I have used OpenOffice for the last few years, I think it's fine.
A girl on my ASL course bought a new laptop and needed an office suite but was fretting over the cost of MS Office (even with the student/teacher edition's discount) so I installed OpenOffice for her. A few weeks later I asked how it was going and she said she hated it!
I use OpenOffice and it works just fine. It just isn't compatible with most people that I contact with as they use MS Office. I have to convert files over to PDF or excell all the time which can be taxing... so I will have to pony up to get MS Office eventually.
See post #4. I prefer WordPerfect and went to their WordPerfect Office X4 (no longer the latest version) because of conversion of M$ docx files received from others. It usually runs less that M$ to buy and will open these files without intervention from you. You may see a box flash saying it converting as it opens; but you don't have to do anything and it is not time consuming.
She is not only the one. I tried OpenOffice and I hate it so much. Too limited and not works very well from .docx format due templates issue. So I am perfect happy with M$ Office 2011.
OpenOffice is something that takes patience. It's not exactly Microsoft Office, but it gets the job done... especially for word documents.I have used OpenOffice for the last few years, I think it's fine.
A girl on my ASL course bought a new laptop and needed an office suite but was fretting over the cost of MS Office (even with the student/teacher edition's discount) so I installed OpenOffice for her. A few weeks later I asked how it was going and she said she hated it!
I use OpenOffice
I use it solely for Word documents though.