My applicable background is primarily user-interface design and programming. (I'm also a bit of a data guy and my degrees are in bioengineering, so I don't actually consider myself a programmer, or even UI designer, but I've done both.)
I've been doing things with Star Office & kin for quite some time, and switched to Libre Office this year. (What can I say? SVG support sold me. I hate juggling resolutions on bitmaps in documents.)
One thing I've noticed in OO.o and friends is the continual improvement. When I wrote my thesis, my school used some really picky formatting rules. In OO, The only way to consistently achieve that was manually tweaking the page and paragraph formatting. I ended up using another word processor. Now, the solution would be tricky & ugly, but it's possible.
(The school's rules have now relaxed considerably, too: Now that Libre Office can do the picky stuff, the new grad student don't have to.)
In many significant ways, I consider Libre Office already superior to MS Office, but I'd like to assist making that unconditional. I've been pondering a few issues, and actually have a few specific comments to lay on you shortly.
-Nate Schultz -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to design+help@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/design/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted