anyone have exerience with openoffice.org

[astroglide]

that is a knee-jerk zealous assertion. for openers, nobody can predict if or when microsoft is going to die and the file formats are already readable by tons of 3rd-party apps (e.g. openoffice) through digging through what little specs there are and reverse-engineering the rest. if microsoft dies, office will still run on the computers it ran on.

furthermore, there is a 0% chance that the governments and people of the world would simply throw their hands up in the air and say, "oh well i guess we have to keep all of our old computers so that we can access any data earlier than this point in time!" the formats would be completely opened. voluntariily by microsoft, certainly, after they had no ability to profit from it. if some retarded circumstance arose where they were unwilling to do it, it would be forced.

the idea that one would actually lose the ability to see/use any data they create in office at any point in the future is absolutely preposterous and wrong.