With a VM you don't need to partition the disk. If the disk is already dedicated to Windows (or Linux) a VM will let you run Linux (or Windows) without the need to re-partition. On top of which there is no need to reboot to swith between Mr Gates and Mr Torvalds.

If there was any further reasons required you can have multiple VMs or, to get realy complicated, VMs within VMs. I have had Windows 95, 98 and 2000 running on my XP desktop as well as RedHat and Ubuntu Linix! Each VM takes around 8Gb.

Open Office is excelent - comes included in the full RedHat suite as well as others. Will read all MS Office documents and does everything that Outlook does. The only issue I had was getting Messanger working in RedHat but I managed it eventualy:-)
- Dave-