Excelling or Not

[Alram]

I use Open Office almost exclusively. There was one time when I had to use MS because Open Office would not save a particular formatting style which was required for submission of a manuscript. But that was a word processor document, not a spreadsheet; however, I could envision such a problem with the spreadsheet happening now and then.

I use Open Office on machines that I don't have MS Office on. Since I'm in the academia, I get quite a discount -- e.g. academic pricing for the professional version is $58 (vs $344 retail) and our for organization it's cheaper as we do volume licensing (serverOS/APPS+staff+faculty+students) with the advantage of the @home option for employees (so, I can have a copy at home for $9.99). The overall cost of our MS License for the college is about $35K -- and it covers ~1000 faculty /staff and 3400 students. Net price is about $7.95 per person. But, they are still enamored with Google Apps (it's FREEE!!!) or is it?

At home I have 2 machines with MS Office, and 2 machines with Open Office.

Humph. Since posting this, I encountered a problem with Open Office spreadsheets. My wife has 2 versions on her computer. She was using an older version just fine and then I installed the newer, latest version, so that she could have 1 word processor dedicated to the Spanish language, and another for English.
To make a long story short, when entering new data, the latest version would not compute a formula which had been created with the older version. The spreadsheet has to be opened with the older version in order for new data to be properly computed. I am not sure why.