I D/L'd & installed OO a year or two ago but had problems with it properly formatting my existing Word docs & templates so went back to MSO.  Admittedly, I use highly formatted docs with tables & columns, but OO advertises itself as able to read & write .doc files.  I seem to recall some odd crash issues as well, but someone who's used it more recently may be a better critic.

I don't see the Ribbon going away any time soon now that they have ported the whole Office, most Windows apps, MS partners are selling it as a control,...

You can try the Ribbon Hero add-on/game to see if you may change your oppinion about it, although Ribbon love/hate is pretty extreme in general

http://www.officelabs.com/ribbonhero

Open Office is a passable alternative if your word-processing and presentations are not part of your professional career.  I say passable because documentation in Open Office is ... bad.  Say what you will about Microsoft's UI choices and software design, at least with their product a few seconds of quality time with their help-files will get you towards what you want to do.  With Open Office, that's not the case by a longshot.  Lack of documentation, tool tips, or stability doing anything remotely exotic feature-wise are all problems with Open Office.

That said, free is hard to beat.

open office is a great word processing altenative...for just that...standard word processing (I am not talking about the presentation or spreadsheet apps).  If that is all you need...you will be fine.  If you are really into document design, Adobe Indesign is the only way to go.  All the other bells and whistles in MS Word are really just bloated toys. 

Well... they could pay me to use it.

I actually have a fondness for writer.  I do mostly general writing/ light documentation ---tbh---I do most of the writing in a text editor and move it over to Writer for formatting.  So that's not a 40 hour a week opinion.  As I recall, it was pretty solid on   You might actually be pretty happy with how people react to impress.  I'm not saying it's 'better' than Power Point, rather you get a little love because it's definitely not power point.  In other words, if you're in a power point saturated workplace, it might make you stand out a little bit. 

As for calc, feature wise it keeps pace with Excel 03.  It's pretty much all there--pivot tables, a similar array of formulas, hideous out of the box charts.  It's totally outclassed by Excel 07 though. 

I might have to look at getting 2010, since as a student I can get it for $13.

Got it already a few weeks ago under my Microsoft TechNet subscription.  To tell you the truth I don't know if I really like it or  not, they TOTALLY changed the interface. 

The ribbon is now customizable, for those who don't know - you can ararrange the various tabs and items and add/delete/hide them as well.

"You still have to swap ribbon modes constantly and dig around for certain functions just to get stuff done, which defeats half the point of it.

Dig where? 99% of the functionality is under one of the tabs. That's not much digging. Not any more than the countless menus and dialog boxes 2003 and below had.

As far as Outlook goes . . .

I have mixed feelings.

On one hand, I'm stuck with it because I haven't replaced my Palm T|X with a smart phone yet.

On the other hand, web based email / PIM really is accessible anywhere.

But - web based email / PIM also requires 100% uptime on the internet. And, frankly, the functionality still severely lags behind downloadable clients.

IMO email and personal information management is still quite a mess, online or offline.

My biggest problem with ribbons is when I know something exists, but I simply can't find it.  In 2003 I can scan the menus and I'll usually find it pretty quickly.  With ribbons I have to... parse what I'm looking at.  I don't know about anyone else but I find that the icons are kinda visually distracting.  Also, sometimes things aren't in the ribbon I expect and sometimes they aren't even listed on a ribbon.  I've had plenty of times where I've had to click on a button to open a sub-menu or window that has the feature I'm looking for.  This is especially true in Outlook 2007.  

Off the top of my head, one function I use a lot in Outlook, that's now hidden, is the ability to edit someone else's email.  (For the record, I do this so I can highlight text.)  I dare you to try and find it in 2007.  It's there but it's not easy to find.  In 2003 it's right there smack in the middle of the Edit menu.

Later,
LAR

You're right about that.  Outlook sucks.  Thunderbird is better mainly because of extensibility.  I can't figure out why, to be honest, email advancement seems to be sort of stunted, save for the cool  stuff google has done with gmail (inline youtube previews, view attachment as html, etc.)

Yup.  I use the google stuff, only because it's there.  The gmail is fine and dandy for on the fly stuff.  If I absolutely need to run a full sized client, it's Kontact

Well, you can always add it to the quick launch bar, or in the case of Office 2010, customize the ribbon to add it.

I'd say it's missing by default because almost nobody really uses it. For most people, if they want to edit a message, they're forwarding it, and the message becomes editable when forwarding. Yeah, there's a lot of people who use some oddball tools a lot, but unfortunately just because you use it a lot doesn't mean it's a popular with other people.

Microsoft can't put every feature possible on the screen - that makes everything cluttered and just adds to the feeling of complexity to office.  So, yeah, they do have to decide what get put in the home tab, what gets put in a different tab, what goes into some sort of context sensitive menu, and what goes into the "command well" -  the list of commands that are available to be added to the Quick Access toolbar (and to the ribbon in 2010).

Sorry that the defaults aren't your favorites. It's very hard for any company to create defaults that please everybody.

If you absolutely can't find something, it's always available to be added to the Quick Access toolbar. You don't need to dig beyond that.

Once you place it on the Quick Access toolbar, it'll stay there always. So it's basically a one time issue IMO.

If you have a layout you like, in Office 2010 you can export/import the setup easily so you can copy it to other computers.

I think that's a matter of opinion, though. I'm a very visual person, and IMO icons make commands instantly recognizable rather than having to read every single line of text in a menu. Microsoft has put a lot of work into the tooltips, though. Every command should have a tooltip, and in the Quick Access customization, all of them should have labels.

Sorry that your favorites weren't the ones Microsoft decided to keep in the ribbon.  Rest assured, however, they're likely all to be in the Quick Access toolbar customization, and in the ribbon customization in 2010.

Which is . . . cool. But missing some functionality. Like using groups in a filter, or removing tags based on filters. And still, to this day, I can't get a straight, sensible answer out of anybody what the big, huge problem with the hierarchy was that sooo needed fixing.

Although I can definitely see the point of merging the hierarchy with the tags concepts. Like Live Photo Gallery did. That was cool. Just throwing away the hierarchy in favor of tags wasn't cool at all.

Gmail is nice for occasional email checking, and for cool features - but lacks a lot of the power software like Pegasus Mail have. You can really do a lot of automation and sorting with downloadable clients that you simply can't do with current web clients.

Where is the automation with these web clients? Filters are just tossed on as an afterthought, as if they weren't important at all. It's really quite pathetic how much more useless email clients became when they moved to the web.

If this is the future of email, I'm disappointed. Very disappointed.

I share your beef. 

I spend more time managing email than I do responding/reading/sending.  It's not just that I work for an organization known for an attitude of cc everybody, it's also limitations on server space allotment (10 megs isn't much at all) and limitations on outlooks functionality.  I'd love to tell you that a better client would solve all my problems, but it really wouldn't----only kill the pain a little bit. 

Sad thing is, there is no email 2.0.  You could install xobni or something, but even that is a comparatively shallow solution to what are pretty deep problems. 

I mainly use Office as a graphics tool to make custom graphical calendars and cards, using Word & Publisher respectively.  I never use built-in templates, 'cause that's totally lame & unoriginal.

But anyway the 2007 version works just fine for my needs.  I wouldn't waste the money on an upgrade, at least for now.