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.
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This article is the third of five (or so) in Tom's Definitive Linux Software Roundup, and my production machine has undergone a few upgrades since the series began. The new hardware configuration is in the table below. However, the software has changed as well. I started out with Ubuntu 9.04, but switched to Kubuntu 9.10 over the holidays. Therefore, some of the versions may have been from Jaunty and not the newer Karmic repos. Also, some screenshots are GNOME and others KDE.
Its quite possible he did all the testing in Jan/Feb and just now got it published or finished writing it.
But I agree, the article is complete crap. In other words Open Office is the best full office suite there is on Linux, same as it has been for 5 or more years is all that the article says.
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Wrong about that because it also says all of them are inferior to Microsoft Office.
That is an important thing to know, if you are in the market for an Office suite.
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Plus, OOo is pretty compatible with most formats. Yeah, its not as 'polished' as MS Office but it sure beats running it in WINE or a VM for most tasks.
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KOffice is fantastic. (Score:2, Interesting)
KOffice is fantastic. I was using OpenOffice.org to write my History PhD thesis, but then when I heard about KOffice, I switched and I'm glad I did!
KOffice is fast. You don't realize how fucking slow OpenOffice.org is until you've used KOffice. It's probably because it's based around the best UI toolkit available today, Qt, and the best open source desktop available today, KDE. That, and it doesn't have the heaps of Java shit that OO.o unfortunately has stuck on.
When I used OO.o intensively, it'd crash thre
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... and it works well on Windows ...
I know, I know, it DOES run on Windows. If you have KDE for Windows installed ...
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I use Writer in place of Word, because of OO's greater reliability and accuracy, especially in long documents; but I'm still a bit torn.
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It's written in C++ and Java, so you're pretty much stuck with it. Not that I think Java by itself turns things to shit, but OO definitely seems to suck in ways that are considered pathologically Java.
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...
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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?
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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).
No LaTeX, R, etc. (Score:3, Interesting)
I didn't see any mention of LaTeX (or Beamer), R, or PostgreSQL. No, these aren't your typical office packages. They're better than your typical office packages.
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They didn't mention LyX too, I pressume (since you would mention it, I guess, while lamenting lack of LaTeX; reading TFA? Nah). Also quite nice and one would thought not too scary...
Re:No LaTeX, R, etc. (Score:5, Funny)
I didn't see any mention of LaTeX (or Beamer), R, or PostgreSQL. No, these aren't your typical office packages. They're better than your typical office packages.
What? PostgreSQL? LaTeX?
Are you going to be dictating to your secretary who's typing in SQL statements?
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The article did contain a section on database applications.
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Quite different things.
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That's what pgAdmin is for.
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*Laugh*
No it's not. The clue to its use is in its name.
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That's what pgAdmin is for.
Oh, no, so so wrong.
Ruby on Rails is for database applications.
Except it isn't exactly geared towards your average end user, which is also why it's better for those who can use it.
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The really amazing thing is that it took only two posts for someone to completely miss the point of the article and go straight to unabashed holy wars. TFA is about helping Windows immigrants use Linux, not the shortcomings of GUIs. FOAD, sir. FOAD.
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Follow the KISS principle. The whole point of computers is to make work easier, not complicate it by eighteen quadrillion times.
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Putting in a little work up front pays off in the long run. Using good tools like LaTeX and R will make your life a lot easier when you do something important. Why deal with spaghetti code in Excel when you can do the same thing with a neatly managed R program? Why fiddle with consistently formatting a long Word document when you can just load a document class in LaTeX?
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Yes, code maintenance is nice, but for 99% of OFFICE workers (as opposed to geeks, admins, etc) it isn't an issue.
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Why fiddle with consistently formatting a long Word document when you can just load a document class in LaTeX?
I spend my days building systems to process legal documents from over twenty countries. Words like yours make me weep with despair.
If I had my way, I'd do away with word processors entirely. Really [imagicity.com].
I couldn't agree more that a little bit of structure goes a long way. But the problem is, the benefits derive to people other than the document authors. In effect, the case you have to make is, "If you would only make a slightly greater effort. my life would be easier."
When it comes to closed systems (e.g. larg
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I do a lot of writing. When I use LateX instead of OO.org or Pages, I save a lot of time and effort. Lots of time and effort, actually. There is a learning curve for LateX but IMO it is well worth it.
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Times are changing (Score:5, Interesting)
Improved driver support (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Improved driver support (Score:4, Interesting)
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What does that have to do with micro vs. monolithic kernel?
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Printer drivers are most certainly not included in the kernel... for obvious security reasons.
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No
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no, its the lack of an ABI that drivers are included in the 'kernel' distro. If the Linux kernel had a defined, never-changing interface for drivers, then you'd probably find them on every manufacturer's website. As it is, every so often a change is made to the interface requiring the drivers to be modified (even if slightly) but as the source code to the drivers are in the kernel source tree, the modification gets made and they get recompiled for the new kernel version.
