open office vs ms office........................?

I did not test all the options of the both packages, only Word and Excel. My prepferences stay with MS. For example, MS Excel can handle bigger files (up to 10 MB), which I could not even load with Open office. Open Office, however, has one huge advantage - it is free of charge.

I would prefer to use Microsoft Office. I have been using it for many times since high school. I have tried using openoffice.org when I tried to open an excel sheet using calc from openoffice, there were a lot of cells that has formulas that has been changed and not interpreted well.

Open Office is more flexible than MS office and It has a built in PDF export feature too.

I disagree with cnetboss. OpenOffice supports more file formats than MS Office, but they miss the point. Being "universal" is great, but there are separate freeware tools for that. MS Office is more "functional." When I'm using Excel (Calc) for example, sometimes I'll be selecting gradients to color in a cell. Unfortunately, Calc doesn't offer 24 million colors, it offers 91. :( I'm happy to say I can color the edges of a cell separately in Calc now, but it takes more work than Excel.