What can Microsoft Word do that the Openoffice.org word processor can't? I've heard that there's some advanced Word functions that Openoffice can't duplicate, possibly because Microsoft has them copyrighted.

I haven't run into anything yet that I could do in Word that I can't do in OOo Writer.

I do a lot of spreadsheets, but I've never needed to do pivot tables or stuff like that there, but that's Excel stuff. That may be an area where OOo can't do what MS Office can do.

Here's a good site to learn OOo.

http://www.learnopenoffice.org/

You might take a look at the Go-OO version of OpenOffice.

http://www.go-oo.org

One paragraph from the above page:

"Better interoperability

Go-oo has built in OpenXML import filters and it will import your Microsoft Works files. Compared with up-stream OO.o, it has better Microsoft binary file support (with eg. fields support), and it will import WordPerfect graphics beautifully. If you are reliant on Excel VBA macros - then Go-oo offers the best macro fidelity too. If you expect your spreadsheets to calculate compatibly, or you get embedded Visio diagrams in your documents, you'll want Go-oo."

i am not a frequent user of MS office or OO.o..one thing i noticed is that we cant use some fonts like arial in OO.o but we can view them.

If you have installed them, you should be able to use them.
I simply copy the windows fonts from the \windows\fonts\ directory in a different partition to the /usr/share/fonts/TTF/ directory in my Linux partition and, bingo, they are available for all applications.

oh.i am such a stupid.i didnt think like that..it was just matter of copying from windows to linux..sure i will try that..

edit: it worked ..thank u.

There are quite a few differences. I did not reply earlier, expecting someone to post a link giving a table of the differences but that hasn't happened so here's what I recall (it's a long time since last using MS Office so the info below is sketchy).

The casual user may not notice any differences but the power user will notice many.

OOo takes a long time to load the first document (longer than MS Office?). There used to be a "Quickstarter" to ameliorate this problem by loading a lot of OOo at logon time (Windows only?).

OOo uses Java for some things (I recall Help and running macros on events but have not been able to reproduce it); it runs faster with Java disabled but you lose some functionality.

The Basic language has several differences, most of which can be configured out, for example 0-based or 1-based array subscripting.

The one thing I still haven't got the hang of in Writer is paragraph end behaviour. In Word I used to drag-select down the left margin to select paragraph(s) then cut or copy them. This does not work in OOo Writer; you have to select including the paragraph end marker of the previous paragraph and up to but not including the final paragraph end marker. It's still not intuitive and I usually insert empty paragraphs at copy-or-cut site and a target site before copying-or-cutting and pasting.

Tables and pictures behave more intuitively in Writer than in Word (but MS might have improved that since I last used it).

Table-of-Contents entries in Writer are not hotlinks by default in Writer as they are in Word; you have to edit the ToC and configure each level of Entry, adding a hyperlink start and end. More flexible.

Styles are not portable between OOo Writer and Word; saving a Writer document to Word format and opening it in Word (done this on the Office version that includes the ribbon) requires a lot of non-trivial styles editing to get the same appearance, especially around heading indentation.

OOo documents are between a half and a quarter of the file size of equivalent Office documents; disk space is seldom an issue but backup size considerations can be significant.

There is a larger user and support base with Office skills than there is with OOo skills.

Surely there are more differences but that's all that comes to mind now.

WHich functions? If I don't need the disabled functionality, I would like to get this speed increase.

Just turn it off and see what breaks; it's easy to turn it back on. Tools->Options->OpenOffice.org->Java