[citation][nom]Honis[/nom]At my work its because you can't open an encrypted or password protected MS word document in Openoffice, we've been using MS Office for more than 15 years and training people in Openoffice isn't worth the overhead of training current staff and most new staff that have also been using MS Office since 95, legacy word documents run the possibility of not being compatible with future Openoffice releases, etc.[/citation]I have lots of old Office documents that aren't formatted correctly in newer versions of Office. Microsoft Works files are even worse.[citation][nom]Honis[/nom]People generally use what they know at home, and what the people at my work place know is MS Office.[/citation]You have co-workers who know have word processor skills exceeding WordPad and spreadsheet skills beyond using them for shopping lists? Wow! That's a rarity.[citation][nom]Honis[/nom]I use Openoffice on my home PC and MS Office on my laptop. On my home PC I value hard drive space and the Openoffice fits my needs. The laptop needed to be compatible with anything my school threw at me.[/citation]I use OOo all the time to edit Office documents and the people I'm sharing them with don't notice. Of course, it depends on the complexity. I have a customer that was fretting having to buy Office for college in order to be able to edit assignments in *.doc files from the professor. She finally asked them if there was some way she could get a cheaper version of Office and they told her to just use OOo because that was what they were using.