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All three of my children have tried OpenOffice, and all three of them, after a few days, have come back and said "Daddy, please can I have a copy of the real Office"?
At thirty quid a go - around half an hour's earnings - it's a no brainer, as the result, in each case, has been that since giving them the real Office I've had to spend exactly 0 minutes providing them with support.
To think there are people here on prune' who evangelise OO and say its the next best thing since sliced bread, that it does everything MS office does and that it marks the demise of Microsoft.
Nothing fundametally wrong with Open Office / Libre Office in a home user / small business environment I've got several 3-4-5 man companies using it. But all they need are basic word processing and spreadsheets. For that it works fine I'd be less happy in a larger company, or if they needed more capable spreadsheets - but in that case there could be a case for looking at Lotus Symphony, which is an IBM fork from the Open Office code
Whats also worth thinking about is that if you are upgrading a small network from systems using Office 2003 / XP or earlier, then the training jump to OO / LO is often easier than the jump from old versions of Office to the ribbon-driven 2007/2010
The problem I have been having is in the transfer of macro writing from VBA where 'help' support is frankly poor. For those who just need the basic 'Office' facilities in open source it is fine.
For CATIII- many thanks for the offer, but a noble OO person has come forward at last and put the light on for me in the tunnel.
"All three of my children have tried OpenOffice, and all three of them, after a few days, have come back and said "Daddy, please can I have a copy of the real Office"?"
I'm sure its true but must you trot this little story out every few months?
My (and the neighbours kids) son has been using OpenOffice (and now Libreoffice) for several years and doesn't seem to have any problems.
Got to say that I personally did have some problems with OO, but have now standardised on Symphony which does everything I need. It's closer to Office 2003 but will open .docx documents - so I'm not complaining!
