I prefer OpenOffice, and more generally Linux because it is not intrusive. Microsoft has a love affair with helpy helpers that just aren't helpful. I expect my programs to fade into the background and allow me to complete my work. MS software continually invades my workspace with useless advice and information. It grates on my nerves and is one of the main reasons I completely abandoned Microsoft.

Personally, I rarely use any office packages, I have no need for them. I have my own method of managing and presenting information that works the way I do. I use txt2tags, vim, some scripts, and anything else that I can learn to achieve my goal.

However my room mate is attempting to move from MS office to Oo, and he has one feature the he misses and would like to see on Oo: outlining. I'll admit, I've always liked the outlining feature.

I only hope that the feature is not implemented because of technical reasons and not philosophical reasons. It would be hard to convince people to change if they are bing told the feature they have been using on different word processors for many years is not being implemented because the designers don't like the way you work.

jer

Edit:
My Apologies to the developers and designers of OpenOffice. The outlining thing is no big deal for me, I'd adapt, others might not want to. I like OpenOffice and I believe that it may encourage me to try and make office productivity packages work for me again. I have to learn it, because I know a lot of people that are very interested in these alternatives. I'm lazy, the fewer hurdles I have to offer -- especially to technically proficient people, the easier it is for me.

i use windows at work (i have little choice)
and FC6 at home

at work i have both MSoffice (only the main 3, my company cant afford licences for everyone to have acsess and publsiher)
and OO.o

I tend to use OO writer all the time but MS excell ratehr than calc.

but that is mainly because i have to work with hidiously complex spreadsheets with miles of VB emedded in them

and i aslo have to use many of the more complex fetures of exell like the dataanalysys addon, and solver.

if i coudl import my hidioiusly complex spreadsheet into OO calc, work on it, run many of the macros, fill it all in, plot a few graphs (mabie run a few macros that plot graphs for me) then save it back as XLS give it to my boss who checkes it then strips all teh processing and sends it to the client where they only have MS office (and we dont know what version)
without loosing anything, then i would delete MS office tomoro.

anything i do in word i can do in writer, anything in excell is usially not supported

powerpoint/impress i hardly ever use,
and i have no choice but to use OO base if i need a (small) database

(for a big one i would learn MySQL)

on my windows machine at work i use the cygwin enviroment a lot (bash as a CLI insatead of dos)
and that lets me compile a few simple progs for windows.

i also have windows versions of the GIMP
and Jedit (very usefull text editor, with syntax highlighting)

While it may be possible to use MS Office under wine, it takes a lot of work and in the end probably won't work anything like as fast or anything like as reliably as a native program. That's not really a serious option in most cases.

Using MS Office under Linux is not a serious option, so obviously that means that Linux users don't really have a serious choice between these two programs. Hence this thread is indeed irrelevant to Linux.

I have moved this to the General Forum since OOo is not just a Linux app.

I find that OO does all that I need to do and then some. I haven't looked at Microsoft Office in a terribly long time now.

Frankly, it seems to me that MS really hasn't added anything other than a leering paperclip to Office since about 1997.

ODF has been mentioned before, but it is IMO the most important feature of OpenOffice.

I forgot to include it in my rant.

Having recentmy switched from more of a support role to an end user of MS office I can tell you its terrible. I have constant problems with it, I won't go into them here since its a long list but OOo Works much smoother.
I've gotten my wife switched over to Firefox now and she willing to try OOo in her PC but we need some replacement for Outlook to make it work. Thundarbiord is nice for mail but the calendar is lacking and thats an important part to both of us.

enine, for an Outlook replacement type app, look at Evolution.

http://www.gnome.org/projects/evolution/

I went to novel's web site yesterday and all I could find was a link to buy it.

Not sure what OS the PC of your wife is running. For Windows, you might try Sunbird, the calendar companion to Thunderbird and also the one that is planned to be integrated to OOo soon.

For Slackware, I believe you need to compile your own evolution.

K<o>

She's still on Windows. I've filed a few feture requests on Mozillia's bug site for stuff that is broken or missing in Sunbird so for now it doesn't look like it will work.
I use Korganizer on Linux but am looking for something that can work on either (and Korganizer for windows is several versions behind).

I can't stand office applications like Word and PowerPoint because of their low quality of output. I used to use them, however, because it seems that Microsoft have been doing a pretty good job of not letting you know that you have any other options.

I use LaTeX exclusively now where I used to use Word (back in the windows days) and there is a noticeable difference in the typographic quality of LaTeX formatted documents compared with anything that comes from a word processor.

My two cents

I don't like big, integrated office suites. I use various things to generate text (gvim, zim, occasionally abiword; I also often filter to html to view complicated relationships of information in a document) and then I use kile to finish off with a pdf for proofing/printing. I think there's nothing better than latex to make nice-looking documents.

edit:
ErrorBound, I guess great minds think alike

OOo is very nice. I like the shiny interface and all the bells and whistles. Add to that an overall faster load time. My only complaint is that Word has a really nice feature I use all the time: the ability to go right click on a word and replace it with a synonym, as I can find some very nice replacement words in there, useful especially for English class. I usually find myself typing all my essays in Word because of this. Luckily, my dad found the whole MSOffice 2000 suite for about $8 at the flea market.