Office

90% of the things that 90% of people need an office package for is doable in Open Office. I say this having used it for a couple years now. The only times I have had to track down a box with MS Office on it was to satisfy someone who said specifically that they wanted me to do something in a proprietary MS Office format.

We have had some new folks at my office who are in technical fields who have not ever used Open Office for anything. I cornered a couple of them and they ended up admitting that they either fudge on the student purchase forms or outright pirate MS Office in non professional arias like home or friend's computers they set up.

This is one area where I wish MS would start going after people for prating their software. Open Office has problems. The more people who used it, or are at least exposed to it, the better it will become. There are other office packages. Some are OK and some are outright terrible. The tide of MS enforcing their rights would raise all the boats in this case.

We setup a couple computers on our network that let people run MS Office remotely. There are three. If I go look at the logs, they get used about three times a week by the same people over and over. Then, thirty five people all try to use them at once. It would be great if we had a virtual machine system that would scale and allow so many hours of use or whatever as people needed them. This is what the whole MS Office Online thing is supposed to allow. The trouble is, we don't have internet access.