I use OpenOffice.org for 2 reasons. 1. I don’t own Microsoft Office 2. I use Linux (most important reason, of course :)).
Did you ever want to get rid of those “Saving in external formats” prompts that bug you when you save a word document? Well, today I finally was annoyed enough with this that I searched the web and found out how to banish those ‘errors’ forever! Click Tools->Options->Load/Save->General, and under document type, pick Text document and then for ‘Always save as’ pick the version of Word you want. It will throw another ‘error’ prompt about how dangerous this is (aren’t they proud of their product??), but if you click ok, you won’t be haunted by the ‘external formats’ ghosts anymore. I rarely save spreadsheets in Excel format, but I assume this procedure will work for those errors as well.