Apart from the fact that Open Office is free, are there any significant differences between the two Office programs? This has come up today and I'd be interested to hear from people who have used both. Ta.
I find Office 2010 far easier and intuitive to use than Open Office. It is much more versatile as well.
I use MSO at work and LibreOffice (which is forked from OO) at home, and both do the job for me. I actually prefer LO, but then I don't like all this arty farty ribbon stuff.
I use open office at home mainly because I'm too mean to pay for anything, and MS office at work. I find for home use open office is generally OK, I don't think it's as stable as MS and I can't put my finger on why but not as pleasing to look at. I generally have about one document crash a month with open office but the document recovery has always worked and I've never actually lost anything. For some reason the dictionary in open office doesn't seem to work all the time and I've also had problems with vanishing formulas in the open office spreadsheet, but never enough to completely put me off using it. So I think I've got the balance about right: Occasional or home use Open Office probably OK, serious business use, I think MS is probably better.
Oh, one last thing: The MS version I'm using is a least ten years old, as I remember it's Office 2000, don't know much about the later versions but I know one or two people not completely happy.
Give Open Office a try.
I used to have Open Office on my laptop, and the conclusion I drew was, it's fine for most things if you just want to use it exclusively, albeit with occasional formatting issues, but compatibility with existing documents made with MS Office can be patchy.
I already use Libre Office (which is pretty much OO under another name). I was interested in specific things you can do with MS Office that can't be done in OO (leaving aside Access and Base which are very different.)