Slow to download with a dial-up connnection - 8 hours. No kidding, but well worth it. Loading this while I sleep is much cheaper and easier than spending $200 for something else.

After using OpenOffice. for about a year, I removed MS Office from my drive ( yep it is legal, it is last copy I will ever buy) I have two tables which Open Office couldn't read a few versions ago and I haven't tried with the latest. I kept Word on the puter so I could use those two tables and am too lazy to redo them. It is hard to believe the price of OpenOffice. It is worth at least $100 and MD isn't worth their price. I have several access files and some excell files and haven't had a problem with any of them. I get a lot of PPT files and read them all with OO. I haven't tried to build anything yet but am going to build a photography course in it after first of year.
Good stuff. Thank all of you who contributed to this software.

I love the fact that MS is having problems all over the world with countries and businesses switching to Open Office. Even New Hampshire is switching to be able to use ODT for text documents.

OpenOffice always offered a lot for free, but the 2.0 release is improved further. Compatibility with Microsoft Office file formats is improved, and the program's XML-based ODF format has been ratified by OASIS as an application-independent standard.

OOo now has a database application and a more intuitive and familiar interface. The word processing app (Writer) has advanced style and formatting tools, and in my experience, the whole package has been very stable and crash-proof. (On a WinXP PC. I can only imagine it's even more bullet-proof on Linux or MAC OS.)

The added features come at a price, in machine resources, not money. OOo 2.0 requires more disk space, memory, and CPU cycles than did its predecessor, but my PC runs it fine, and it's by no means the latest or greatest.

All in all, I can't say enough good things about OpenOffice (and I've been an MS Office user for years). Anyone who needs a good office software bundle should check it out, even those MS Office users who are considering upgrading to newer versions. You'll probably find that OOo will do everything you want, and save you a ton of money in the bargain.

A co-worker of mine loves to hate Microsoft, uses Linux, and won't shut up about OpenOffice. That was almost enough to make me NOT try it, but I'm on a severely limited budget, and I needed an office suite that would let me share Word and Excel docs.

Well, it turns out that dude was right. Open Office does everything I need it to do, it's stable, and it didn't cost me a dime. I had originally thought I'd use it just until I could save some bucks for a new copy of MS Office, but OpenOffice is good enough that now I'm in no hurry to go back to using MS Office... if I do at all.

The only downside is that now I have to admit to that bozo at work that he was right.

OpenOffice is not perfect. (No software is.) While it will create and open MOST MS Office documents, the compatibility is NOT 100%, and some Word formatting and Excel formulas can be inoperable. The interface is clean and attractive, but there are some areas where it's not the most intuitive. The PowerPoint equivalent ("Impress") is pretty rudimentary, as is the database app in the latest beta release, and there is no email client or Outlook equivalent.

HOWEVER... What do you expect for free? I certainly didn't expect OpenOffice to be as useful or as stable as it is. Since I already have valid copies of MS Office Pro and MS Works, I probably won't abandon them for OpenOffice. If I did not already own them, I can certainly imagine getting along quite nicely with OpenOffice, and recommend that anyone needing an office software suite check it out before spending money on anything else.

The 2.0 Beta suite is a must have. Considerably better than its previous
siblings.

A good programme

I must say that I am blown away with Open Office and its capabilities. Not only is it compatible (write/read) with any MS product, it can also write directly to PDF with a touch of a button. Very cool option for those of us who don't want to pay MS high prices, but still want to write in that style.

I was WAY skeptical, a free program that is not only MS Office, Word compatible it actually does ALL that it says! I know the prog is big and a bit slow to load-BUT WHO CARES! You can write and read WORD and it doesn't SPY ON YOU! I have not missed MS ONCE, I'll never go back. AMAZING!