I just bought a new laptop. After much consideration I decided to stick with Windows. I wasn’t a fan of Vista but after using it for a week I haven’t had any problems or difficulties. I am not sure what all the negative hype was about Vista but so far so good.

At present time I don’t have MS Office installed. The laptop came with MS Works although I am not a fan of this program. I considered downloading and using Open Office 3 but heard there were difficulties opening some files, especially Office 2007 files. I just recently read a post by Harold Shaw, “Life Without Office” in which he details his use of Thinkfree Office 3.

I checked out Thinkfree and learned Thinkfree isn’t free, the version linked above is $49 which pales in comparison to the Office 2007 price. With Google docs, Zoho and many other free web applications I am not sure that I would need Office. I do want and miss not having MS Outlook for email as I miss not having folders to store email. I am using gmail right now but don’t like being limited to only labels and filters in gmail. I haven’t tried Thunderbird but may look into that as using gmail is getting a bit tedious with the organization.

What are your thoughts and opinions on using Open Office or other web applications instead of using MS Office? Will I miss Office? Is there life without MS Office?