OpenOffice.org: 7 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do could get you thinking. Did you know about these capabilities of Open Office?
1) you can open multiple windows on single file to edit various places in a document without having to scroll back and forth. This facilitates cross referencing and internal consistency.
2) you can import a lot of different legacy office suite formats which makes OOo handy for recovering archives. (I just wish it would import DeScribe files).
3) There are an easter eggs in the spreadsheet program, type “=GAME(“StarWars”)” in a cell and see what happens.
4&5&7) If you don’t like the way OOo does things, odds are you can fix it in tools for customizing and options.
6) OOo supports macros and its own scripting language.
As FOSS, Open Office has its forks and branches and people with better (or different) ideas. One of the major such efforts is Go-oo which brags about Microsoft Works import filters and better Microsoft binary file support. It has connections to Novell which may or may not be important to some. It is the version of OOo used in Ubuntu distributions.
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