Why? Word & Excel are pretty good. Is it some - Carrol alert! - moral issue? Functionality issue? What?
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I'm about as Open Source friendly as you can get...hell, I'm typing this from my copy of Ubuntu 8.04 which runs Virtualbox hosted instances of Vista Ultimate, RHEL 4 and Solaris 10 in VMs because that's the sort of fiery baton juggling propeller head I am.
But I'll be among the first to admit that not everything MSFT does is terrible. MSOffice is fine. Excel, one of its key elements, is a solid product. Damn, even MSFT Office Sharepoint (or MOSS, as we wankers say) is very useful when smartly deployed.
MSFT has its competency niche. In working life, the trick is to prevent Redmond from schmoozing management into believing that niche encompasses the world.
.d.