> From: Jacob Mansfield <<a href="mailto:cyberjacob@gmail.com">cyberjacob@gmail.com</a>> > of corse you can do it in OO, why the f**k would you want to use M$ Couple of things: 1: I've not used MS Office for about 5 years now, however the one time I needed to was in 2007 for a really complex mailmerge, which is one area where MSO is still better than OOo :-( There are lots of areas where OOo is genuinely better, in terms of functionality, as well as being free (in the cash sense). Actually, it's not quite Free in the OpenSource sense, if you read the Sun licence carefully :-) 2: I'm not sure you CAN do this in OOo - ie, create a link in a spreadsheet that then creates a pre-populated document in Writer. This wasn't a question about mailmerge, but about how to achieve a particular task. To be fair, I don't think that mailmerge in MSO is the right answer either, but given the user in question feels that mailmerge is too complex, I'm guessing that telling them that it needs about 20 lines of VBA macros probably isn't going to work either :-) 3: If you asked a question about OOo, and someone replied "MSO can do this, why the f*** would you use OpenOffice instead", would you: A: Feel that the respondent had a good point, and you should go out and try MS Office. B: Feel that the respondent was a jerk, and that you wanted to steer clear of the kinds of things he was recommending. The reason I bring this up is that I had a meeting with the IT Director of a FTSE 100 company a couple of years ago, and that one of the things that came up was OpenOffice as a possible replacement for MSO. The reply I got was "This is like Linux. I'm fed up of Linux people. They come in and want to have a religious conversation. I want to have a business conversation." This over-the-top, "why the f**** would you" stuff is actually DRIVING PEOPLE AWAY FROM LINUX. If I ran for Microsoft's Dirty Tricks Division, then I'd pay people to join LUG lists and post nasty comments about MS to make people feel that the Linux community were nutters :-) So, thanks for harming the spread of Free software. Mark