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The sad truth is that MS Office, and Word in particular, has become a de facto standard in much of big business and government, both in the USA and (it appears) in other countries such as Great Britain. Documents get exchanged in that format, and if you don't have the latest version (soon to be XP) you can't work with them. The behavior is self-reinforcing. Star Office isn't a solution, and won't be until and unless it is able to both import and export the most recent MS formats. I wish that would happen, but I don't expect it to. Please don't get me wrong. I lament this state of affairs as much as anyone here. The only solution I can see is a new antitrust action that would force Microsoft to publish its data formats for all Office products 90 days before releasing any new ones and would explicitly permit anyone else to use them. Paul