While I use OO.org the most, I reluctently have to agree with most of Electro's and grholme's statements. That is why I am not voting. I just wish there were pure GTK+ versions of the Gnome office programs. I am going to try Lyx for wordprocessing, it looks interesting.

Excuse my coming rant please.

WHAT IN THE **** IS WITH ALL THESE PEOPLE CALLING THINGS BLOATED! OPENOFFICE.ORG = BLOATED, GNOME = BLOATED, KDE = BLOATED! I AM RUNNING A COMPUTER THAT IS AS SEVEN YEARS OLD (128 mb of ram) AND ALL THESE RUN FINE (Except for GNOME which almost runs)! WHAT ARE YOU GUYS RUNNING AN ATARI ST! IF THEY ARE BLOATED WHY DO THEY WORK!

Word Processor:
OpenOffice Writer = 70 MiB
Abiword = 6.8 MiB
KWord = 5.5 MiB

Spreadsheet:
OpenOffice Calc = 62 MiB
Gnumeric = 3.8 MiB
KSpread = 4.6 MiB

Presentations:
KPresenter = 5.2 MiB
OpenOffice Impress = 52.7 MiB

Database:
Kexi = 5.3 MiB
OpenOffice Base = 53.8 MiB

What is bloated?
OpenOffice

What fights to be light-weight?
KOffice and Gnome

I have an 8 year old computer that can run these programs fine, but it has 256 MiB of RAM.

All caps means yelling and do you not have yell at us.

Gnome and KOffice can never be compared with OOo's features.

OOo is the only free office suite today which can fight MS Office. These days, even in a developing nation like mine (India), many have systems with 512 MB of RAM. With this RAM OOo starts in 3 seconds. Is it such a big issue to hate it?

OpenOffice does not load up in 3 seconds. KOffice and Office programs in Gnome applications loads up in a few seconds just right after boot up. OpenOffice takes tens of seconds to load up.

OpenOffice does not have good graphing, macros does not carry with the saved office file, and several other features. Gnumeric is close enough to Excel features and it graphs well too. I know a spreadsheet that tests OpenOffice Calc, KSpread, and Gnumeric. With the known spreadsheet, KSpread can not read the spreadsheet while OpenOffice Calc can read it. Macros do not work and graphing is terrible. Gnumeric is the only one that is close enough to what I see in Excel. If Gnumeric has macro support it far exceeds Excel and OpenOffice Calc combine because it calculates data fast, graphs fast, and it barely takes up a lot of memory.

Right now Gnumeric and Kexi fights against MS Office. They provide real replacements while word processor and presentations in OpenOffice and KOffice does not.

I have tried it on a Laptop with 512 MB of RAM and it did load in 3 seconds. Dunno what's going wrong there on your system.

Gnome Office and KOffice just give some components which are good. OOo gives overall balance. KOffice doesn't support ODF. KOffice 2 is expected to support but it is almost half year away.

KOffice doesn't even save in MS formats. So OOo is the best suite of 2007. May be things would change in 2008.

What version of KOffice are you using and what Distro? To my knowledge KOffice fully supports ODF, and officially supported it well before OO.org 2.0 was formally released (i.e. during the release candidate days). It has been set as the default format as well for a while (I have KOffice 1.6.3). KOffice also supports, to various degrees, all the Microsoft formats except OOXML and Access and Exchange/Outlook specific stuff.

I certainly haven't had problems saving as a legible Word file from KOffice (or OO.org), but I don't normally deal with complex documents, which will obviously pose challenges to any of the challengers. I have just noticed that KOffice not export as Excel, however.

CAVEAT: As I said earlier, I am more familiar with OpenOffice than KOffice, as XFCE is my usual desktop. Which is why I wished for pure GTK+ versions of the Gnome Office programs.

OO.org for me:-)

IMHO
Maybe the option of a Office mesh (custom suite or -selection) could be added to the pool.

It's the most natural way of LINUX to use many tools from many suites for the reason they all are the respective best in it's own category.
Adding the option of custom selection would reflex the WAY OF LINUX and send a message to the developers - do inter cooperate more next 2k8 year.

jeremy?
free choice of plentora?

I tried KOffice which comes in the default install of Slackware 10.2. At the same time, I downloaded OOo from linuxpackages.net and it supported ODF while KOffice did not. It also did not write to MS Office files. I never turned back to KOffice after that.

If KOffice does support ODF, I stay corrected.

OpenOffice.org, because it supports document interchange with MSOffice, which is the most popular office suite around.
You can set the default file format to MSOffice97 and an average user can just use the open source product and forget about compatibility problems with proprietary format.
I still hope all formats will be open in the future

Exactly. I receive a lot of MS-Office files through e-mail; Open Office works perfectly.

Cheers

I still love Applix but it's getting a bit dated now. :-(

OpenOffice has been serving my purpose ahead of all others, and nicely. My vots goes to OOo.

For me Open Office, even it consumes many resources of my system and a lot of memory.