The goals of source-only drivers is g
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If you favour practicality over ideals, then you should certainly favour the fluctuating kernel ABI. It is practical for good kernel development. Also, it pretty much forces all drivers to come with the kernel, which means that they are well maintained and easily accessible.
Find an old but useful piece of hardware. Bonus points if the manufacturer is out of business. Try it on Linux. Try it on windows. Then you will truly appreciate the practicality of the kernel ABI.
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Except printer drivers are PPD files, plain old text.
micro vs. mono doesn't matter, since I assume that with a micro kernel you could still have loadable modules, just like with the monolithic kernel in Linux. And distros ship with just about all of the modules available and compiled for the sake of the end user.
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Except printer drivers are PPD files, plain old text.
PPD files aren't drivers, they just describe the printer, including what filters to use, what options to set and where to send the output. The actual "driver" is the combination of the PPD and one or more filters, which are usually binary executables.
In any case, the specific printer drivers aren't in the kernel. All that's in the kernel is the drivers for passing data through USB ports, parallel ports, etc.
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What does that have to do with micro vs. monolithic kernel?
Technically nothing, but I imagine a micro kernel would have a much more persistent API/ABI in practice. Linux changes the kernel module interface very often so it's a lot more practical to have the source in the main kernel and let the kernel maintainers update the driver than to keep up with a binary driver. The nvidia and catalyst drivers are exceptions because they're huge graphics processing engines but all the other hardware is really better off in the kernel because of it.
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Yes, it is Ubuntu/Deb only, and it would be better if it were hosted by Nvidia with proper regression testing. Or to just have an open driver to begin with that could be included in the main kernel. But you know what? It's a step (maybe a half a step) in the right directi
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I came to the same conclusion a couple of years ago. As long as your hardware is built upon open/industry standards and not based in proprietary, closed, one-off systems, Windows is quite inferior to any other system. As more and more systems get moved to the network and have to support a wider variety of devices that are not Windows-based, they will start using more and more the established standards any decent IT shop has been using for years. For printers this means moving to IPP (and Bonjour for auto-di
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Amen!
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True. It was quite an odyssey to get the Realtek 8192SE on my notebook to work reliably.
Worked fine (despite the need to compile it by hand) until one kernel upgrade lead to kernel panics when switching between eth0 and wlan0.
I'm glad the newer kernel in Ubuntu 10.04 has corrected that again.
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Open the Ubuntu software centre, click on the category 'office' and browse... Each software package collection got a summary of what it is (for) and what is does and doesn't.
Tom's Hardware created a series of articles about this? OH MY FSCKING GOD! What a bunch of total retards! Maybe even more retarded are the people that actually read this and even more retarded are the people that submit this to /. instead of Digg.com and even MORE retarded is the... *ok I'm not gonna say it*
So in other words... (Score:2)
I really don't get how this is a story for the
Only if you care about TFA, which nobody does (Score:3, Funny)
But by posting this article on Slashdot, we get another excuse to fight out some holy wars and rant on about various random topics involving Linux, Microsoft, Windows, OOXML and whatever you can think of. I wouldn't be suprised if somewhere in the comments people would start another browser war or say something about the ridiculous policies of Apple regarding the App Store.
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I think the Slashdot crowd is actually quite diverse. I can only speak for myself, but I am happy with the article and the Slashdot story. I don't have the time to keep up with everything myself, so it helps me if other people perform these reviews and tell me about their results.
OpenOffice getting worse (Score:2, Insightful)
In some ways, OpenOffice 2 was better than OpenOffice 3. At least it crashed less. Google "OpenOffice crashes". [google.com] (764,000 hits.) It crashes on SUSE. It crashes on Ubuntu. It crashes on Windows. It crashes on launch. It crashes on exiting. And what's the support advice? "Delete your OpenOffice profile". "Clean the registry". None of that helps much.
Since Oracle took over, the online "support" is best described as "developer in denial".
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I think NeoOffice [neooffice.org] has a slightly better track record -- for me at least. I have had it crash once in the last 1.5 years of using it. Maybe I'm just a weird user or something. I know it's just OO.org, but methinks the use of their custom (java-based) UI frontend somehow helps with things, somehow.
I've tried native OO.org for OS X recently, and it felt like crap in comparison. And yes, it did crash -- twice during one day of testing.
So I hold NeoOffice folks in high esteem. But that's just me.
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I have to say that I find Calc on OO to be painfully slow.
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I disagree. I've been testing OpenOffice since the day it went public on Windows and always went back to Office 2000 frustrated. I really wanted to like OpenOffice but I couldn't... until version 3.1 which finally provided me all that I needed to make the move.
I've never seen OpenOffice crash but of course I am not a seasoned user, yet.
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``Since Oracle took over, the online "support" is best described as "developer in denial".''
So much for the oft-repeated idea that for-profit companies provide great support. They may, but it's not a given.
The Lotus Fallacy (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people simply never needed $400 desktop productivity apps.
