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

[Dan Harris]

This is pure nonsense.  I am a die-hard Linux and F/OSS fan as much as 
the rest of this group, but I also have a long history in the industry 
of working with MS products.  Excel is one of the most impressive 
applications to ever come out of Redmond.  By combining Excel and VBA 
with a solid RDBMS, it has shown to be an indespensible tool for not 
just complex spreadsheets, but also as a very complete presentation and 
devlopment platform.  Both myself and many of my customers have built 
some impressive Excel+VBA+SQLServer solutions that are scalable, robust, 
and powerful.  For you to claim Excel is only a Word replacement for 
PHB's makes you appear completely uninformed and blindly biased.

Excel has some VERY nice formatting capabilities that combine with a 
powerful VBA object model to make some seriously powerful tools that 
cannot be matched by anything in the open-source world.. yet..
I've used OOo's scripting and to put it mildly, it pales in comparison 
to VBA's  power. 

-Dan

Bruce Ediger wrote:

>
>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.
>
>  
>