I've been using OpenOffice.org for years and have been very pleased with it.

Abiword and Gnumeric (Gnome Office) only because they integrate better with all WM/DE's and are truly multi-platform. If I create a document in Abiword on Linux, and send it to someone that uses Abiword on Windows, they look the same. Can not say that about Open Office, I've heard you have the same problem with Open Office even across different distros. The weight - both installed, source, and running size - of Gnome Office is far less than Open Office.

Honestly though, Google Apps works well enough, and has the features we need. Not worried about the big bad Google reading our text documents. It's not like we're using it for financial data or nuclear plans

So far it's OpenOffice, maybe it's not perfect, but when you have KOffice as alternative, OpenOffice rocks

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For me the typical limit is 3 pages. For longer documents TeX/LaTeX/PDFtex/GNUplot/Graphviz give me better results in less time than any word processing program. But I often use spreadsheets, and the vast majority of my documents are letters of 3 or less pages. For these, I use OOo.

Good thing is, that there is an Add-on (or do they call it "plug-in" or "extension", I never know) that allows to create LaTeX output from within OOo. While the results of OOo Writer are not as good as with Kile or Lyx, the output of tables from OOo Calc is sometimes very helpful, because editing a table is not very comfortable in any markup syntax...

But I have to say, that I haven't used this function in a while; I just noticed that it's no longer a part of the standard OOo "distribution".

gargamel

That has not been my experience. To verify that I just, in the last several minutes, copied 3 different documents created with Go-OO in Slackware to the the xP partition. I then booted over to XP, installed Go-OO for windows and looked at each document. They were all Identical right down to the last period.

For simple stuff, this is true.

And since most people only tend to do simple stuff, i.e. nothing more than headings and a table of contents, they don't have problems.

If you try to do anything even slightly more complex, such as custom styles, headers or footers, endnotes, graphics, highlighting, revisions, charts etc, things start to get horribly unreliable.

OO.org is terrible for this, because it is common for distros to offer a patched version, or even just a different version number.

And, this is talking about an office suite, in which writer is the most reliable. To even try with impress or calc is more pain than it's worth.

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The Go-OO version, and even the plain vanilla version of OO have always imported and displayed my old WordPerfect documents perfectly, tables, graphics and all. Ditto the ms-office documents sent over by the company I work with, which include custom headers, graphics, footers, etc.

Edit in: I just remembered there was one document that came over from the company that didn't display properly in OO. I then tried ms-office and had the same problems so I called the person who made the presentation and found out it was created in ms-office 2007 and I was viewing it in ms-2003. I've since heard there are compatibility problems between each version of ms-office and the cynics say mickeysoft does it on purpose. I don't know if that is true as I don't think they are that smart.... are they?

I generally use OOo as my university demands my assignments to be .doc. I do think OOo is bloated and slow. So how is the compatibility with odf/doc with koffice these days? I remember it was pretty bad last time I tried it a few years ago.

I had used (plain) TeX for years before I first used a "word processor". At that point where I worked a number of us were creating a large document as a team, and one person pushed his choice (M$-word) on us. Never having seen it, I thought it was fair to give it a shot.

After finishing that project, I told my boss, in complete seriousness, that I would rather quit than use m$-word again. I really liked my job, but I was completely serious. It was 10 times more painful to write the document with m$-word than emacs + TeX, and I really hate wasting such large amounts of time.

Don't forget the fact that gnumeric starts up in about 1/100 the time that OO does. Every time I fire up OO because some inconsiderate person has inflicted a m$-word file on me, I am amazed at how long it takes OO to start up. Is it computing the first 1,000,000 digits of Pi before it is ready to go???

Nothing to do, OpenOffice is better

OpenOffice.

@ zsd, post # 40

That is why I use textmaker-free-2006 :
starts blinking fast, the executable = 9 MB.

Does a few things better than Ooo,
and one better than MS Office. Has it limitations, though.

Please see post # 16.
.....

I tend to use kile/latex for letters and pdf files. When I have to make a word doc I use OO but it still does not translate tables and bullets properly. I just had to open up MS word in a vm after noticing my CV was all out of kilter from OO. People must have looked at my old CV and thought god knows what...

The argument of loading times on any type of editing software is pointless. I would consider the use of open office to be of the common office worker that has it open all day long and simply just uses the quick launch feature to always keep the most important elements of the program in memory.

However, there should be a quick load document viewer that only loades the necessary components to view the document. Much the way of PDFs. You don't need editing tools for most of the common pdf usage.