Not that i think that anyone is interested, but I like to type...
I agree that data loss could happen with any kind of software manipulating
data of any kind. My own experience is that paid software is not necessarily
more stable than free software. I would rather say the opposite. Most of my
"office related" problems I've had was with MS Office 97 and MS Office 2000.
A few years ago I heard about, I think it was Star Office 5.1 and it was
free, so I downloaded it and tried it out. However it crashed almost
immediately on my Windows 98 system, so I uninstalled it and continued to
use MS Office for a while, until I heard about that Star Office is no longer
free, but there is something called OpenOffice.org that is a free version of
Star Office. So I decided to try again, and this time it worked a lot better
on my system.
I also found that all of the things that irritated me with MS Office worked
a lot better in OpenOffice.org. Of course nothing is free of bugs, and I
found a few. Most of them was related to my language, like that Swedish
characters (åäöÅÄÖ) was sorted incorrectly ("aäåbcdef...lmnoöpqrs..."
instead of "...wxyzåäö"), so I just told the developers about it by
reporting it with Issuezilla, and when the next version were available it
was all corrected.
What I am trying to say here, is that I find OpenOffice.org to be a lot more
reliable than MS Office, even if it's not perfect in any way. It gets better
all the time though. I also think that it's easier to make
OpenOffice.orgdevelopers to correct a bug than it is to make MS Office
developers to do
such a thing. They more seem to create bugs...
