Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

I'm with you on the use of LaTeX for document writing. I too use gnuplot for my graphs, but I did switch from xfig to inkscape (the GUI of the former would drive me nuts).

I made a few presentations in LaTeX, but then I switched to OOo. Why? Because of issues with sharing. Slides are shared a lot more than documents. In a collaborative environment (aren't they all?), people exchange slides from each others' presentations all the time. Unless you don't have any co-workers, or they are all as huge LaTeX fans as you are (in my experience, unlikely, even among programmers), using something radically different for your slides than the rest of the crew is a big PITA. OOo is close enough to PowerPoint to make importing and exporting practical, and that really helps.