Many people continue to use MS Office because they are locked into it at their workplace by their employer. Hence why it is so ubiquitous, and why most of us are familiar with it, albeit at wildly varying levels.

In my part of the world, schools routinely teach MS Office to kids because of its ubiquity, and also because all government agencies and state schools are mandated to use it.

And for all of your bluster about how other office suites are better, many complex files created in MS Office often don’t quite look or work the exactly the same when opened in a non-MS office suite.

In my experience, most people are either ignorant and/or lazy about alternatives to MS Office. Many are simply “monkey-see, monkey-do” users who don’t care about the big evil of Microsoft, or are ignorant or even uninterested in anything other than what they know.

Microsoft Office is expensive, and saves files in proprietary formats (to ensure vendor lock-in) that are not supported in the long-term (in order to force customers onto the upgrade treadmill). So you pay, and pay, and pay again.

Open Office is free, and saves files in a standard format (ODF) that will be supported for a very long time (of course, Open Office also supports legacy formats such as those found in the Microsoft suite). The quality of Open Office approaches (and in some respects surpasses) that of Microsoft Office. Moreover, Open Office continues to improve with each new version, which isn’t something that can be said of Microsoft offerings these days.

“Take on any new employee and they will probably know how to use Microsoft Office.”

Take on any new employee and they will learn Open Office in a matter of hours (at most).

“Yes, you may need to show them little tricks and foibles of your particular system.”

What they’ll have to master are the changes to the UI. And why has the UI changed? So that Microsoft could give the impression that the software is new, and thus convince the gullible to pay for the same product over and over and over again.

What’s ludicrous, Gareth, is that so many people continue to line up and hand over good money to Microsoft to receive, in return, shoddy, bug-ridden, exploit-prone software. I am surprised that you of all people, given your Welsh heritage, cannot see the distinct absence of any value in such a proposition.