I came across a blog post by capslock assassin comparing Office 2007 and OpenOffice. CA's methodology, as the writer described, came down to five reasons why Office 2007 is better than OpenOffice; user interface, help system, speed of common tasks, templates provided, and innovation.
In a nutshell, it was a pretty light treatment of the topic. Most of what was highlighted as strengths in Office 2007 were due to the new Ribbon menu feature. The ribbon menu won the day in the user interface, speed of common tasks, and innovation categories.
If you've followed my blog posts you know that I'm not a fan of the new ribbon menu. It's tough to give this comparison of Office 2007 and OpenOffice much credence giving the weight put on this questionable (in my book) ribbon feature of the new Office 2007.
Frankly, you could have replaced OpenOffice with Office XP and written almost exactly the same comparison, based on this blog post. Pre Office 2007 releases don't have the ribbon menus or some of the new features like SmartArt (which I love!).
I don't think comparisons like CA's do much to convince anyone that OpenOffice is inferior to Office 2007 and would probably only speak to an already biased Microsoft crowd who have never used OpenOffice.
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Ribbon
I am a web developer and I mostly deploy open source software. I do keep a laptop with Vista solely for use with Office. There is no other productivity suite that even comes close.
At first I was turned off by the Ribbon, but quickly realized I was simply biased because I had the other navigation style down and I was hesitant to learn a new system.
Now I use the Ribbon and I dread using other programs that still deploy drop down menus and buttons.
Also another great feature of Office 2007 is viewing changes to the document by hovering over options. Gone are the days where you have to open a dialog make a change, look at it, change your mind and then do it all again.
From an end user perspective, There is no comparison between Office 2007 and Open Office. There isn't one task that anyone can honestly say Open Office does better than Office 2007.