good replacement for open office

[icantthinkofone]

Frank Jahnke wrote:
>> what would be a good replacement(s) for most of it's functionality
>> (word processing and spreadsheets are what matter to me)
>>     
>
> You really have to decide what you want to suite to do.  Otherwise, your
> problem is underspecified.
>
> 1) Collaboration (complex).  If you collaborate with colleagues who use
> Word (for example) then practically you have to use Word if you deal
> with complex documents.  By "collaborate" I mean exchanging documents
> back and forth, with edits in each pass.  Mine are always heavy in
> equations and chemistry.
>
> Run it in a virtual machine (VMware, Win4BSD, qemu/kqemu) on XP, W2K or
> 98SE.  You probably don't need the latest and greatest version of Word
> unless you colleagues are very sophisticated.  Word 2000 has been fine
> for me.
>
> 2) Document creation.  If you only want to create documents, and Office
> compatibility is not that important, then there are many options:
> Abiword/Gnumeric are quite good if you want WYSIWYG (but do install all
> the extensions), the formatters TeX and groff are exceptionally powerful
> if you learn them well.  Abiword does not read Word files well; Gnumeric
> has many short-comings in reading Excel (particularly for graphics) but
> is very good otherwise.  Personally I use the groff family for all my
> complex documents, but I have used it for 25 years and know it inside
> and out.  (Well, it was troff and friends long ago.)
>
> 3) Read-only.  You can use Antiword to get the raw text, but you lose
> all formatting.  It is a pretty lousy choice in my opinion.
> Textmaker/Planmaker do a very good job for this.
>
> 4) Mixture.  If you have a general mixture of these tasks and don't want
> to set up a VM, use Textmaker.  The programs are quite good, they are
> quite compatible with Office (but choke on obscure files I use
> regularly, as does OO.o and all the others), and much better than OO.o
> and Aibword/Gnumeric in my opinion if you like Word.  They are also
> quite inexpensive -- you can often find them for $20 or so on sale from
> the publisher.
>
> Personally, I use groff (with chem, grap, pic, refer, tbl and eqn for
> all the heavy text formatting), VMware/XP/Office 2003,
> Win4BSD/W2k/Office 2000, Textmaker/Planmaker, OO.o, Abiword/Gnumeric,
> and Windows computers.  What I use depends on what I am doing.
>
> Good luck!
>
> Frank
>
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>   
Why not use Google Docs?