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.

[Neil Stevens]

Whether the US and other governments do or do not have escrow agreements with MS to protect their data is irrelevant to whether average users will have any recourse when MS once again breaks compatibility.

[astroglide]

microsoft isn't in a position to prejudically break compatibility for breaking compatibility's sake because the broadest base of their users is still running older versions. they introduce new formats/features with the releases, but the default one remains the most compatible (and this hasn't changed for a while). they would have to introduce features that would be highly compelling to the simplest of users in order to get anybody to even notice their existence. virtually everyone is satisfied with the features of 97/2000, and those that aren't have specific reasons (which most likely mean that only office can do what they need).

[astroglide]

just so that i make a directly-topical response to this, try openoffice and see if it suits your needs. it's free, and it doesn't have spyware/viruses so there is no harm in trying. if it works, keep it. if it doesn't, consider picking up an oem copy of office 2003 basic (outlook/word/excel) for around $140. oo has a number of apps beyond document and spreadsheet creation, though, and if you use/appreciate those you'll have to scale to higher costs to get the same functionality in office. it doesn't, however, have a functional equivalent to outlook. if you're only interested in READING office documents, you can download free/small viewer apps for them from microsoft.com/office.

[NoChance]

I tried OpenOffice and I couldn't stand it. I ended up getting MS Office.

[rusty JEDI]

This is way more discussion than i expected and hoped for and i thank all of you.

I will give it a shot.

rJ