[afnog] ? office

[Steve Song]

Randy Bush wrote:
>> i use openoffice when i need something like that.  staroffice wasn't
>> tracking microsoft office well enough to be useful to me anymore.
> 
> that is the critical point.  i am wondering if i can wean myself off of
> microsloth.

I have been using OpenOffice on Ubuntu for 2 years in an all Microsoft 
organisation.  It works for everything except collaborative work on long 
documents where formatting is an issue.  The larger the doc the more 
idiosyncrasies one discovers between the OO and Word  Indexes, graphics, 
don't quite turn out the same way.  This doesn't matter if you are 
printing the doc for yourself and don't mind the odd formatting blip but 
if you are trying to produce a long and in any way complicated doc in 
collaboration with someone using Word, forget it.

So, I use OpenOffice for 98% of my work and for the other 2% where I am 
collaborating with a Word user on a long doc, I have a copy of MS Word 
that I run under Wine.  Not pretty but it works.


-Steve Song


P.S. Office Calc is works very well too except for an infuriating 
failure to wrap columns the way Excel does.  Roll on ODF!