Open Office

I was talking to someone the other day who had a problem because their home computer was not equiped with Microsoft Office. In particular, they did not have Microsoft Excel, which by the way is an excellent program. (As a side bar, has a great deal of power to make nicely formated documents.) When I mentioned that they might try Open Office they made a comment about Linux and its future. Aside from the question about Linux, I think there is a mis-perception that the free software movement is all about Linux. Fact: you can download OpenOffice for Windows. I have mostly used Star Office and Open Office outside the Windows. More specifically, I have used Star Office on a Sun workstation and on Mandrake Linux. I have used Open Office on a SUSE Linux machine. While I have not had great success with transfering PowerPoint slides to StarOffice and back to PowerPoint, the Word and Excel documents have pretty much the same formating and functions. The PowerPoint/StarOffice problem is that the functions are the same but the formating is not quite right.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I have found a lot of software that originally was oogled over by linux fans that have found their way over to Windows (enigma is a big one, that annoyed Al when I started playing it on my Windows machine)

When it comes to the general public, in a not-so-hacker*-savy world user interface is the key. I've only did about half a year doing tech help with computers, and most problems usually came from, not so friendly programs (or printers, people can never figure out printers). This is why windows has gained so much power.

I have a webcomic you might enjoy http://www.userfriendly.org it is about an ISP mainly with 'software rebles' type characters.

But my favorite view of linux can almost be summed up in this one strip: http://pvponline.com/archive.php3?archive=19990818
3:04 AM
pruittcommunications said…
I liked the cartoons. Thanks for sharing.
3:12 AM
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