OSNews

I don't know why you've been modded down. There seem to be many people who simply can't imagine that it's completely possible to get real work done without an office application, no matter from which manufacturer it comes from.

Several years of maintaining mixed environments taught me that OpenOffice is suitable for most of the purposes done (in these environments, mostly in the medical sector); these settings included mixed installations of UNIX, Mac OS X and even "Windows". The most remarkable thing for me have been the users coming from MICROS~1 "Office" who suddenly wanted "this new 'Office'", which was OpenOffice in fact. After getting it installed, I could notice that their complains, their problems and their questions got fewer and fewer. Ineroperability between the different plaforms was not a big deal, and the ressources brought by OpenOffice (structure of menus and dialogs, templates and functionalities) created no real problems regarding the "usage migration" from another application.

Speaking from my individual background, I've been a long time StarOffice user, and OpenOffice afterwards, but for important things, things that have a serious background and that have to be done in a way where content, form and data representation have to be perfect without any compromises, more simple tools like LaTeX are my choice. This is, of course, not applicable to other fields where office applications dominate today.

So if someone would ask me: "Can You Really Live Without Office?", I would be able to answer honestly and without any doubt: "Yes, I can."

A note on the english language: The use of "you" may be seen with two different meanings: "can you" can be addressed towards a certain person (like me), or it can be a kind of a rhethoric question, such as "can man(kind)"; in the german language, we can differentiate this with "kannst du" (individual context) and "kann man" (generalized context).