I just linked back to this from another comment and thought that I should note this,

ODF files seem to be working well with the copy of MS Office Pro 2010 that I got from the University Book Store.

I’m still not a fan of MS Office, or MS in general, but I’ve had a much better experience with Win7 and Office ’10 than with any of their earlier products.

YMMV of course, and I still have Slackware on my computer, but I don’t feel the need to cry when I use the laptop I bought for school.

@Mats Rauhala: Well, I guess it depends on the level of abstraction. For example I could say “OSX is Unix” too – after all it is based on a BSD kernel, no?

In fact I would venture a guess that OSX is more unix than linux is unix, kernel wise. But, you know… Linux behaves like unix, and both are POSIX compatible – so yeah. You could argue that linux is unix meaning “like unix” to some degree. The codebase does not intersect though – nor it can because of GPL restrictions.

Although he apparently uses linux, but can’t discern between linux and unix.

“Linux is Unix” a quote he said today

@Mats Rauhala: This just goes to show that having a PHD in Computer Science does not mean one possesses a clue.

Also this is the reason why I think that all computer science equipment should be running some flavor of Linux and should not include Open Office or other productivity suite. I mean, computer science students and professors should be using LaTex anyway. :P

Also, there is like 10 billion UML modeling tools out there. Why the hell is he using a drawing program and exporting, importing and etc?

I’m studying computer sciences at Turku University of Applied Sciences. At the moment we are studying UML-modelling, and our teacher shows us how some things are done and the results. He made an uml-diagram with Magic Draw, exported is as an image, imported it to word, and showed it at screen.

Made me want to bang my head to the table

Yeah, the nice thing is that most places will now take a submission in PDF, and LaTeX outputs to that just fine. Of course, if someone else has to edit your stuff, you still have to use Word :(.

I stopped using Word Perfect around the same time submitting your homeworks electronically became an accepted practice. I was forced to switch to Word. Then around my Junior year in college I was introduced to LaTex and never looked back. :)

WYSIWYG or no, any word processor that doesn’t allow the user to “reveal codes”(in WordPerfect speak) is defective. Unfortunately this includes OpenOffice too, they seem to think that since Word doesn’t offer users the ability to see the markup codes, that it’s not a feature anyone actually needs or wants. Which sadly is another example of why MS Office is bad for humanity – just like all other Microsoft products, they’re designed to keep the user stupid and hapless. And since they’re the de facto standard, all the alternatives (well certainly at least OO.o in this case) model themselves on crap like Office and when people clamour for years to get some useful features included (search OO.o bugs for “reveal codes”) the response is “Office doesn’t do it so neither do we”. *sigh*

I dropped MS Office about 4 months ago along with Windows. I still miss PowerPoint. There is nothing that comes close to it. And I do most of my work creating presentations. I am learning to deal with Impress.

I’m indifferent between Excel and Calc and I actually find that Writer is a lot better than Word. If I get any .docx or similar I just return the document and explain that many corporates don’t have Office 2007 and to please save in Office 2003 format.

Regardless of the Open Document and MS Office Open XML hype, we are going to struggle with formats for a long time still.

What bugs me even more is when people use Word for everything… even when they have the whole Office suite.
Things I have seen done with Word:

1. Webpages (my school) – Frontpage
2. Tabular data and only tabular data – Excel
3. Greeting cards – Pulisher
4. Composing e-mails (from Outlook- introduces even more problems that regular HTML emails because of Word’s bad HTML export) – Integrated HTML mode in Outlook
5. Saving images (I see people do this all the time at school, even teachers- copy the image from IE, paste it into Word, and then save a doc) – No extra software needed
6. Copy and paste a paragraph or so of a webpage where File>Print, Print Selection would suffice. – No extra software needed

And so on. It bugs me beyond belief.