The
Office Suites are bundled/integrate programs, some of which are usefull and to others,
portions are useless or better performed by other software. The basics of any
Office Suite is the
word processor and
spreadsheet programs.
The other portions are like candy to a kid; not necessary for day to day use.
The BIGGEST issue for an Office Suite is compatibility with your correspondents!
Office implies business and a team of others with which you exchange documents.
Thus your documents must be able to be processed by their software as well as easy to use by you
At the worst case, you can
save as ... into a common format, such as
RTF(word) or CSV(spreadsheets) but risk loosing things like colored backgrounds.
Yes, there are many nice components to MS Office, Publisher, Draw, Access,
Outlook (email+calendar+contacts), but each of these have competing offerings from other vender's.
So the real issues for MS vs OO is price, support, and B L O A T.
The subtle benefit for OO(OpenOffice) is it's compatible across platforms,
which is HUGE in my opinion.