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

[Vernon]

Mike Williams wrote:

> 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.

Depends on _exactly_ what you are trying to do with it.
But even so, I've always been able to find a better solution than Excel 
for any _particular_ task.

> 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.

JMP from SAS, inc is better.  And SAS is better also.
S-Plus is better.
Most of the SPSS GUIs are better than Excel at this, also.
Heck, there are some home grown Perl CGI scripts that do as good as MS 
Excel with just a browse button.

Remembering that Kspread from Koffice, KDE 2.2.2 with a _much_ faster 
launch time than oocalc from OpenOffice 1.0.1, and
the "text to columns" notion that Kspread has is probably about as good 
as Excel's ... never compared them side by side,
but I do remember using that feature of Kspread for different text 
delimiters, and it worked great.

Give the OSS community some more time ... you'll see improvement.  OO is 
a baby yet.
The open source community tends to focus on things that are needed, and
those things are not always the things which are obvious to the end user 
now.
Something tells me that spreadsheets are not as important as the XML
content management software that is getting so much attention.

The question arises, and please do not take this as an offense ... Are 
you making money with spreadsheet software?
If you are, then you are doing better than us, and you need to give me a 
call so that I can make your job easier :)

>   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. 

There are many pieces of software that none of us have tried ... it 
takes time for them to get fleshed out.
The impatient whiners like us always out number the front running doers :)

Vernon Singleton