>So I HAD to buy Office2000 to work with all of their stuff.

We've never bought or isntalled Office at ARS. We've never "HAD" to buy any proprietary software. Why didn't you tell your clients to use RTF or HTML? There are free office 2000 reader programs if you really want to view them. Typically, when I get Word documents (wether for resumes or some other type paper work) I either chuck it, reply telling them we don't support proprietary formats like that, or just throw it in a pile that I'll say I'll get to when I feel like going out of my way to read a text document (usually never).

I've been in two scenarios where Office documents were required (creating conference materials and a magazine article) and I didn't see the benefit of using Office in either (Using XHTML/HTML/XML with CSS/XSLT would of made a whole lot more sense then putzing with Word Templates and all that crap).

Anyways, my point is, the reason people think they can require Office Documents is because everyone will just jump and buy it. If we didn't buy office, no one would HAVE to buy office and we could actually use a real standard.