For me it is the Gmail of Office Applications. It's easy to use, free and extremely straight forward. I would say much more straight forward than the big Microsoft Office 2007. As an average but regular user of the Microsoft Package since Winword 2.0 came out - I was really disappointed by the ribbon concept introduced in Microsoft Office 2007.Open Office is different. It is like green IT. Several enthusiasts have worked really hard to create a free and powerful office suite with all the major features. Unfortunately the Excel competitor can only cater for 1024 columns. That is definitely not enough. But: The OO package is available for free as a lightweight 128MB download for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. I am especially curious to try it out on Mac OS X.Here is a summary of download resources as the official page seems to be down at the moment:http://openoffice.mirror.aussiehq.net.au/stable/3.0.0/http://scott.yang.id.au/2008/10/openofficeorg-30-download-it-now/