We use OO here at CapeAds, it does the job pretty well, except there are many times when I have to e-mail this person to who MS Office to open the file because OO doesn't open it properly.
Something that is FREE will not always be PERFECT but as far as PERFECT goes, OO gets very very close.
plugger123 said:
Cool.. Everybody loves free software but this can be a killer to innovation. Sad to say this but if there is nothing commercial happening and there is no income for the developers I fail to see what will drive innovation in the future of Open Office and Open Source for that matter. Microsoft is evil but they rule the Desktop market and the reason they do is because they innovate. (with hangups and all) If they don't they will die. (maybe soon if I look at Vista which is a piece of crap)
harsh words...
Not to attack you or anything, but the fact that it's not perfect has nothing to do with it being free.
It's not perfect because Microsoft only opened up their proprietary formats a while ago, and as such much of the code was reverse engineered.
Quote from Wikipedia:
One of the greatest challenges is its ability to be truly cross compatible with other applications. Since Openoffice.org is forced to reverse engineer proprietary binary formats due to unavailability of open specifications, slight formatting incompatibilities tend to exist when files are saved in non-native format. For example, a complex .doc document formatted under OpenOffice.org, is usually not displayed with the correct format when opened with Microsoft Office.
You might also want to keep in mind that no one does anything for free. Money generated directly by writing a program is hardly the only ways to gain satisfaction.
For example: When everyone uses Open Office, these guys will be able to charge for professional support, and validly claim that they are better than the 1000x other people who are giving support because they /wrote/ the software.
OR:
Have it on their resumes that in their own time they worked on a highly succesful project like Open Office. Something like that might score you even more points than having another job reference there.
OR:
Gain personal satisfact from a job well done.
etc etc etc.
Know that people often have the wrong idea about Open Source. While you may not always be allowed to charge for the product itself, you are always able to charge for services rendered.
Take Apache for example, the most popular web server on earth. You cannot download it and then sell it, but look at all the hosting companies and how they are generating profit by using that behind the scenes, and charging you for hosting your website.
Most of the Linksys routers are running Linux, and they are selling like hotcakes. So, for Linksys they saved money and time by not having to write all the software running on their routers themselves, and are still making just as much money as they would have, had they written it themselves / or bought commercial software like embedded Windows...
Finally, there has been much, and still is alot of monetary backing for the project. Just because it's free, doesn't mean no one gets paid to do it...
they do not support Open Office document format in Microsoft Office.
in fact you can "save as" a lot of things in Open Office making it so much more user friendly. No more excuses that you can't send someone a format they can't open! 
