[Sussex] Life without Microsoft - day 1

[Geoff Teale]

Mark,

Very interesting.. 

On Mon, 2003-11-10 at 22:44, Mark Harrison wrote:
> Well - I've finally cut loose from Microsoft Applications at long last...
> 
> As you will know, I've lived in a hybrid IT world for many, many years.
> 
> I started programming on a Spectrum, and then had an Amiga, which I
> primarily used as a terminal for a Sun network at University (I was lucky
> enough to get a terminal point in my room in 1990!)
> 
> After 3 years of Sun, I started work, and my employer used DOS as part of
> its standard build for office-based tasks. I've used Windows since 3.0, and
> I have always liked SOME of the things it did. The Windows 3.1 DDE interface
> capability to share information between applications was something I used
> between Excel and Project and found very powerful, but I still missed the
> elegance of the Unix approach and found that DOS had some ludicrous
> limitations.


OK, fair enough.  Question, are you really describing DDE as a good
thing?  Even given the dates involved, surely a UNIX named pipe is far
better than just let application read freely from an unprotected area of
RAM.

Having had first hand experience of DDE at Claybrook (Angelo and Steve
Rye can back me up here), I'll take a good old UNIX named pipe for open
IPC any day of the week.

<snip>

> 2: VBA. This is, I think, the battleground. When one buys an MS product, one
> isn't just buying into that product - one's buying into a complete
> architecture which includes VBA as a unifying tool for macro development,
> and presents a consistent object model across an entire suite of components.
> This is something that OOo has to address if it's going to tackle the
> corporate space, still.

OK.  I think the point here is that there are a lot of companies who
have developed a lot of stuff in VBA (and indeed VB).  Legacy is the
biggest factor in a lot of technology decisions these days, and I accept
totally that this is a big battle for a product like OOo to fight.

A couple of points thought:  

1.
If you really _must_ have VBA compatibility you could use Gnumeric,
which I am told is quite good in this regard.  This is of course not as
nice as having one integrated office suite, but still the economics are
favourable.

2.
As far as VBA compatibility in OOo goes I would advise reading this:
ftp://docs-pdf.sun.com/817-1826-10/817-1826-10.pdf  for some pleasant
suprises.

-- 
Geoff Teale <tealeg at member.fsf.org>
Free Software Foundation