I write good business letters; often for other people; sometimes a printed letter gets more attention than an email. The envelopes, formatted and printed in Open Office, are proper business envelopes. At a time when we are working more from home more, Open Office is a sensible alternative to expensive word processing, and spreadsheet programs. I do my company books with an Open Office spreadsheet that I designed myself. It calculates income, expenses, sales and income taxes etc. as I go. When it's time to do taxes, the numbers are all there at the bottom.

I use Open Office for at least three hours every day—usually six. It is my go to word processor. I've written two novels and a collection of short stories with it. I was easily able to format and style the layout for the paperback and eBook files, so they conformed perfectly to Amazon's publishing requirements. Most folks don't know this is possible so they farm it out and pay dearly. I didn't rate the support category above because I have never had to use it. Open Office works fine all the time. It's totally reliable and at a cost 100% less than MS Word.

Figuring out how to do headers and footers on alternating pages was a bit of a brain buster, but I got it. I'm sure it could be more intuitive.

Easy to switch from Microsoft Word and not get lost. Functionality is basically the same.

Moving documents from Word to OpenOffice always ruins the formatting. Essentially, you have to start in OpenOffice and finish here unless you have extra time to reformat everything.

I've been really happy with it (some concerns with some specific version, but nothing that couldn't be resolved downgrading to the previous one. The lack of support and the creation of LibreOffice made it a deprecated solution, unless you are already a user who doesn't feel confortable with changes (but you would feel much happier with LibreOffice from minute 1).

I have been a daily user of OpenOffice since its earliest versions. It has been THE alternative to Microsoft Suite for many years, and at no cost. Its vast number of developers around the world made it easy to find solutions to your problems in any language, and to install flawlessly a wide number of plugins. But the situation changed in 2010 when concerns arose around the management of the project. Actually Apache is the owner of the project, and also if it is still free, I wouldn't recommend to spend a second on it.

Its development has not been updated in the last years, if not for minor updates, and community support is falling down. Also if a strong community is still existing, it has majorly moved to LibreOffice project, a suite which is the choice if you are looking for an (inexpensive) alternative to Microsoft. Having to chose between OpenOffice and LibreOffice (both based on the original OpenOffice experience), there is very little to discuss: the second one is the only alternative you should consider.

I am very happy overall with using this program. It is a complete and lightweight program that allows you to do almost everything it promises

It's easy to download, it's a lighter program than those on the market

it is difficult to recover data, lost due to PC malfunction, not previously saved