Open Office supports all Microsoft Office file types. So, if you are planning to make the move to a free open source, office toolkit, Open Office is the way!

Though it lacks the bells and whistles of Microsoft Suite, it serves the purpose and deserves a pat on the back :)

I try my best to stick to and support open source tools. I fully appreciate all the efforts made by open office gurus. However MS Office remains far in the lead by what it has to offer.

Perhaps the standards of office format (regardless who wins) will help open office catch up in support

I realize that everyone loves free stuff and is behind the FOSS movement and all - but this is an example of sub-standard software that is popular just because of the hype surrounding open source. Its slow, doesn't render/format MS Office documents correctly and is just a pain to work with.

for me this is a very nice office , with very good capabilities in formatting(for me is even bettter than microsoft office in this part), the major problems for me is the scientific area, because i

need a good solver and that trendlines can give me the equations of them

From: Download Squad

Open source software advocates like to point to OpenOffice.org as a viable alternative to Microsoft Office. It can open, create, edit, and save Office-compatible documents including text, spreadsheet, and database files. It might not have every last bell and whistle of Office, but it gets the job done. But OpenOffice.org also has a dirty little secret: It's kind of slow. And apparently, it's getting slower all the time.

OpenOffice.org Ninja ran a battery of tests and found that with each major release, OpenOffice.org has gotten a little slower when performing common tasks like opening, closing, and exporting documents. OpenOffice.org 1.1.5, for example, launches about 40% faster than OpenOffice.org 2.4. That figure holds true whether you're doing a cold start (loading the program for the first time since rebooting your computer) or a warm start (starting the program a second, third, or 15th time).

The developers have certainly been tweaking the open source office suite to improve performance. But they also keep adding new features, which is a good thing. Unfortunately, sometimes those new features slow down program performance. Of course, if you can't wait 20-25 seconds to load your office suite, you could always just buy more RAM, a faster CPU, and umm... Microsoft Office. Or try an online office suite like Google Docs or Zoho, which load faster than OpenOffice.org if you already have a browser window open.