We migrated to Open Office on Windows at our company a few weeks ago. I had been tracking OOo for a about 2.5 years in terms of how it would work for us, and so far, the migration has been very smooth.

I would disagree about the speed; Office 2000 is faster than OOo, but OOo is getting faster all the time and Sun are totally aware of the issues and spending time and money on resolving it.

Very recent builds DO have some capabilities to run some VBA macros in Calc, but so far it hasn’t worked too well for us. We will probably have to rewrite our Excel macros to OOo Basic or even Python which can work with OOo, but as yet, we have to wait for the much wanted new chart infrastructure which is being currently developed for OOo Calc.

You need to train your staff in what formats to use to send docs in however. Emailing .odt files to customers is liable to result in a lot of confusion !! We settled on saving all our files in the Open Document file format, as you can get issues saving OOo files in the MS formats sometimes. At least the send doc as PDF via email function is particularly good !!

Good luck

I consult for for a company who has moved to Open Office and has been using it since the early beta of the 2.0 code base, at the time 1.9.94 and up, with good sucess. There were issues along the way of cource but most of them turned out to be, how do I do this task now, where do I find this option now. We had our finance departments very complex spread sheets over by the IT departmant just to be on the safe side and we have never had an issues yet. This is a very large public fund so it’s not like they don’t have the money but saw the value in saving it’s members money and the licensing freedom that Open Source brings.

On a side note we are also migrating all the workstation to Linux as well so we had to make sure all the tools on the Linux side had Windows equivalents. We us Firefox Thunderbird, Gaim, GNUprogect and as many web based apps as we can to make the transition as smooth as possible.

As each up date is released of OO2.X it just keeps getting better and better. The baries are continuoing to drop. Al thougt I will admit that the mail merge function is a bit of a bear and has been the largest thorn in our sides on the move.

On you access issues, There are a few tools you can get to migrate from Access to Mysql, see http://www.mysql.com/products/tools/migration-toolkit/ but I imagen that the big issues is the front end used to access that database. You may look at realbasic which will allow you to build and run VB like code on Linux windows and Mac’s. Not sure if that tool may have something that can be used to help port your app but it may be worth looking into. I think in the end you would be better to write a web front end or a java front end to make cross platform access a non issue in the long run.

In a pinch you could run access under wine or the commercial Crossover Office Plugin until you can get everything ported.

Hope this helps.

Thanks

Rich