I work for a small engineering and instrument making company. I suggested trying OpenOffice in a company, it was carefully considered and rejected, and there are reasons for it:

1. Some of the documents we get from partners who write them in MS Word just don't open right. The company can't afford this, period.

2. OpenOffice Calc doesn't have compound filtering, like MS Excel. I.e. you filter column by one parameter, then by another. In Excel it is compound filtering: you select list of parts that satisfies the condition1 AND condition2, in OpenOffice Calc the condition2 just replaces the condition1. Maybe it's even more _right_, maybe the behaviour of MS Office is just a gimmick - I don't know, but the fact is that a guy who manages inventory of parts in our company came to depend on the functionality of MS Office and making switch is just impractical.

The version of OpenOffice was 2.4 back then, but I have no reason to expect that those issues have been fixed since. OpenOffice is a nice project and helluva work, and open source is cool, but there are reasons why not everyone can use it.