I'm just wondering what the need is to buy Office when you can get OpenOffice for free? Does Office have a lot more features that I am not aware of? I use OpenOffice for spreadsheets and word processing. I can save my documents in a wide variety of formats including .doc so what would be the point to spending the money for Microsoft Office?

I tried OpenOffice and I didn't care for it, I'm just used to MS Office I guess. I usually like the open source programs, but I just didn't go for this one.

I went from Word to OpenOffice and I like it just fine. As far as I can tell there isn't anything it can't do that Word does, but it does occasionally format things a little differently. Certainly not enough to merit the Office price tag.

I think it just depends on what you are used to and what you really need the application to do. If you dont mind some funky random formats then its okay, but I dont like to spend that much time editting things I just want it to work the first time around.

I have never (yet) had any issues with weird formatting but I occasionally get one annoying issue. Sometimes I will open a new document and for some reason will not be able to paste into it - other times it works just fine. I don't know if it's a Vista issue or not. Usually if I just reopen a new document, it corrects itself though so really not that big a deal, I guess.

While OpenOffice is still far from perfect in my opinion, I still find it to work more than acceptably well for what my needs are like. While I still like Microsoft's Office better overall, OpenOffice is very good for a free program. Now if only Microsoft would lower the price of Office!

I have Office on my desktop, and I have never found a reason to go use it. I do everything on Open office on my laptop, the 'issues' with it have been so minor as to not be noticeable.

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.

OpenOffice is good - but it is still a work in progress. I introduced OpenOffice into my workplace in an effort to treplace M/S Office, but there were too many niggling challenges and too much effort to support it, and so I was forced to switch back.

The really BIG advantage of using Open Office is that it is not only open source (and hence developments are fast) but it is multi platform. I can take my documents from *nix to windows platforms and back again, and last time I had to do that Word did not offer that functionality.