Rapaire -

I think for most people Open Office is perfectly satisfactory. Few are likely even to know the existence of the fairly common but slightly advanced features used by many WP workers, and only very few "casual users" would even imagine the existence of the capabilities used by the specialists in book publishing or similar applications.

So far as I can tell though, many really necessary features we used in our businesses are simply gone, or inaccessible since OS updates crippled older versions and we were forced to Office 2007.

It's pretty obvious that the people who "redesigned" Office simply didn't know very much about how it was being used by those who had taken the trouble to learn what could be done with the prior versions.

Perhaps it's fortunate that I'm old enough to be retired, and LiK is "withdrawing" from her prior work due to her health. It would be impossible to continue her former business at the same levels as before, using Office 2007. They would have put us out of business even if we weren't in the process of "phasing out" of it.

I find it sad, however, that those still working (assuming there are some still literate ones) will not have the same kinds of tools (or skills) that we knew and used.

John