It's a fully functional work processing program that does everything I need. Perhaps not as much polish as Microsoft products, but totally fine. And priced right. I will never pay for Microsoft Word again.

I'm kind of surprised OO never developed a similar e-mail client for their Office suite.

LibreOffice may be the current fork of the OpenOffice code base that is being most actively developed. LibreOffice was formed by members of the OpenOffice development team when Oracle's development of OpenOffice was discontinued. Oracle contributed the OpenOffice code to The Apache Software Foundation's Incubator.

LibreOffice:
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/

OpenOffice:
http://www.openoffice.org/download/

And then there is the IBM/Lotus fork of OpenOffice known as Lotus Symphony:
http://www-03.ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/home

It works fine. My years with Office '97 (which I still use... how do you think I do the DUzies???) translated pretty much directly into OpenOffice.

There are some minor differences in the details, but so far I haven't had any problems.

file suffix needs to be understood.

Because of the need to transfer files from office to office and site to site you have to match what software they(the other office) has and your need to conform to their needs.

Open office itself replaces most(99%) powerpoint,excel, and macros ok but then it saves the files using a different suffix (due to patent/copyrights) than Microsoft. You need to act as a translator so that others can send you a file as an attachment or download.

MS Word prior to/and version word 2003 end in doc. Newer than Word 2003 end in docx (xml type file). same problem with powerpoint , excel and database. You need to study this and research to be ready for an employer/interview.

I set it to save in Word or Excel 2007 format which is the .docx or .xlsx format. You can then send it to people who insist on using M$ Orifice.

Of course I prefer my WordPerfect.

My WordPerfect will open and save in the original format going all the way back to WordPerfect 5.0 for DOS. I'm now using X5 and will open all sorts of document formats including old IBM and Lotus. Word 2010 won't even open a Word 2000 document.

One thing I have found particularly disturbing is that OO can open older M$ files that M$ Office programs can't (or more likely are designed not to). The only thing I've had trouble with is getting OO Presentation to translate into a workable PowerPoint file. Then again, I think PowerPoint is a useless piece of shit. I do a lot of my writing in OO on a Linux box and I am yet to find a case where files didn't seamlessly move between Linux and OO on an M$ box. I don't know of any other suite that is even close to OO in stability and compatibility.

That said, the question sounds loaded. It could be a screening question to weed out non-M$ conformists. M$ Word and Excel are slow and cost money, but it's a long-running battle for the alternatives. The "it has to be IBM compatible" (currently M$ exclusively) argument has been a corporate standard since the early 80's. Take a hard look at the ad you responded to for clues as to their bias. The Apple II, Mac, Amiga, and Atari ST all blew away the so-called "IBM" machines in performance and capabilities all along. Businesses weren't interested because of that bias. My storage area used an Apple II+ to control the security system up until about a year ago when they moved the office to another building on the same site. Have you seen any 8086 machines still in service lately?

And technically OO doesn't "use" anything - it IS the thing.

But it is slower than fuck.

I find Open Office faster than most versions of Microsoft word suites. Plus they don't have that stupid, confusing Ribbon. To say nothing about having the defaults setup better, so you don't waste time making it useable.

Java is the culprit.