Why is it that Microsoft have stopped making bearable versions of Office? The last okay one was 2000 (which I unfortunatly have to use having lost the disk for Open Office and it having been uninstalled by cousin messing around).

Having used XP and 2003, I am forced to say that they are crap. Hopefully Longhorn will be better

What's so bad about them? Personally, apart from Access and Word I don't really use them much anymore, but I can't say I have any particular objections to them.

Well, considering that they aren't that great at making an OS either and they've just as much experience at that then it's not really surprising that you don't rate their Office software. Although personally I've not had any issues with Office XP, but I hardly use anything other than Word.

Oh, Access is the devil's 'special friend' and always will be.

If people haven't done it, check for Windows updates, there's a bumper pack of critical ones this month :/

Access is evil. Pure pure evil.

And Powerpoint can be a bit PMS'y too......But word works well for me.

FreeBSD + AbiWord2 + Gnumeric + MySQL

Good non-pinhead inhabited (like Linux) OS, word processor, spreadsheet and (GUI-less) relational database combo.

OpenOffice is improving but it's far too bloated and shockingly slow.

http://www.freebsd.org
http://www.linuxisforbitches.com
http://www.abisource.com
http://www.gnumeric.org
http://www.mysql.org

Okay, so MySQL is nothing like access but it's useful, versatile and far less restrictive, as long as you don't mind learning SQL.

Just so this is relevant to Windows people I should point out that Abiword has been ported to Windows.

Unfortunatly so true