Decaflon

So Wired starts claiming that Adobe may make an office productivity suite to compete with MS Office. This, of course, is always welcome news, since it involves competition to the de facto 800lb gorilla in the office productivity suite market. Adobe's argument is that they have the framework in which to build a suite. (Edit: I argue that if anyone can build a more bloated software beast than MS it's Adobe, which I suppose bodes well for them in this regard.)

Still, it got me wondering what people here use for their office apps. For me it depends on where I am, though admittedly 95% of my office app use is actually word processor use, so I'm not exactly a good person to gage anything from other than what's comfortable in the word processor market. In fact, the following comparisons ONLY take into consideration word processors, though I'd like to hear what others think of the other usual productivity products (spreadsheet, presentation, email).

At work it's MS Office all the way. I've been using MSO2007 for a couple of weeks now and, as a writer, I've been loving it. The interface's easy to get used to, easy on the eyes, and does the best to not get in your way. Also, since I'm getting .docx documents from clients (most of which are heavily modified), I sort of have to use this.

At home, I usually use OpenOffice, which works great for most things. (Sometimes I use AbiWord, and rarely I use Word on my wife's laptop.) It's not quite as pretty as MS Office, but once you get used to it, you realize that it tends to make a lot more logical sense (at least for versions before MSO2007 -- the verdict is still out for me on that front).

Because I tend to travel around a lot, I've started using Google Docs to keep track of simple documents, mostly non-blogging related writing activities. The only big problem I've seen with it -- outside of the lack of "fancy" layout features -- is that it's not particularly good for documents larger than 15,000 words. (In contrast, MSO and OO can both handle 100,000+ word documents with images fairly well.)

I've been wishing for years that I could again use Word Perfect -- which I absolutely adored -- but it seems like Corel isn't planing on releasing another Linux version any time soon, and I haven't quite been able to justify using it at work in lieu of MS Office.

Again, as for spreadsheets, I don't use them anywhere nearly enough to care. In the email front, I love the new look and feel of Outlook 2007, but I'm super happy with the Google tools, since they're available to me anywhere (and I've never had much luck with client-side email software, nor any needs that would demand offline email).