[Sussex] Life without Microsoft - day 1

[Mark Harrison]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Geoff Teale" <tealeg at member.fsf.org>
To: "LUG email list for the Sussex Counties" <sussex at mailman.lug.org.uk>
Sent: Monday, November 10, 2003 11:25 PM
Subject: Re: [Sussex] Life without Microsoft - day 1

> [...]
> 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.

At the time, it was a good thing, and improved my personal productivity. At
the time, I was a junior support guy, doing a bit of project management, and
had no input into the choice of technologies in use...

>
> [...] 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.

It would be interesting to try to port some of the VBA code I've got over to
that and see how big a task it really was. Inevitably, it's chicken and
egg - no-one will pay to port their code to OOo unless their customers use
OOo. Customers looking at OOo will, in part, be influenced by their
supplier's architecture strategies.

In some ways, this is where .NET actually HELPS OOi. Companies are faced
with a major migration anyway... so the difference in costs of migrating
from VBA6 to VBA.NET and costs of migrating from VBA6 to OOo's basic/XML
transforms would need a careful look at. Now _THERE'S_ scope for a white
paper.

/me goes away to think.

M.