Mail Merge

I hope they have worked on the utterly pathetic mail merge tools in OO. I hate Office but rolling out a few hundred names tags or address labels from a merge is a snap. Otherwise OO is a cool product in many respects.

Re: the price of MS Office

"If you've looked at retail prices for MS Office lately you may get some idea of why people are using OpenOffice.The price of Office does not reflect the amount of work put into it - otherwise MS's Applications division would not be making 60% profits"

Nowadays Office probably is too expensive compared to the work that should be going into it. The stuff of putting text on screen so that it appears exactly as it prints, of things like searching and, in the case of OS X, spell checking and grammar checking has long ago found its way into the operating systems. Free SQL-based database engines abound, and of the platforms supported by Office, at least OS X installs one by default. Similarly PowerPoint isn't doing much that the Windows Presentation Foundation and CoreGraphics can't do automatically. The kicker is almost certainly that Office can't use the OS facilities for many things because it needs to support the various hacks of previous versions that have found their way into the file formats. Word's typography is famously erratic, Excel deliberately duplicates bugs that may or may not have once existed in Lotus 1-2-3, and I'm sure the other components have similar cruft issues.

However, it would be wrong to ignore the way that the price of Office has fallen in recent years. The home-user version is now just about £100, whereas before the 2007/8 versions, home users had to pay more like £400. Even if business prices remain the same (and I don't have a clue), that presumably still means a sizeable overall reduction in the amount of money obtained by MS for Office sales?