On a new computer, rather than paying megabucks for MS Office I'm looking at Open Office which is, I believe, the base program on which sun Microsystems Star Office is based. Because of MS Office's dominance in the market, it is essential that my WP and spreadsheet can read and write MS Office format documents - has anyone any experience with Open Office's compatibility with MS Office that they can share.

I think you've reversed the history. Sun's commercial program StarOffice was first. The source code was released and is now OpenOffice. I believe Sun still sells StarOffice - what you get for the fee is support. OpenOffice can open, edit, and save Microsoft Word and Excel documents. With the word processor, compatibility is very good with the exception of some advanced functions such as TrackChanges. With the spreadsheet program, the basic cell data is compatible but Excel seems to contain a number of features not present in OO. To save $$, you might consider a new product, Works Suite. It's Microsoft Works with a full copy of Word. The best part about OO, is that it's free so it won't cost you anything to test it. I recommend you give it a try. Best Luck, Bob

I have Open Office but have not installed it. I do have Software602 Suite the free for non-commercial use version. It is highly compatible with MS Word and Excel. The download is ~15mb (when I got it anyway). The Paid version ($29) offers more but not things that I needed. It is worth a look at. Regards, Bryan

Ability Office is also worth a try and is compatable with MS Office applications. Trial here: http://www.vnunet.com/Download/1150643 M

I'm a big fan of Star Office 7, which I think correlates to OO 1.1. I love it, espcially the text writer. It has more features than Office 97, 2000, both of which are on the home network. I've found for papers and books, and reports, it can't be beat. My learning curve is still on going, as there's so much in it... If you're familiar with MS Office, you'll pick it up in a day. The Calc, the excel equivalent seems to do everything I need to do, no complaints.. Only problem i had was when saving a complex thesis/book to a .doc file, I lost some of the first page / table of contents / left page-right page formatting. No biggie really. Have OO 1.1 here on anther system, jsut no time to install and play... Unklegrumpy