[tarballed]

I know both are pretty similar for the most part. I do have experience using OpenOffice on Windows, but now that I'm off Windows, I need a Office suite that has at least:

-document (like Word)
-spreadsheet capabilities

Just curious if anyone had any suggestions and feedback regarding these two.
What they liked? Disliked and so forth.

Thanks.

Tarballed

[bmw]

StarOffice just has some bundled fonts and a few other doodads (spellcheck?). OOo is what you should probably use. I use it on 3 platforms -- mostly the Mac. I read Word files by sucking them in and "printing" to PDF format. I have yet to find a Word doc that won't be imported that way.

Also check out AbiWord for a standalone Word-compatible WP.

Not sure about spreadsheets, I hardly use 'em. Have you looked at the Koffice suite?

[elmore]

Open Offices spreadsheet capabilities have come a long way and excel imports fine with most basic formulas. I don;t know that you'll be able to get advanced pivot functionality to import without a litle trouble but then again you're probably not using that anyways.

[bumbler]

I have been a heavy user of both, since about StarOffice 4.0 on RH 5.2. I still have copies of SO 5.1a and 5.2, because they work rather well on older, slower machines. For some word processing tasks, the old SO was frankly better. I've not seen SO 7.x, so I can't comment much. As they have said, extra fonts and a few proprietary extensions.

OO.o does a far better job of, say importing a section of spreadsheet into a text document. Old SO turned it into a graphic. The new one appears to embed directly, as it should. But does anyone have to tell you it sucks power big time? While I haven't bothered to use it on my current 5.3Beta3, I recall under 4.x the Linux version of OO.o ran faster on FreeBSD than the native version did.

[NullSpin]

I'm sure the real world response to this is Star Office, as they (SUN) have dumped a ton of money into making sure every facet of use is addresed. But....I have used open office on bsd and transferred .xls and .doc files back and forth to windows without any issues.
In fact I have used openoffice ot recover 'corrupted' ms office files on a number of occasions. So for 0 money down, open office has my vote.
NS

[z0mbix]

Another OOo vote here. We evaluate both at my company and eventually deployed OOo to as many users as we could (around 50 out of our 80 staff so far). We had no need for the extra functionality that SO had to offer over OOo. I too have used OOo on several occasions to recover MS Office files. Sometimes, I just had to open it in OOo and save it without making any changes and it worked again in MS Office.

[draconius]

toss in another vote from a practical use....here at college, I have been using my FreeBSD box all the time, and openoffice is nice to have to open up syllabuses, and to type papers and to keep track of my finances in a spreadsheet....all sorts of good practical uses that I have found, and have not had an y problems yet...