[Gllug] Voluntary work

[Jack Bertram]

* Tethys <tet at createservices.com> [031113 16:12]:
> Gordon Joly writes:
> >At 15:14 +0000 2003/11/13, Harry Mantheakis wrote:
> >> > Microsoft's biggest advantage
> >>
> >>MS Office - Word and Excel in particular - I would say.
> >
> >OpenOffice.org has adequate replacements.
> 
> No, it has substandard replacements. Abiword and gnumeric are better,
> but still not good enough to replace the features of Word and Excel
> that are in everyday use in businesses. We're considering migrating
> users to a Linux desktop here, but the barriers are very high. We
> think that certain departments can get away with the Linux based
> alternatives to Word and Excel, but many can't.

Yes.  Although at home I've used Linux for the last 7 or so years,
there's absolutely no way that I could do my job without the power of
Excel and Access.  (Word I could get away without).  In fact, even Excel
and Access aren't perfect tools for the kinds of analysis that I do, but
I've never seen anywhere /near/ the level of functionality in
gnumeric/OpenOffice that I use on a daily basis in Excel.

There's also the problem of communications - one of the things I do is
to build complicated modelling tools in Excel and Access.  Even if I
could do this in some other program, no one else would be able to run
it, as I can't believe that a file converter could cope with VBA or
features such as PivotTables, PivotCharts, controls, etc.

jack

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