I've used Office too, and currently use 2010. I've also used OOo, and I'm sorry but it's really not competitive. If you haven't used Office since 97 (three or four versions ago) then I don't know how you can justify having an opinion how OOo/LO compare.
Yeah, I was very surprised. I like open source and all those good ideals, but MS nailed it with 2010. If you have the money for Office and don't have ideological or moral concerns, OO.o is not competitive.
One could make the argument that they were before the interface overhaul, but it changed my view on Office completely.
It's just really nice to use. If OO.o could find some way to clone Office's interface without legal trouble, I'd go back in an instant.
I used to hate MS Word with passion. I felt that OOo was the mucch better alternative. After all, it could handle a few hundred pages with images, which MS Word could not.
But, the new file formats changed that.
And with Office 2007, MS rethought the whole UI and made features increadibly discoverabke and visceral. It honestly is a joy to use--and on the Mac, too!
To me, the Ribbon UI represents the next step in desktop UI: No menu bar, easy discoverability of features, direct feedback on most actions, very few breakout windows. OOo feels antique and clunky by comparison. So much so in fact, that I generally prefer to use Google Docs over OOo, just because it looks cleaner. By the way, have a look at [The Story of the Ribbon](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/the-story...), a brilliant talk about how the new Office UI came into being.
But the final nail in OOo's coffin are the templates. Seriously, both Apple Pages and MS Word provide very nice-looking, professional templates that make it hard to make a document look terrible. In contrast, OOo has very basic tmplates that are guaranteed to look boring unless you change them.
Libre Office may be a chance to get these things straight. Start with good, professional templates, then overhaul the UI to something more practical. By all means, take inspiration from MS Office and Apple iWork. If they manage this, at least to some degree, this can be a winner. And I will donate money for that cause right now. But my hopes are small...
Let's just say that there is nothing I need an office suite to do that OpenOffice couldn't do five or even ten years ago. I'm not a heavy office suite kinda user, but I have written two books in OpenOffice (one published), without major complaint.
These days, as I mentioned, I use Google docs for most stuff, and that's dramatically less capable than either MS Office or OpenOffice. I simply don't need millions of features to get the work done.
I think the relevance of desktop office suites is fading rapidly, and with it the need for Office or OpenOffice. (Though I do wonder if I could write a book for publication at this point in Google Docs and have editors/publishers be happy with that decision.)
MS Office lost me when they rolled out the "ribbon" UI. I never understood it, and still have to hunt around for ten minutes any time I want to do something that's not visible.
Granted, this is because I've never been much of an Office user. But over the years I came to know where pretty much all the features were in the "classic" Office menus. When MS threw that out and put in a radically different UI, I decided that my minimal word processing needs did not justify the pain of re-learning the app.
As of Office 2010 the Ribbon has improved a lot more. It's still annoying, but it has really grown on me over the past few years. Another nice feature of 2010 is the addition of formatting options to the context menu, so you can easily change basic text and image formatting by right-clicking them instead of flipping through the Ribbon.
