good replacement for open office

[Aryeh Friedman]

On 10/5/07, Frank Jahnke <jahnke at sonatabio.com> 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.

Read/write .doc, pdf and rtf mainly

> 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.)

WYSIWYG editing for the above including embedded graphics and equations

I also want to keep the learn curve as small as possible (I know
enough troff to be dangerous)