Debian Administration

At work I'm forced to use Microsoft Office on Windows systems. I almost never need to actually use the applications myself any more but I routinely receive office format files that I have too view/read.

At home I have little use for office applications, possibly slightly more than at work. When I switched to Linux initially I kept a Windows system at hand for working with Microsoft Office files but over time I found I used it less and less. Once Debian Sarge came out and OpenOffice became available I started to use it and binned Microsoft all together. I don't use it much but I find OpenOffice.org is plenty good enough for everything I do.

--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam

At work we have both MS Office and OpenOffice installed. At home, I use OpenOffice exclusively: for big jobs, like when I was writing my thesis, there's no comparison between the two.

LaTeX lets me write documents, and presentations. I edit them in emacs. What else do you need?

What, no option for google docs? Both my wife and I used that as our "office suite"

At work I use MS Office a lot, mostly Excel, and have reached quite a proficient level. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that all the VB macros that I carefully developed during work hours can run flawlessly and unmodified on OOo at home!

On the other side, there are some tricks I've become accustomed to, which don't seem to be possible with OOo. Or simply they are achievable in other ways and I haven't spent enough time with OOo to discover them yet!

For example: in Excel, if I set a filter to only display some rows, select the whole area, change the background to yellow, and then remove the filter, what I get is that only the filtered rows changed background. I couldn't find out how to do the same with OOo Calc.

We're a Microsoft Shop at work, but with OpenOffice and ntfs-3g almost everything works flawlessly.

My only problem with OpenOffice is that one of the Excel spreadsheets I have to work with is password protected.

I can open and read it just fine, but I can't save changes without nuking the password.

Bummer.

Office *suite*??? Nah... Abiword and gnumeric. I keep my schedule kinds of things in Thinking Rock, and do project planning/tracking with Task Juggler.

At that, my primary use for gnumeric is to make CSV and TSV files more easily viewable, and I mainly use Abiword to view the email that one of my clients insists on writing in Word and sending as a MIME attachment.

Could be I'm a bit of a Luddite.

I use MS Office at work. At home, I use OpenOffice for easy stuff, but really have to use MS Office for spreadsheet macros. I just cannot get to grips with OOo's macro language.

I use openoffice almost everyday and I can tell that is a very great suit office. What I like is to improve the stability of the 2.3 version and if possible steel to improve the time of the loading, which was already much improved.

I don't use very much office applications, but my favourite is OpenOffice.org, just because it's the one I use more, and because it's almost the same when running on GNU/Linux (at home and on some PCs at work), on MS Windos (at work) ando on Mac Os X (on my father house), so I'm always very efficient and don't need to learn anything new.
What's more, since OpenOffice is distributed also as a portable app, I put it on my USB stick and use it anywhere posssible!

I use Microsoft Office at work; we have Word 2000 on one of our home computers; all have openoffice installed also. I'm an advanced MS Office user and frequently write VBA. Translating them to OpenOffice macros is a bear; the problem also that I'm not as familiar with OpenOffice macro objects. However, I like and use both of them. OpenOffice is particularly nice because it's free, quite powerful and robust; however it lacks some of the features of MS Office. Use what's best for you. :-)

OpenOffice makes me puke. Why do we not yet have something with the functionality and usability that FrameMaker had (on Solaris) 15 years ago?
I use gnumeric and abiword when necessary. Not that they're really any better than OpenOffice, but somehow they make me feel less sick when I have to use them. What I lack is something that will read PowerPoint files when I occasionally need to view them.

I use Star Office 5.2. It came free with a computer I bought in 95 and was the first office suite I learned. Later I found that I could download it free. I
do desktop publishing, and I use the 'image' and 'draw' features together.
When I tried OpenOffice, it was missing one or the other, I can't remember which..
I've never needed anything else.

I use KOffice here - the KParts integration into KDE is really useful for me, and because it links to the kdelibs, it starts fast for me too.

I once teached a class using MSO 95 and Staroffice 5.1. They definately found theur way better in Staroffice menues, and i think they still will in comparision. I have no idea why the school stubbornly tries to make pupils think they need Microsoft, that cost us taxpauers ans student money, and have caused much unesessary grief. Shools shoud teach general knowleddge and let pupils try different program and choose themselves.
Today in my company we use only OpenOffice as office suite.
On a similar issue, why do we still learn to type on keyboard that have keys arranged by mechanical limitations of the first typewriters, and not in ergonomical ways, like Dvorak??

Suit? Abiword and gEdit with a pack of plugins and dictionaries are more handy and I do use them a lot.

I'm forced to use MS Office at work. Whenever I must use word I spent about 75% of the time with clicking and dragging and searching for some menu points which are just too hard to find. At home I use linux and latex to write documents. I think it's much easier to work with.