Linux Desktop for university staff

[Robin Laing]

David Curry wrote:
> Murat Tepegoz wrote:
> 
>> SNIP
>>
>> Office: Openoffice.org. Write and calc are perfect alternatives to 
>> word and
>> excel. Abiword always crashes abnormally. I could not try koffice yet. 
>> I use
>> kile for latex.
>>  
>>
>      SNIP
> 
> I think "perfect alternative" to excel is a bit of overstatement 
> regarding oo.o calc.  Calc is limited to 32,000 rows whereas excel can 
> handle larger files and calc does not have as many built in functions 
> for users to draw on (date manipulations such as determining the time 
> between two dates come to mind).  Gnumeric appears capable of handling 
> files as large as excel can take, but the last time I evaluated 
> statistical and financial functions in Gnumeric some of those functions 
> did not produce output  that was directly useable for polished 
> presentations.

OOo 2.0 calc will support more rows and better support for Excel.
OOo 2.0 writer will have better support for word docs as well.

Link for OOo 2.0 snapshot download.
  http://download.openoffice.org/680/index.html

Feature guide for 2.0
http://marketing.openoffice.org/2.0/featureguide.html

I have used Gnumeric to open Quatro pro spread sheets.  And Abi word 
to open Wordperfect docs.  I just prefer to use OOo.  Of course one 
feature that I really like in OO is the ability to export to pdf.  In 
fact, it may be a requirement to export all our future documentation 
as pdf.

-- 
Robin Laing