“Back on August 3rd, I installed the Beta 1 version of Windows
Vista on my work desktop. That meant reinstalling all my
software… but I didn’t have a copy of Microsoft Office handy. So
I installed a beta copy of OpenOffice.org 2.0–the leading
open-source office suite–figuring that it could serve as a
stopgap.“More than a month later, I’m still using that OpenOffice.org
beta to do my everyday work… and it’s been a remarkably smooth
experience, especially considering that this is a pre-release
product running on a pre-release operating system. I’ve wrangled
lots of Word and Excel documents in OpenOffice.org’s counterparts
(Writer and Calc, respectively), and as far as I can tell, the only
tip-off that my colleagues have noticed is that my documents have
funny icons rather than the universally-known Office ones. All in
all, this is a considerably more polished product than the version
of OpenOffice.org I wrote about back in May of last year…”