[Gllug] conversion from WinXP to Linux

[Simon Wilcox]

On 05/05/2010 09:08, Jason Clifford wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-05-05 at 07:54 +0100, t.clarke wrote:
>> The big sticking points in getting people to accept something other than Windows
>> (at least as far as we are concerned) seems to be:
>> a) replacement for Excel
>> b) replacement for Word
>
> Those are fairly meaningless criteria. You need to specify what you use
> Excel and Word for - which features you use and need. You also need to
> consider the extent to which you need to be exchange documents with
> others who use the Microsoft products.

If you use macros, you will need to convert them all.

If you routinely round-trip & edit Office docs with 3rd parties you will 
have a whole world of pain.

If you routinely send out Word docs that are not meant to be edited, do 
the world a favour and use PDF (which OOo exports natively).

If you mostly use Office for internal communications, swapping to OOo 
shouldn't be too painful and you can always keep Office on an XP VM 
somewhere for the odd occasions where you need to preserve formatting.

Typically you will lack fonts, particularly from Office 2007+ where 
Calibri is standard and widely used on Windows but is NOT available as a 
free installable on Linux (deliberate change ? you decide !) so you can 
expect formatting to be inconsistent when opening newer Word documents. 
Also watch out for forms created in Word. The table handling 
characteristics of Word and OOo are different and OOo really doesn't 
play well with multipage tables imported from Word.

It's definitely achievable technically but be prepared for a whole load 
of user moaning about how it's 'all different'. My practical advice here 
is to set up a PC with Office 2007 (or 2010 now it's available) and 
invite them to use it for a day. It is SO different from 2003 and 
earlier that they ought to positively embrace OOo when the get back to it!

Good luck with the migration.

Simon.
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