Hello Tom,

I made the move several years ago to OpenOffice 1 (still havn't tried the new version) on my laptop wit no problems. We investigated it where I work when we upgraded to XP but that version was missing a couple of very minor features in excel that were needed. I would be suprised if this version is not good enough for our office use for the next upgrade cycle. Might even be inclined to try some Linux on the desktop if it were not for VFP.

Bob

>I barely scratch the surface when using Excel, Word and Outlook - just a minimal user but I do like the products. When I bought my new Winbook notebook, I installed my previously purchased copy of MS Office and it worked fine for about a year.
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>A week or so ago I started getting an error message whenever I started any of my MS Office applications. That message was "Microsoft XXX has not been installed for the current user. Please run setup to install the application". Unfortunately, I recently moved my home office and can not locate the CD containing the Office software. Not sure what new feature I needed so bad that MS decided to shut down my legally purchased copy of Office.
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>Yesterday, I decided to move on and donwloaded OpenOffice.org 2.0.2 from Sun Microsystems. OpenOffice was able to replace Word, Excel and PowerPoint. In addition it has contains a database, Math Editor and Drawing tools. All this works great - reads my old Word and Excel files and it is free!
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>The only thing I needed now was a replacement for MS Outlook. I found that by downloading Mozilla Thunderbird. What a great product Thunderbird is, it read in all of my Outlook contact info and folders - oh yeah and it is free too.
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>Later on today I intend to say goodbye to Inernet Explorer and replace it with Mozilla FireFox. Internet Explorer is apparently the least conforming to the established W3C standards - for example, IE requires the download of an Adobe SVG viewer while this is native in Firefox and Opera. The only remaining MS product on my notebook is the one that MS doesn't care about but the one I really like and that of course is Visual FoxPro.
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>I really do not know why I was getting the error that caused me to depart from MS products but that is something the boys in Redmond need to understand. If they do not, I suspect more and more people will see the light and convert to free open source alternatives like I just did. At what point do buyers of MS Office realize that there is nothing new in Word and has not been for most users since Word 97? What is new and exciting for most users of Excel since Excel 2000?