Maybe he or she needs some of the other features of Of2007. OpenOffice doesn't do everything. It doesn't have citation and reference features built in, it doesn't have grammar checking (granted MSFT Office's features that do kind of suck at them). And there are other features of a professional package that OpenOffice just doesn't have. It's for that reason that IBM made Lotus Symphony after all.

My main machine (the one I'm on now) is Debian only. My other one runs Debian but still has a small partition for the XP it came pre-installed with. The reasons I keep it are I paid for the damn thing and I like to play one freeware/shareware game, Warblade.

Pretty much 90% of all people that use office don't use half of its features.
I heard that Symphony is basically openoffice

What's your source for this 10% figure and how was the survey measured? And even if so, realize that Office (and Symphony) are made to plug into other applications. So once again, perhaps the user uses features of Office that OpenOffice simply does not have.

Even if your 90% claim is true, which I highly doubt since every student in college I know with MSFT Office uses at least the grammar checker.

For another source other than myself of why someone would use a commercial product, please listen to the Linux Link Tech Show June 18, 2008 interview with Jeff Smith, IBM's director of open source in which he explains what Symphony is, why it was made and what their customer's do with it.

Don't get me wrong, I love OpenOffice and am all for breaking the MSFT monopoly and especially their stranglehold they have over colleges. One of the purposes Jeff mentions of Symphony is to promote the ODF format for that matter because if OpenOffice remains the only product using ODF as a standard then it's no different than MSFT Office only using .doc. But you have to realize that many people really don't give a flip about WHAT product or OS they use at all - what they want is solutions. OpenOffice is a solution but it is not the be all and end all for all solutions.

Rob

Honestly, how many home users use visual basic macros for example?, I can see your example with grammer check, but there are alot times where openoffice is a better choice. Why would a grandma, for example, spend $496(price for standard edition of office at futureshop here) or some similar obscene price to write letters on the computer? I doubt $496 would be worthy enough for grammer check.
FYI, this is the article I read about symphony http://www.linux.com/feature/137876

But you weren't replying to your grandma when you suggested the poster use OpenOffice instead of MSFT Office 2007 so your answer is a strawman.

So all you've done is admitted that you have no source for your 90% claim whatsoever and now created a strawman argument as your defense. For that matter, you do realize that "grandma's" today started the information age don't you? So the old argument that "grandma only uses her computer for x" simply doesn't apply anymore and needs to go extinct.

I love OpenOffice but it lacks features that some people and companies need - but ALL software is prone to lacking something people need. Thus innovation is constant. I rest my case.

Rob

Currently the only reason I have WinXP is to play games. I'd rather not have an emulator such as wine or cedega with cabextract. I like to keep my linux box "clean."

Another thing I use is MS Office, since a lot of people still insist on sending those office files. On Linux, I don't have an office suite. I use LaTeX for text processing. I currently don't have anything to replace spreadsheets, but I was thinking of either MySQL or SQLite + scripts and sage. Sage will also replace Maple, Matlab, Mathematica, Magma and any other mathematical software available. I'll use feh to do slideshows instead of using powerpoint, or if I need to be portable, there's always the LaTeX package that can make pdf slideshows. I also use SPICE + nutmeg (looking into ng-spice) and that easily replaces NI Workbench. I hate NI Workbench with a passion! Couldn't tell me the transient response of even a simple RL and RC circuit.

Having these individual components fits my paradigm more, so I find it useless to have an office suite such as OOo2. MS Office is there to read the proprietary documents and run the macros, because I, and the people I work with, actually do use the macros. I can easily get away from macros with other languages available, but I doubt any of my current and future colleagues can.

I'm going to have VirtualBox with my new Linux installment though. I won't need to reboot just to use MS Office. Once I get a laptop, I can just boot that up and get rid of the VM altogether.

Having a spell or grammar checker is stupid, in my opinion. It's sad how many people rely on it so much. People should just know the grammar of the language they're typing in or have a reference nearby. The Elements of Style is pretty much the last grammar book you will ever buy, and it's available at most places for less than $15. As for spelling, either people should know how to spell words in their vocabulary or they can hop onto reference.com or google.com to check their spelling if they are unsure. Google can also help with some grammar.

Games..only games,i still run in Windows only games..ah,and SPSS 15.0 too which is a database i use sometimes for work--then,for work,for multimedia and serious use and for everything else of pc i use ONLY Linux..

I have an old laptop which uses a diagnostic tool made for windows only - it's pointless to use a diag tool in a VM or emu :-(
So I have no choice but to have this tight win98 partition on the thing :-(
It's BTW an IBM lappy ;-)

Do you use LaTeX for creating documents with a lot of tables that needs to be placed precisely? (Like various forms, "bureaucratic" documents, etc.) Just curious.

It helps to quickly correct typos, like "tehm" instead of "them", etc.
It won't replace language knowledge, but it helps a lot. Also there is at least one common word which will turn into swearword if you miss just one key (and hit nearest other one) while typing (the result will look very nice in a official document). So having a spell checker is a very good idea. Can't say same about programs which correct punctuation - I never liked them.

I haven't needed to create a document requiring lots of tables precisely placed yet. But I'll have some sort of template ready for when I write my resume. I already have a template ready to go for when I need to write papers for my classes. Basically just open it up, and I'm ready to just type the paper. It's a bit rudimentary at the moment, but I plan to build on it; turn it into a package. I'd be doing the same for documents requiring precise placement of floatable items to help facilitate the procedure.

I tend to catch typos on my own. You know how people claim they need the keyboard feedback to help them type? I'm not exactly sure what happens, but it would seem they type slower to avoid mistakes or something like that. Well I don't rely on keyboard feedback. I sort of proofread as I type, yet I can manage 100 wpm, which isn't too bad; better than average (33 wpm). I suppose it's a little slow for people who are on computers more often though, such as people in here. For professional/official documents, you should be proofreading them anyway.

But those are just my own personal opinion. To my knowledge, everybody else in the world loves and embraces spell and grammar checkers. My ways of doing things is, as my roommate would describe, "different." It's not just my preference of LaTeX/database + scripts/feh to replace the office suite, but my preference of a fountain pen over any other pen for any kind of writing, using printing paper instead of lined paper when I have to write by hand, even my grooming techniques are a bit unorthodox. I mean how many people do you know who shaves with a straight razor (a.k.a. cutthroat razor)? So my techniques are a bit "out there" I suppose some would say.

Anybody who purchases my product and has Microsoft Office installed on their system uses VBA even if they don't know it.

My product integrates with Office via VBA macros to automate a lot of reporting for my clients and users.

Yes, I'd love to see programs equivalent to 3D Studio Max and Maya avaialble for Linux. There *is* Blender but it's far far away. I use Windows:
1. I get no mouse cursor under Fedora and my screen doesn't look good (resolution? fonts? dont know)
2. Does the bar at the bottom of the screen in Gnome slide down like the Win taskbar can be made to? And, can the top one made to disappear as well?
3. I can't install stuff that has dependencies which have more dependencies, and the graphical tools for installing programs havnet yet worked (using them for 10 years - from gnorpm to yup or pup or whatever its called).

What do you mean by no mouse cursor? As in it's totally not there? So the mouse is pretty much useless? The bars at the top and bottom (referred to as panels) do indeed disappear. You can have it automatically do it for you, or place buttons at the end of the panels so you may click them to make them disappear. Back when I used Fedora, I remember yum and yumex would always properly fetch dependencies; that's even the dependencies of dependencies.

I still have Windows because Wife 8.6 refuses to run on Linux.