Any time I’ve had an issue with Linux (I run ubuntu because I’m lazy), I’ve usually found the solution to my problem in a couple of minutes. The community support is fantastic.

The support that microsoft offers means it is much safer to use MS office.

I’ve worked with companies who used both OpenOffice and MS Office, and they have experienced much more support from the OpenOffice community than they got from buying MS software.

Unless you separately pay for commercial support with MS Office, the “support” is very limited, and basically covers little more than “it doesn’t work”, rather than the more common support needs along the lines of “I don’t know how to make it do /x/”

You can pay companies for commercial support with either product if you need it.

OpenOffice forums are an excellent place to get support from the community of users, too. I’ve had good personal experience of support there.

I switched to OpenOffice some years back, and can recall a single instance about two years ago when I needed to borrow a friends Office (Mac, Off ’97) to open a supplied file. (I had already tried later PC versions of Office on the same spreadsheet and they didn’t open it, so this file was apparently an oddball.)

Off-topic, but I know alot of people who think vodafone is the greatest cell phone company on the planet but they can enver tell me why they hate Telecom. I was quietly enjoying the fact that while on holiday in the coromandal I was the only person in my group of friends that had cell phone reception:)

I work for a multinational and thus am stuck with office for the time being. During my post grad I became a full linux convert (thanks to Ruaparaha!) but was quite dissapointed when I found out I ahd to use windows and office at work.

As another aside, Ruaparaha and I have blogged on open source stuff before

http://www.tvhe.co.nz/2007/08/28/if-there-is-no-free-lunch-why-should-we-have-free-software/

http://www.tvhe.co.nz/2007/10/22/a-nobel-defence-of-free-software/

When my daughter went to Otago Uni we sent her off with the latest copy of Open Office loaded on her laptop, a month later she asked for MS because economics spreadsheets and documents wouldn’t open reliably in Open Office. So the University, which pays a very low licence fee, forces students (or parents) to buy a branded system designed to keep competitors out. The student version of Office is relatively cheap at $150 for 3 licences but when she leaves she will expect to use the same system – which costs a lot more for businesses.

Apple have been the master of this tactic – just try and get a Mac user to admit that MS or Linux can do the same job.

Because we are not rational. We just like to think we are.

Unfortunately the standard is largely gibberish but since people are used to reverse engineering MS formats and XML makes that easier it’s not too much of a problem. There was quite a shit-fight about that standard and basically everyone except M$ gave up and walked away.

That said, I have a copy of Office97 lying around somewhere but OpenOffice is on all of our computers. It works.

Just to make things confusing:
– “MS Office XML Formats”: deprecated, propriety xml-based format for MS office
– “OpenOffice.org XML”: deprecated, open xml-based OpenOffice.org format
– “OpenDocument”: OpenOffice.org’s current format
– “Office Open XML”: MS office’s new native format, however it’s standardised and the standard is maintained by the ECMA. This means it’s royalty-free and OpenOffice.org is free to implement complete and total support for it.

Unfortunately the latter point is not really true — OpenOffice.org is fairly compatible, but not fully, and in particular it is fairly compatible with 5-10 year old version of MS-Office.

Microsoft are very good at breaking compatibility with older versions of their products to force people to upgrade, never mind undermining compatibility with competing products.

The list of organisations that are adopting OpenOffice (or one of it’s derivatives) is growing

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.org_Deployments

While OpenOffice is compatible, it’s not perfect. Last time I checked “commenting” and “track changes” don’t work anywhere near as well in OO as they do in word.

An even bigger change you could make is to changeover to Linux. Totally leave Microsoft behind… 🙂

If I could play all of my computer games on Linux without issues that transition would’ve happened for me a long time ago!

When you’re reduced to googling problems and posting on forums, you might as well be using Open Source – at least the people are friendly.