Open Office Shortcomings

I've been using open office for about a month now. In general it works very well, but I am experiencing three problems:

Gradient fills in Impress (the PowerPoint equivalent) do not display correctly. When I open a file previously created in PowerPoint, rectangles that contain gradient fills display in the wrong direction. For example a rectangle that contains a gradient of white to grey that goes left to right will display as grey to white. I can make the changes and save them, but when I reopen the file the problem comes back. I have not found a way to work around this.

Connectors in Impress diagrams re-route themselves in awkward ways. If I draw diagrams with connecting lines it seems to work exactly as in PowerPoint. When I

save, close and then reopen the file, the connectors are often moved into rather strange configurations. After I move them back and resave the file, the program still re-routes the lines when I open the file again.
I cannot seem to find the data analysis tools in Calc (the Open Office equivalent of Excel). By default the data analysis tools are not installed in Excel and it is not commonly used by most people. This module is used for statistical work such as regression, histograms, calculating standard deviation and so on. Unfortunately I have to revert to Excel to get these tasks done!

These three issues should not be critical for most people and I believe that the Open Office package would work well for the majority of users - and chance are the existing short comings will soon be addressed.