For the past while I have primarly been consulting with a large Canadian financial institution and for the last year I commited myself to only using OOo (OpenOffice.Org) the free open source Office Suite and removed MS Office from the machine they provided. I consider myself a limited power user. I can figure out most of the features of MS Office, but I don't personally use them.
Here are some lessons learned and tips that I came upon during my one year of OOo on a Windows 2000 box. Note this would apply equally on my home machine or laptop that use Mandrake.
1. Focus on data and then add formating
If you are working with someone who has MS Office on a presentation or document work on the content first without formatting. Later apply a template.
2. Change all the associations in your browser and ensure they work.
I primarily use Firebird and was lazy about changing the associations - they didn't initially work, which wasted time.
3. Beware Office Automation Lock-in
The main issue I had over the course of the year was in house applications which call Word or Excel via COM. The smarter developers export to .csv or save as a generic doc file (word 6) and then allow you to re-attach or
edit the file.
4. No Outlook or Access replacement
I used Lotus Notes or MySQL as a replacement.
5. Expect a learning curve
Take some time to explore the features when you are not under pressure. When the presure mounts and you have to get that perfect Presentation in by 6 PM you may feel the desire to switch back. Use the web for support. I found the forums helpfull.
6. No filters for Lotus 123 or Word Perfect
When I started using OOo in windows Lotus Notes exported to 123 files only. With Notes 6.5 there is now a CSV export option.
Word Perfect has been less of an issue, although expect this to be fixed soon by libwd.
7. Ensure you have enough RAM
Requirements for OOo are closer to those of Office 2003 than Office 97.
8. Small Changes to documents and Esthetics
You will see small changes to Powerpoint and word documents. Most are minor and I ignored them. For example Revision tracking between Word and OpenOffice is not guaranteed to be perfect. Roll-out on a large scale will generate some calls to the help desk unless there is user education.
Printing of Presentation files (which I do a lot of) has less options than Word and the print dialog is quite different.
9. PDF integration is excellent.
I use send document as pdf attachments all the time.
How much could the bank save if they switched? It pays $236 per license of Office (Roughly $110 per copy of Windows). If half of the 22,000 MS Office Users switched, assuming support costs remain the same, it would save the bank about $23 Million if you value it as a perpetuity.
Not huge money - but nothing to sneeze at.
Challenges going forward: Email + Calendaring.
Options are Web based email such as IBM Domino 6.5, Squirrelmail or the Ximian Evolution product.