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

[Adam Williams]

>For one thing, and I truly hate to admit this, Excel is the best 
>spreadsheet out there. 

SO/OO is getting close, but I have to agree.

>I've tried Quattro, I've tried Star / Open, none 
>of them can touch it.  

Open Office 1.0.1 can touch it, just barely.  Alot of buggaboos were
fixed from 1.0.0.

>It's bloated and slow, 

I actually disagree.  It is certainly less bloated than SO/OO because it
shares alot of components with the general environment.  SO/OO doesn't
even use the same widget set as GNOME or KDE.  It cetainly ain't slow, 
it knocks the doors clean off Gnumeric and SO/OO (at least in my tests)
when dealing with really big data sets.

>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, 

That is exactly what I use them for primarily,  so we are talking the
same functions {mid, right, left, trim, substr, etc...)

>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 

I pretty much agree.  I ran a battery of tests not too long ago (in the
archive somewhere).  With a large data set Excel was the only
spreadsheet to actually finish,  and that running on a machine with less
memory.  Both Gnumeric and SO/OO went off to do the recalc and never
came back, they just sat there eating 99.9% of the CPU.  At least with
SO/OO I was ***finally*** able to abort the operation and regain control
- I let it sit for a couple of ***HOURS*** and finally a dialog box
popped up.  Gnumeric sat for an entire day and never did anything
useful,  it was "kill" that stopped that puppy.

But!

I continue to do almost all of my work in OO/SO since Linux is what I
got - no dual booting for me.  And since RH8/OO1.0.1 I have yet to have
OO wander off on the ghost roads for more than a minute or two (and even
excel does that).  So if you haven't tried OO1.0.1 I'd recommend taking
another look.  Are they up to 1.0.2 now?

>right, (and I haven't tried Ximian yet, so maybe it will save me) MS 

Ximian 1.4 is just Gnumeric, which for what I use a spreadsheet for is
simply one madness-inducing chunk of software.  I've used if for finance
type spreadsheets - but for chunking data?  No way.

>Excel will continue to dominate.  At least this time they're dominating 
>because they actually have a better product.

IMHO, that was true for Word as well until SO/OO entered the seen.  As a
word processor (whatever compatibility issues aside), you'd have to
wrestle swriter from my proverbially cold and dead hands.  We had Word
Perfect for LINUX the same week it came out - DREADFUL!  And AbiWord
always made me think I was using Apple Works - and I was dumb enough to
pay them for it!