Man oh, man, if I hear another person say OpenOffice isn’t ready for prime time, I swear I’m gonna yank out their odbc and hit them over the head with it.

In my experience joe-generic office drone, when faced with OpenOffice or MS Office, is gonna make all the same mistakes independent of brand.

Word vs. Writer

He’s going to double carriage return to put spaces between paragraphs. He’s going to indent with spaces. He’s going to to use the B I U and font settings to change heading’s characteristics (which are double carriage returned as well). He’s going to freak out if you mention ODBC and mail merge. He’s going to tediously type out envelopes and form letters (“testing” them in the printer to align them correctly). After you teach him how to mail merge off of a DB, or that documents are easier to update when you define styles etc., he will thank you. When you return a few weeks later, he will be back to his same tried and true plodding slow-wittedness.

Powerpoint vs. Presenter

He’s going to make a presentation by first deciding on a background and header style. Then he’s going to mess with borders for 30 minutes. Then he’s going to play around with slide transitions. Then he’s going to import some useless graphics. Eventually he will think about content. Once there, he will repeat steps used to make the text document. You doubt me? Tell me if you’ve seen this done before? Gettysburg

Excel vs. Calc:

Will pore over columns of numbers for hours, hand editing and typing values. He will alt-tab between his spreadsheet and his calculator program to add numbers. He will select some columns and make a chart, spending 15 minutes to find the pie/scatter/bar configuration that looks prettiest, and then proceed to misname the  dependent and independent axises. Then he will select fonts, backgrounds, borders… and then spend no less then three hours trying to get his 40×129 monstrosity to fit on ONE page. He will waste no less then 40 sheets of paper to accomplish this. Upon success he will make 56 copies for distribution.

Did I miss anything? I’d say both products let people do their work as they normally do. I’ve observed for some time and both products give you equal levels of  functionality.

This has been my experience for 95% of all office workers, and I also find that their adamance towards MS is inversely proportional to their competence with it.