First of all, I am not trying to start a debate on this subject. I wanted to pass along an objective look of Microsoft Office 2007 vs. OpenOffice 2.3 word processing article posted on Linux.com.

The author breaks the two down into about a dozen categories and posts both his “winner” in the category as well has how the conclusion was reached. Overall, the conclusion was OpenOffice is the winner over MS Word. This is a very good overview look with an even better discussion thread at the bottom of the article. Definitely worth the read if you are looking for an office suite.

On the heels of my post yesterday, I’ll give my opinion since I use both fairly extensively.

In a nutshell, if you are a home or small office user, OpenOffice fits the bill perfectly. It is free and does everything you could want it to do. On the other hand, for corporate use OpenOffice isn’t in the same league. MS Office has tight integration between all their products, as well as Windows itself, and when you consider the widely used VBA extensions (yes I know OOo does have macros, but nothing like VBA) and Sharepoint Services, OpenOffice currently does not offer the same feature set. Not to mention MS Office formats (.doc, .xls, etc.) are the standard.

Don’t get me wrong, OOo is a great product, but it is not the “why do people still buy MS Office?” replacement people make it out to be. I currently use OOo at home, but at work MS Office is significantly better.