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

[Jeff Cann]

On Monday 16 February 2004 7:02 pm, Dan Harris wrote:

> Both myself and many of my customers have built
> some impressive Excel+VBA+SQLServer solutions that are scalable, robust,
> and powerful.  

Scalable is probably not the word I would choose.  I can tell you of customers 
at my company that tried to build a replica of our (financial) product using 
your suggested platform.  Their financial model took 4 days to run.  Ours, 
written in Java, running on Solaris and using Oracle could do the same 
calculations in 10 minutes (I'm not exaggerating).  Needless to say, they 
scrapped their 2 years of work and bought our product.

I agree on the robust and powerful descriptions.  IMHO - Excel is a cool 
product with a lot of advanced features -- few well-documented, but many cool 
ones.  I was impressed when I learned how to generate dynamic SQL statements 
from VBA GUI widgets.  I don't do much work in this realm - this one was a 
special project.

Plus, Excel is the lingua franca of financial companies.  Most have millions 
of dollars of their own intellectual property built into Excel spreadsheets, 
macros and VBA apps.  So, it must do the job well enough and to get them to 
move to OO without the automated ability to move all of those custom macros 
and apps is a joke.

But for personal use, I would not run MS Office on Linux -- I'm use OO to 
track product features in spreadsheets -- text formats and some simple sales 
models.  Not rocket science, not RDBMS back end.  OO and Excel are overkill 
for my personal use.

Jeff
-- 
http://isuma.org/