[GLLUG] Crossover office
Andy Lee
ALEE at courts.mi.gov
Wed Jul 12 14:56:47 EDT 2006
>>> "Clay Dowling" <clay at lazarusid.com> 7/12/2006 2:41 PM >>>
Make your life easier and use OpenOffice. It will save to MS Office
format and it generally works better. The Calc application at least is a
much better Excel than Excel is.
For simple things, or on surface examination, or if you don't have to regularly collaborate back and forth from MS to OO.O, this seems true.
My wife is a research scientist who uses Excel in ways I've never seen anyone else to crunch test results and make graphs for presentations. When Excel decided it wouldn't run on her tablet anymore, I encouraged her to give OO.O a try. Formulas from Excel didn't transfer at all. Creating in OO.O was possible but cumbersome, and if modified in Excel by a collaborator, it was back to non-functioning in OO.O.
At the Court, we evaluated OO.O, but had to abandon the project due to the loss of macros in conversion, and horrid behavior of templates. For what I use Office for OO.O works great, but our secretaries push it to the limit. The IS department does still use OO.O on occasion, for things that MS mangles, or for features that MS doesn't offer. Open Office is a great product, and well on its way to being a viable alternative for most users, but for power users, or those forced to collaborate in MS formats, it's still not there.
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