Re: I'm on it!
"This crud is only suitable for the most basic of home users. And if you don't need your documents to work on a real version of Office."
Well, yes, I am at home. And I can be pretty basic at times.
I'm wasting a bit of time here as a break from writing. I'm on page 73 of a revision/study guide for Foundation GCSE Maths for adult students. I'm not allowed to use 'Joy of X' as the title (Koerner thought of that one before I did, but he wasn't allowed to use it either).
Written from scratch in the version of LO distributed with CentOS 6.4. So far, we have around 18k words, 300 objects, 50 or so tables, 25 drawings and lots of headings and sub headings. Around 1.3Mb file size. No problems as yet (cross fingers, Shape and Space is yet to come, and that will be fifty to 100 drawings). Projected length is around 120 pages A4.
I'm using Calc for the charts and graphs and find the drawings easier in Impress for some reason. By using Impress, I can also pull the diagrams out separately to put into interactive whiteboard software later.
Why LO and not LaTeX or Lyx with (say) R and pyxplot for graphics? I can pop Portable App version of LO on a USB stick so colleagues can edit/chop/change. My colleagues can cope with an Officey type interface. Learning LaTeX isn't happening.
Why not MS Office? I use Linux at home, and the mathematical formula editor is less annoying in LO. And, no, I don't need my document to work in a 'real' version of Office. But I am greatly concerned with any differences in the files produced by oOo and LO as mentioned up the screen.