyways) as part of Operation BMS (Ban Micro$oft)

I like the ODF better than the MS formats, they are smaller too. As for being slower, yes they are a bit slower (especially when I run it on my laptop)

xboxrulz

I've used both, its a bit hard to use openoffice but for free and opensource. Can you really go wrong? Don't think so, so the person who doesn't want to shell out loads of money for the office program won't have to. I use both now mainly microsoft office at school and openoffice at home. Just saves me money in the end =)

I'm a big fan of OpenOffice, as I can't afford to but MS Office, but my boyfriend hates it. I think if you can live with any office suite then it will work well for you, so you should just try them out and decide from there. You can normally get demo versions of many of the top ones so you don't have to spend a fortune straighht off. I also liked Lotus SmartSuite, which would definitely be my suite of choice if money were no object.

Besides which, I only ever use OOo2 for my writing, so it isn't even like I need it anyway, it just makes it easier!

Rebecca x

I'v never used OpenOffice but from what i'v heard it's fantastic and alot better than MS Office.But since i'v never used OpenOffice,MS Office gets my vote..

I have used both products and have never really liked MS Word (Mainly because the cursor disappears when you type, really annoys me) and when I got my laptop I didn't have a copy of MS Office so I spent three days download OOo and I really, really like it.

It has some nice features like exporting to a PDF document and it's compatibility with other formats. I also like the way the cursor stays visible when you type.

While OOo might not have the large array of borders MS Office does (Has anybody used more than 5 of them, ever? I know I have only used about 2) it does have rounded borders on text boxes and there are lots more formatting features.

While it loads a bit slow on my laptop it does come bundled with a PP like program, Spreadsheet program, Database program, Publisher program, something called Math (I don't use it) and of course a Word program. The plain MS Office suite comes just with Word, PP and Excel (Correct me if I'm wrong) and you have to fork out extra for the others while OOo is smaller, comes bundled with them all and, best of all, is free!

Open Office has my vote!

to be honest with you..open office is great comparatively just because it hasnt been developed for long and it achieved so much, but ms office still has better stuff in it..like last time i was trying to insert page numbers and it inserted them wherever you put your mouse instead of showing you specific positions like ms word...and so on...it's nice as a free software and i use it, but it's a change down a little bit from ms word

I prefer Microsoft Office just because I have used it alot more and the whole suite just seems way more polished then OpenOffice. I found OpenOffice hard to use especially the spreadsheet program because it didn't support a lot of the things I was used to with Excel. Also Microsoft Office Pro 2k3 I got for 20$ student license from Dell and the support and help cannot be matched by OpenOffice. ALSO Microsoft Office runs a lot faster and I like how it integrates itself into Windows. I also was able to get the Office 2k7 beta and it really improves upon some of the features that were lacking in the past, and they did add PDF format, but I am not sure if it will stay like that because I remember hearing Adobe were fighting against Microsoft about it.

This post has been edited by Demonhawk: Aug 9 2006, 05:03 AM