office apps

[Charlie Kester]

On Sun 06 Jun 2010 at 20:56:50 PDT Chad Perrin wrote:
>On Sun, Jun 06, 2010 at 01:34:16PM -0700, Chip Camden wrote:
>>
>> Does anyone have a recommendation for a lighter-weight office suite?
>> OOo is such a pig.  It takes a good minute to start it up and open a
>> spreadsheet.
>>
>> Short of the full suite, how about just a spreadsheet program that supports
>> complex formulas and charting?  If it could also be used without X11 when
>> charting isn't needed, that would make my day.
>
>It may be a little late to ask -- but I notice nobody else addressed the
>matter:
>
>Does your OO.o replacement have to be somewhat compatible with MS Office?
>
>If so . . . does it have to be two-way compatible?
>
>There are options for one-way compatibility (e.g., catdoc for turning MS
>Word files into plain text), but for being able to interoperate to
>roughly arbitrary degrees with users of MS Office I'm not aware of
>anything other than OO.o, KOffice, and whatever GNOME's using, that would
>work for the purposes you described.  Maybe someone else can comment on
>the suitability of recent versions of Abiword and Gnumeric (for
>instance).
>
>Ever since it essentially stopped being possible to install OO.o from a
>binary package on FreeBSD for me (at least without also installing Java),
>I've dreaded the day I will no longer have the venerable OO.o install
>from way back when and some jackass expects me to talk back and forth via
>MS Excel.  I loathe "applications" written in VBA, to put it mildly, and
>only my loathing for MS Windows and MS Office has kept that ancient
>OO.o install on one of my computers for so long.

Tell the "jackasses" that if they want to send you one of their Word
docs, they should save it as PDF, or RTF if they want you to edit it.  

If it's an Excel doc, CSV.  

Sure, it means some of the Microsoft bells and whistles will get lost in
the translation. Tough.  They're like American tourists overseas,
expecting everyone to speak their language and to be familiar with their
provincial customs.

I'm not sure what to do with PPT's.  Can PowerPoint save to PDF, which
is what almost everyone else seems to be using for presentations?