Tom's Hardware On the Current Stable of Office Apps For Linux 121
tc6669 writes "Tom's Hardware is continuing its coverage of easy-to-install Linux applications for new users coming from Windows with the latest installment, Office Apps. This segment covers office suites, word processors, spreadsheet apps, presentation software, simple database titles, desktop publishing, project management, financial software, and more. All of these applications are available in the Ubuntu, Fedora, or openSUSE repos or as .deb or .rpm packages. All of the links to download these applications are provided — even Windows .exe and Mac OS X .dmg files when available."
KOffice 2 (Score:4, Informative)
Bah, they didn't review KOffice 2, even though it had been released at the time of writing. It will be included in the next version of all the distros, and ignoring it makes their roundup obsolete before they even published it.
Re:KOffice 2 (Score:4, Informative)
Heh, KOffice 2.0.0 was released on May 28th 2009 so that has been out a looooooooong time. On the other hand, they also said in the release notes:
Targeted Audience
Our goal for now is to release a first preview of what we have accomplished. This release is mainly aimed at developers, testers and early adopters. It is not aimed at end users, and we do not recommend Linux distributions to package it as the default office suite yet.
And no, the bold outline is not mine. Maybe we should wait for the first release that sees any wide testing by normal linux distro users first? And for a review on Tom's Hardware I'd wait until the next release after that when the nastiest bugs are cleaned up. I imagine any review they'd do now would do more harm than good...
Re:Improved driver support (Score:2, Informative)
No
Re:KOffice 2 (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe this was added on later (?), but they did give a reason for not putting in KOffice 2:
Please note that I used KOffice version 1.6.3 for this roundup. Version 2.0 of KOffice gets full KDE 4 integration and a major face-lift. Though the long-awaited 2.0 has been officially released, it was not yet available via the official repo of any major distribution at posting time. Also, the KDE project tends to make its .0 releases the first look at the development of a new version, not a stable milestone like most other software houses.
I think he's got a point about the "stable milestone" part - remember KDE4?
Re:Let me save you some time... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No LaTeX, R, etc. (Score:3, Informative)
Quite different things.
Re:Not good enough if you deal with customers. (Score:5, Informative)
"When you're doing something for a potential client or for a client, having little imperfections like that, imperfections that are uncontrollable, does not make a good impression. That concerns me that there's little things like that that still crop up."
Microsoft Office isn't really compatible with itself. I've posted this one before, but I guess I'll mention it again:
In a meeting from about a year ago, one of the attendees sent out some notes for us to read beforehand. We all dutifully printed out our copy of the document, and brought it with us to the meeting.
Despite the fact that the document was created with Microsoft Office, and that we all run Microsoft Office, there were 3 different versions of the printed document at the meeting. You could tell by looking around the table that one version of the notes (printed from Microsoft Office for Macintosh) arranged the text around a table in a weird way. Another version (printed by Microsoft Office 2007) put a page break in a different place and put an extra blank line between a table and its caption. The original version (Microsoft Office 2003) was formatted as intended.
This was a simple 3-page document in "DOC" format, with an enumerated list of paragraphs, so it didn't take long for us to realize our copies printed out differently, and to figure out the correlation between versions of Word and how the document printed out.
I think it just goes to show: if you have a document that absolutely must preserve formatting, send it as a PDF.
Re:No LaTeX, R, etc. (Score:3, Informative)
*Laugh*
No it's not. The clue to its use is in its name.
Re:Let me save you some time... (Score:4, Informative)
I'm a big Linux geek, but I'd have to agree with you when it comes to features like "Track Changes". On the other hand, none of the engineering companies I've worked for really had any clue how to effectively use those features.
In my experience, OpenOffice has been great for classwork and day-to-day stuff. I wouldn't get all fancy with graphing, however, since the formatting and scaling still kind of stinks and is crash prone (though it's improved greatly on recent releases, like 3.2+).
For anything more than casual use, I'd go straight to a combination of Lyx + gnuplot / octave .
Most of my casual spreadsheet use is actually done in gnumeric, which is very light, fast, and stable. Unfortunately I can't say the same about Abiword, so I tend to stick to OpenOffice for documents.
Finally, most of my presentations are exported to pdf and displayed using keyjnote / Impress!ve [sourceforge.net] for its dead-simple but awesome usable GLX eye-candy.
If I really need MS Office compatibility to fill out someone's stupid form (which happens often for heavily formatted documents -- different versions of MS Office still can't even share these with each other even with all the compatibility packs), I boot up Windows in a VM (either the free VMware server 2.0 or VirtualBox, which actually tends to be easier to install and works better).