I haven't found the cost of Office 2007 to be so bad. So many stores had rebates and sales it would have been more than reasonable to get the full version without an issue. I haven't tried Open Office as I have Office 2007 and thus see no need to download it, but if people would rather have that than spend money thats fine. One of the benefits I know of is the fact that ebing open source doesn't alway mean you will get the support you need for issues (such as tweaking out those formatting issues). I know Microsoft can and will most likely stick with me until I figure out stuff with their products.