[tokenadult]

The biggest advantage MS has over OO is Excel vs the Open Office spreadsheet, it's not even close.

Hear. Hear. The OpenOffice spreadsheet is very much of a kludge.

In spite of all that I don't use Microsoft stuff any more.

And despite of what you correctly said above, that is also my experience. I have been able to run OpenOffice for years now, and since it was updated to open .docx files and similar files from the newer generation of Microsoft products, I can get my work done with OpenOffice.

Personally I think that the microsoft office suite has more to fear from things like Google Docs than from Open Office in the longer term.

Yes, my collaborators and I are finding more users for Google Docs and related products from Google every day.

P.S. I expect to switch to Linux on my next personal computer, as my son the computer science major has long urged. All the younger generation in my household use various distributions of GNU/Linux.