I have a lot of experience with Open Office, and have 20 years in tech writing and publishing support....I run like the wind away from Open Office. If you need features, this freeware is not for you.
It's fine if you are doing something simple. A couple of headings, bold this, italic that. A memo, a 5 page pdf for your website. If you are a Word Wizard, Open Office is more like Wordpad than Word.
Table of contents? work in outline view? Forget it. Open a complicated Word doc in Open Office....eye-yi-yi....look out! Corruption. Styles, formatting, margins messed up, and not in a predictable way.
The only time I use Open Office now is the rare times I'm on site with my crazy scientist client - a unix guru of the highest level (he knows he crazy)...where open source rules, and Microsoft is not allowed in.
