Open Office has received good ratings from a number of respectable reviewers. It can do nearly everything that a 4- or 5-generation old Word can do, and for most people that's more than "good enough." Most people don't really use 90% of the capabilities of any recent Word version, and are unlikely to us much more of what Open Office can do. I use frequently several features in my Word 2002 that are not available on Lin's Word 2000, and both are "obsolescent" versions.

A common comment from reviewers who actually try to explore all the capabilities is that commands/tools/methods in Open Office are less consistently organized than in Word, so that you sometimes have to swap philosophies when you change what you want to do, but that will likely be smoothed out with a little time.

For most "casual users" and for some relatively advanced users, Open Office is a good program, according to those who've made realistic comparisons with other alternatives. (I wonder why I've never seen its capabilities compared to Word Perfect.)

John