I’m still working with OpenOffice at home and the results are mixed.  The interface is really similar to the MS Office product of about eight years ago so that makes the transition a bit clunky.  Nothing that you can’t adapt to with use though.

The two main products (besides Outlook which is not replicated in OpenOffice) I use in MS Office are Word and PowerPoint.  The equivalent in OO is Writer and Impress, both of which do a great job allowing the user to create documents and presentations.  Both applications can save open MS Office documents and save files as MS Office documents.  That’s a big plus for OO users.

Impress will impress the user as being a nearly identical product as PowerPoint.  There is a wizard which comes up by default when Impress starts that the experienced user will want to turn off.  Other than that it is very simple to transition from PowerPoint to Impress.  

Writer is a bit of a fall off in quality from Impress.  The toolbar graphics are not as clean as in Word, and I am not a fan of the default view for editing documents.  The page is shoved over to the left side of the screen and leaves a glaring empty space on the right.  This can be fixed (View ( Zoom ( Page Width) but is a pain that it is not the default setting.  The Auto Correct feature doesn’t catch as many errors as Word either.  The tip light bulb in the bottom corner is less annoying than the Paper Clip of Death in Word.

I may be the only person in North America that actually likes the Task Pane in Office, so I miss it in OO.  I also am not a fan of the Recent Document feature in OO because it does not limit the documents to those belonging to the software in use.  When I’m working in Writer it brings up all documents that I’ve opened in any OO product.

Making the switch is still a work in progress for me.  Clearly OO does all of the basics that a home user could need.  I haven’t worked in it enough to determine if a business could transition away from MS Office and go with OO.

More later.