With the ridiculous price of MS Office 2010 and the dreadful, hated ribbon interface, OpenOffice (OO) makes great sense. If you have previously used MS Office 2000 or Office 2003 then it will not take long to get to grips with OO.
The familiar menu interface is there and very similar to the old Office interface. Some of the functions are slightly different and setting up landscape pages works differently but it is quite easy to set up very professional documents using this software.
The commonly used apps e.g. word processor, spreadsheet and presentation graphics work fine and are in most respects compatible with MS Office. OO can also save in MS formats .doc, .xls and .ppt and there is also the database (which I don't use). There is a PDF export function built in which works BETTER than MS Office 2010 version in that it saves PDF bookmarks.
I have now got OO set up with templates and the same shortcut keys I used in MS Office and it works fine. In fact, people are stunned at the visual quality of my work when I tell them I used a piece of FREE software! In most respects my work in OO is indistinguishable from docs producted using Word 2010.
It is extremely unlikely that I will ever buy another copy of MS office again!
If you want it on CD this is fine and quite cheap, but I have just downloaded it from the OpenOffice website.
Winner!