Because nothing comes remotely close to Excel :)

Well I use LibreOffice for my college work, saving stuff as .doc and opening them at college to print. I do this from both my Windows machine and my Linux one. It works. It certainly works a lot better than OpenOffice did, and being free and Free it's much more convenient than MS Office for me.

Version 3.5 was released today. Here's to even more testing. Grrrrr.

EDIT: I may have installed the RC3. :/

Where did you see 3.5? According to the website, the latest is 3.4.5 and that was released last month.

On Neowin.net, but I guess it must have been a wrongly posted link.

Anyways, going to be deploying it tomorrow on 4 computers, really satisfied with how the testing went. I must say that I am kind of impressed with ODF, there are some documents where the file size is significantly lower than OOXML. Oh, and the format overall seems simpler than OOXML.

Now if only both parties (Microsoft and Open Document Foundation) work together to bring the best of both formats into one, unified format, I'll (and I don't doubt nearly every user of LO and Office) be a happy panda.

But looking on the more important side, this testing has been a very productive thing, I totally overhauled all documents templates, and now it appears the company won't be needing CorelDRAW anymore. Together with Office, that's about 1500-2000 EUR saved on licenses alone (I admit that we were using unlicensed software, but since we're trying to license everything we use now, cutting that expense for a small business company in a country like this one is a great thing).

Talking about expenses, I still find it sad and funny at the same time, when my dad bought a software from a local dev (that has gone under a long time ago, and 'best' of all the software he wrote is 16-bit :/) for ~500 EUR (for 3 PCs) that he has probably used less than a dozen times since owning it (~5 years).

I'd just do docx if you really need it to work in Office. If you're allowed to hand off PDF files I'd do .odf files and just convert to PDF when I needed to give them to someone.
Do you not know about all the shenanigans that went on between ODF and OOXML? It's pretty safe to say they won't be unifying the formats. The ODF is probably a better choice for interoperability with anything but MS Office, but if your use case is specifically MS Office and nothing else then I'd say OOXML.

Well, I remade all documents templates in .odt and .ods (some are spreadsheets). Some places require PDF, so that is easily taken care of. And I've tested everything, everything opens just fine in Office 2010, and can easily be converted in OOXML once opened by it. I wasn't expecting that, but I guess Office 2010 has proper support for the 1.2 extended version of ODF.

Hopefully those institutions and places where Office 2003 and 2007 is still being used won't make a big roar and accept the documents in PDF (after all, they are shared to be looked at, not modified).

EDIT: About the second part, I did a bit of searching, but all I've discovered were OSS fanboys' bashing articles trashtalking OOXML. Why is it so hard for some people to write about both sides, and not just trashtalk one side... :(

There was some questionable tactics by MS with regards to the ISO standards body. As well, everyone else was really thrilled with ODF and MS didn't want to play along, it is a little annoying having fragmentation when we could have had consensus. There was nothing "missing" from ODF, MS just kind of does their own thing. Sometimes that's good, sometimes it's bad, in this case it was likely bad. The biggest issue was the ISO standards body and issues with vote stacking, accusations of some forms of bribery, etc.

I try not to get into the politics side of things, so I haven't been keeping an eye on how things went. Just wanted to see the technical differences between the two formats, but I guess it is hard to not get into politics on the internet.

But anyways, after some further testing, I've noticed that it is very easy to transfer something directly by copy-pasting, from AutoCAD into LibreOffice's Writer. This I must say is a very awesome thing, it really means that we can totally ditch CorelDRAW. On a related note, there were some errors when copy-pasting from AutoCAD into Office's Word, so we had to use CorelDRAW to bypass those errors. Now I am an even happier panda. :)

The only thing 'bad' about LO is the lack of proper support for OOXML (the formatting basically dies and you have to edit stuff to make it look nice), and the use of Java, but I guess those 'issues' can be dealt with as they come (dozen minutes a day converting stuff and keeping Java updated, should be enough).

Overall, I removed two huge packages, Office and CorelDRAW (and licenses that would have cost 1500-2000 EUR), and replaced them with a one, single, smaller, free (open source or not I don't care) package. Successfully deployed it today, along with 7-zip (which the company will be using from now on (WinRAR as it is not free-to-use, had to be removed)).

This operation has been a success! :D

Anyways, guys, thank you for all the replies!

Hi, I noticed you use AutoCAD and are looking at getting rid of expensive software. Have you looked into DraftSight? It's free and apparently does most of the 2D AutoCAD stuff. Also, it is supposed to read and save-to AutoCAD files. I can't really answer any questions about it though, as I am more of a GIS guy than a CAD one. I've been going through the DraftSight tutorial to try to teach myself a little CAD! I just thought you might be interested...

IZArc is also free and provides support for even more formats than 7zip. Just an alternative if you end up needing it.

The company is actually using AutoCAD Map 3D and Microstation, but we'll be removing Microstation, and probably buying AutoCAD Map 3D if we cannot find an alternative... Although I doubt we'll find one, since Map 3D has so many features that the company really needs.