[CLUE-Tech] MS Office on Linux -- would you?

[Angelo Bertolli]

>  + http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/02/13/HNlinuxoffice_1.html
>
> If MS Office were available on Linux, would you pony up for it?  Why / not?
> How does this affect Linux advocacy efforts to persuade companys to use Linux
> on the desktop.

No I wouldn't.  I'm very fortunate at where I work to be able to choose
which operating system I run.  I run Linux while everyone else runs
Windows.  The ONLY incompatibility we have had between the two is with
Access, and that's just because I haven't gotten around to that yet.
Otherwise OpenOffice takes care of everything.

As long as Microsoft is charging SOMEONE $400 for office, I'm not going to
buy it.  They may be willing to drop the price just to get Linux users to
buy it, but I'm not going to play into their pricing games.


And since we're on the subject, I will take this opportunity to mention a
few things that have been on my mind lately.  First is that Linux is WAY
better for use in the Office than at Home, relatively speaking.  Migration
for people over to Linux (I think) should concentrate on offices.

I know that fortunately for other people, their milage will vary (in a
good way) from mine, but I will give you my situation:  I am a server
administrator for a small company whose main business is to provide web
pages and web hosting for small and medium sized businesses.  At work
Linux is all I use.  But at home, I'm still forced to use Windows most of
the time.  Why?  Because everything I need at work on Linux works great,
and "vital" things I need at home don't.  We have an expensive printer at
work, which Linux seems to print to fine via a Windows print share.  At
home, I have a cheaper laser printer ($70 after a great discount) which
doesn't have a linux driver.  At work we have some kind of high speed
connection which of course linux communicates with well.  But at home, I
just replaced my motherboard and I haven't gotten around to getting linux
to "find" the modem again (seems to have deleted /dev/modem on its own)
after having spent hours getting my buggy modem to work in the first
place.  One thing that doesn't work in either arena seems to be sound
drivers... but I don't have speakers at work anyway.

By the time I get home, I'm so tired from administration all day the last
thing I want to do is spend hours debugging linux at home.  My time to do
recreational things is so short anyway.  So I end up using Windows.  To
me, the there is absolutely no issue with using Linux for Office software,
and it seems totally compatible with common (yesteryear's) versions of MS
Office.  Just make sure you have a postscript printer.


Angelo

P.S. I use OpenOffice on Windows.

P.P.S. If anyone is interested in how to transfer Access data and use it
under OpenOffice: http://www.unixodbc.org/doc/OOoMySQL.pdf

I admit I haven't looked at this thoroughly yet.