I've been using OpenOffice.org for a few months now and it's going pretty well. One thing I noticed though is that the Find and Replace in Writer is not nearly as robust as the comparable feature in Word. I'm a pretty heavy user of Find and Replace especially when I'm collecting documents from multiple places into one document, or when I'm importing and exporting a document from different software.
In Word, it's pretty easy to do all kinds of tasks like looking for two paragragh marks that follow a period and replacing them with one paragraph mark that follows a period. In OpenOffice.org Writer, I don't have anywhere near the flexibility to do complicated Find and Replace operations that Word offers. I find myself opening a document in Word to do the operation, saving it, and opening it back up in OpenOffice.
I think my favorite feature of OpenOffice.org so far is the built-in ability to export to pdf. That works great. I made a nice drawing in Draw and I wanted to distribute it to a bunch of people, and there's no way I could count on them all having the same software to open the drawing, so I exported it to pdf and it looked and worked great.
Labels: OpenOffice.org, serious, text, unsolicited opinions