im sorry to hear that, for me when i used Openoffice it was just fine. i used it at work in place of Ms office. opening mosty documents from word (idk XP version). Truth be told i tend to use the Koffice stuff more now anyway (kde testing mostly). also i don't need any of that for my job now.
EDIT: open document format is the international standard (ISO)for documents (NOT microsofts formats.)Don't belive me?
I know .odt is the standard format. But I can't very well start asking my customers to download and install software for my office.
And as far as opening documents, OOo was actually fairly competent. It's in saving them back to .doc/.xls/.ppt that the issue comes from (and I'm not even discussing .docx/.xlsx/.pptx).
Most of the time, the formatting is lost (minor), data in forms is lost (major) and documents get corrupted when opened back with MS Word (blocker).
Next time we're looking at renewing our office licenses, I'll take a look at it again but that's years away.
I've always found MS Office to be more usable than Open Office (which isn't as open as it used to be now that Oracle are in charge)
Or rather, I've always found Office 2003 to be more usable. Word 2010 is an absolute f*ckfest; what the hell were MS thinking with that ribbon? Now I have to relearn everything.
I actually love the ribbons myself and I was a poweruser. I did have to relearn the interface which took me a few weeks and I still stumble around every now and then but I think it was a crazy number like 7 out of 10 top requested features to Microsoft for Office were ALREADY in there!
The ribbon has made finding tasks much more logical in my mind for less tech savy user. And that's the bulk of the users. Our office had absolutely no trouble adapting.
Disagree there. OOWriter is a far better processor for long documents than Word. Word remains unstable for documents > 30 pages, and still provides somewhat limited style management features. OOW, on the other hand, has style inheritance, customizable ToCs, and true kerning support. The ability to apply macros to long documents without crashes is a tremendous boon, too.
That's really beside the point.
We can't send all our files out as pdf because some do need to be edited by the customers. In itself, OOo was good software but its difficulties integrating with the standard 99% of the world uses is what makes it unsuable in a business setting.
I very happily use OOo on my home computer.