Linux Desktop for university staff

[David Curry]

Robin Laing wrote:

> 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.
>
Thanks, Robin.  I was not aware that OO.o 2.0 would support more rows 
that 1.1

Like you, I tend to use OO far more than either Gnumeric or Abiword and 
find the ability to export pdf files a feature that extends well beyond 
trivial.