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

[Bruce Ediger]

On Mon, 16 Feb 2004, Jeff Cann wrote:

> 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.

I would definately NOT pay for it.  I see no value in "Word" - it does
weird things on its own with no easily apparent way to turn them off
(I speak here of the "I'm going to capitalize the start of sentences
whether you like it or not."), and it has really bizarre bulleted list
and table behavior.

Other applications (which start faster on slower hardware) exist that can
do most of what "Word" does (AbiWord).

Excel is a crock - the only reason people (and by people I mean "pointy-haired
managers) use is is because of the flaws in "Word's" table making, using
and layout.  Managers use Excel to do column-layout documents.  In 8 years
of corporate work, I've never seen a single macro used in a "spreadsheet".
In practice, all that Excel does is organize text into columns and tables.
BFD.

"Word" native format is for the birds, too: you can't really do a "diff"
with it (showing edits in red notwithstanding) so you never really know what
you've changed in a document.