[KLUG Members] Re: Calling all Linux novices: -- Mega-ignorance on MS Office!

[Mike Williams]

I think StarOffice / OpenOffice with it's XML based OPEN file format has 
a chance at fighting the entrenched MS Office juggernaut, but it won't 
be soon and it's far from guaranteed.  What I don't understand is that 
these discussions (arguments?) seem to focus on the Word format.  Until 
you get to unnecessarily complicated documents full of tables and fancy 
formatting (which more people probably do than should, but that's a 
separate problem) reading and writing Word files in something else is 
easy enough that it works.  The problem is Excel.

For one thing, and I truly hate to admit this, Excel is the best 
spreadsheet out there.  I've tried Quattro, I've tried Star / Open, none 
of them can touch it.  It's bloated and slow, but when everybody's 
running 800 Mhz Athlons and above, who cares?  It does everything I've 
asked it to, and the competitors don't.  The most common application of 
a spreadsheet I've seen is taking a string of data, sometimes just text, 
and splitting it up into cells so you can work with it.  Nothing else 
does this even close to as well as Excel.  Until something gets it 
right, (and I haven't tried Ximian yet, so maybe it will save me) MS 
Excel will continue to dominate.  At least this time they're dominating 
because they actually have a better product.