In light of the recent discussions about reading/writing MS docs and general office/prodctivity suites, I thought that I would report on the latest OpenOffice release, 641D. This is the last release before OpenOffice 1.0, and was just made available Friday. One of the biggest complaints has been how long it takes OpenOffice to start up. That situation has been greatly improved. Total time to startup the Word processor for OpenOffice has decreased from 20 seconds to 8 seconds on my machine. Until MS opens up their doc formats and conforms fully to an open XML document specification, OpenOffice remains the best means of working with complex MS docs that I have. It does very well at PowerPoint and Excel; it is quite useable with complex Word docs as well. This is you last chance to use OO and submit requests for the 1.0 release. I encourage you to do so. -ronc