I have done a lot of automation reading backend Oracle data and pushing upwards of 1,000,000 rows of data directly into an Excel PivotCache object using VFP to control the process. At home I had Office 2000 Professional installed on my personal notebook. About a year or two ago I kept getting very irratating notices to install an upgrade feature and if I did not then Excel or Word would immediately shut down.

Since the time I installed my legit copy of Office on my notebook I rebuilt my basement and in the interim lost my Office CD. That CD was required to install the upgrade feature (whatever that was) so I could use the fundamentals of Excel at the time.

After getting very irratated at the process - I uninstalled Office 2000 and installed the free Open Office Org product and have not looked back. I used that same product for my sister's kids in school when they wanted to have Office installed - Open Office works great for them for their High School projects.

See http://fox.wikis.com/wc.dll?Wiki~MakingEveryFoxCount for how this approach can save you thousands of dollars. After all there is nothing new to add in Fox (perhaps that is true) and if it is then clearly there is nothing new or not much new to add to Word, PowerPoint or even Excel.

In the end I am no longer a user of MS Office wittingly or not...

>>>>Tom:
>>>
>>>
>>>>They say bad news always comes in threes, and for loyal developer groups that could be the case. When Visual Basic 6 is fully retired
>>>>
>>>>The infamous "third shoe" actually already dropped: J# is officially slated for retirement. So, maybe there's a new policy change at MS: "Bad news from now on will come in fours." 8-[
>>
>>>Sounds like a horse, completely unshod :).
>
>>Or a programmer, left without tools, crawling towards open source... ;-)
>
>Or unwittingly driven to open source?