I haven't seen OpenOffice.org as an issue of "switching".
It is more like:
- Some install OpenOffice.org in order to be able to handle those kinds of files.
- Some install OpenOffice.org in order to gain functionality that they don't have in their Microsoft Office. For instance, if you didn't buy Visio, it is obvious to use OpenOffice draw to create drawings.
- More and more PCs don't get Microsoft Office installed, based on the assumption that the user on that PC will not need to use Office. This may happen often in technical contexts or if the PC is mostly used for remote processes, like using a browser or a remote desktop. However, in case you really need to open a .doc document on these machines, you can install OpenOffice.
With regard to copy & paste of html tables and csv tables, My Excel 2003 doesn't do that easily. OpenOffice.org easily recognizes when I press Control-V and the data on the clipboard seems to look like CSV stuff or tab-separated stuff, and a popup lets me choose field delimiters, string delimiters, date formats etc. To my knowledge, Excel doesn't have this ability.
Also, writing PDF files is something many people would like. The easiest way to do this with Word files, is to download OpenOffice.org, open your Word files in that, and then press the PDF button.
Installing OpenOffice.org is not a question of switching. It is a question of getting a free solution to common problems. As the OpenOffice usability increases and feature list increases, too, this becomes increasingly true. And as long as Microsoft Office doesn't include PDF writing, there's a damn good reason to install OpenOffice. If the next version of MSOffice is out by 2010, and widely deployed by 2012, it means that OpenOffice makes sense on almost all computers until at least 2012, even if they don't add new features to it during the next 5 years. |
