I know I need to wear my flame proof shorts for posting this, however, Chris has done an amazing post comparing the pain, process and time of doing a mail merge in Office 2007 and Open Office.  He found that something that he could do without trouble in Word was not easy to understand and ONCE ALL SETUP, still took five times longer to then just process itself.  When time is money, this pays for itself in Office 2007 (or 2003 or XP :-) )

All in all, the whole process took just under fifty minutes, five times longer than it did using Microsoft Office Word 2007 although this was considerably longer on my first few attempts as I struggled to locate the functionality in OOo and how to put the whole thing together.

The conclusion... The time taken to complete essential tasks therefore is extremely important. If organisational end users were to be so unproductive then staffing overheads would considerably increase. Whereas Microsoft Word 2007 handled the process with the minimum of fuss and flexibility, using OOo actually felt like a development tool at times and a throw back to the days of Word 95.

I've included the comprehensive screen shots here with the aim of allowing anyone to recreate this experiment.  Thankfully, this is a science project, not a business.

Source: Chris Parkes: A PC is not just for Christmas... : Microsoft Office Word 2007 and OpenOffice.org 2.2.0 Mail Merge Comparison

ttfn

David