Is OpenOffice good tool for advanced applications?

I had to make some "serious" and personalized reports in "office" format. One time task, no need for fancy reporting software.I had to acquire one of the MS Office licensed copies or just use newest OpenOffice 3.1 which I use everyday. I'm a fan of Open Office as a tool for simple documents and spreadsheets - there is no real advantage in choosing other solutions. But new task was more demanding: preprocessing table of data, making nice template and then generating personalized documents.

Data part preparig was rather tedious - fixing some errors, cleaning and adding missing values. The OO database fits well in the OO environment but it lacks more advanced data operations, like joining two or more tables, grouping etc. So I decided to switch to external database (sqlite in that case) and connect it to OpenOffice through ODBC Driver.

I have tried to make nice report with graphs etc., but I couldn't find a way to make it work with mail merge.
I used some scripting to manually copy template and insert some data, but unfortunately I couldn't set up some details, like print ranges and merging documents into one.

I dropped graphs and just placed more data in simple tables. That kind of document was easy to personalize using "Mail Merge" feature. I was afraid it wouldn't work well, remembering bugs in OO 2.x and hacking to get work around. No more problems this time. Good work OO folks!

It took me more time than I planned due to finding ways to do the work, but I'm still the OpenOffice (and family) proponent :). There are features I didn't even mentioned like possibilities of external scripting in server mode, making it even more universal tool (for hardcore coders).