The idea that everyone needed to be completely compatible with the market leader quickly
took hold and helped strangle the industry. Documents should have no more vendor-lock
associated with them than image files.
Those of us that don't really need Word, nor really even like it, should not be held hostage by those that do.
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my word, they sound picky (Score:1)
Why can't they take a pdf? Isn't that common enough? Don't they show up the same across platforms?
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Some slave traders like to reformat your resume or otherwise adjust it, with a PDF they can't do that, so they won't bother.
Not a problem if you're in a really strong position, but pretty major if you're in a more competitive market.
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Otherwise a pdf would suffice.
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That can happen even with Office by itself; you formatted it wrong. Learn to use the tools correctly.
And if you want to have predictable formatting, send a PDF.
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Those of us that don't really need Word, nor really even like it, should not be held hostage by those that do.
I agree with your premise. But the question is ... who gets to decide that? I don't think that's a legislative action item. It's not the government's job to make sure people make smart decisions.
openoffice seems to be working out pretty well. I know a lot of people that use it - because it is free, for the most part. Furthermore, it appears to be forcing Microsoft to change it's Office ways... what with office live and all that.
No, I'm not saying MS is now playing nice all of the sudden with all the op
Re:The Lotus Fallacy (Score:4, Interesting)
> I don't think that's a legislative action item. It's not the government's job to make sure people make smart decisions.
No but if they themselves set the right example the Microsoft document monopoly would end overnight. Simply forbid the use of Microsoft document formats within or between government agencies or the distribution to the public in those formats. Program their mail gateways to automagically transform Microsoft attachments into something benign. We have an ISO standard now, governments should use it. Then if Office gained the ability to faithfully interoperate in those formats it wouldn't matter what anyone else wanted to use anymore than it matters if a JPG was originally created or modified with Photoshop.
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I would generally agree, and I think the people of a democratic[ish] country SHOULD be able to er .. legislate? ... what software or businesses or solutions or whatever the government itself uses. As long as you do not start legislating what other companies are allowed to use (I understand the monopoly thing, but that has to do with the monopolizing company, not the companies that are utilizing the monopolizing company).
The only problem I see is when you start forcing a government into a single solution, o
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Etc. It seems like a fairly sticky situation when you start legislating against or for certain companies or organizations...
You don't need to, you simply legislate that documents must be in an open format. If certain companies don't want to make their software compliant with the standard that's their problem.
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Open formats accomplish a whole lot of nothing for anyone. A billion open formats don't help the situation, what is required is a standard format, open or otherwise, which essentially legislates what features a document can have.
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Re:The Lotus Fallacy (Score:4, Interesting)
That's an interesting point - you can read jpg and tiff files from anywhere on any system. Even .psd (photoshop native format) readers are pretty ubiquitous. I'm surprised that Linux doesn't have the functionality of Preview / TextEdit in OS X - between the two programs you can read and write to pretty much anything.
Of course, you do lose some fancy formatting, especially with Idiot Word files, but I view that as a feature, not a bug. Complex Word files are an absolute nightmare, even for pure Windows shops. Stripping out some of that garbage goes a long way to making people read the words, not worry about the ditzil brained bullet character.
Now, if you Word users would please go and get off my lawn I'll just retire for my afternoon nap.
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"Documents should have no more vendor-lock associated with them than image files."
Although I agree with the sentiment in practice there is a huge difference between an image file and a document. An image is a static set of pixels which is run through a compression algorithm and saved. A document needs to store everything needed for editing which means that creating a compatible format from different programs is far more difficult.
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The Geek's "Retail List" Fallacy (Score:2)
Most people simply never needed $400 desktop productivity apps.
Almost no one pays retail list for the boxed set of MS Office.
The "Ultimate Steal" at $60 for those with student ID. MS Office for $10 if your employer participates in Microsoft's Home Use program. [microsofthup.com]
Those of us that don't really need Word, nor really even like it, should not be held hostage by those that do.
The office manager has work that needs to go out by the close of the business day. He is employing fifty to one hundred and fifty temps he
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The "Ultimate Steal" at $60 for those with student ID. MS Office
Not really. [openoffice.org]
The office manager has work that needs to go out by the close of the business day. He is employing fifty to one hundred and fifty temps he needs to be productive at every empty desk he has to fill.
More power to short-sighted companies that put themselves in positions such as your particularly contrived example making it necessary to waste money on overpriced proprietary software just to get work done. We'll spend our money on benefits and salaries for our employees thank you very much. And as a nice side benefit, we'll put what's left over after that in our pockets.
Classes and certification programs no farther away than your local high school, community college, senior center, or public library.
There have been classes and certifications that supported obsolete business models and practices for long before you or I
Article is worth a quick skim but not a slow read (Score:2)
Those of us on Slashdot are unlikely to learn much of importance from the article, but if you skim it you might pick up a thing or two. I had never heard of Glom [glom.org] before, for example.
I did find it amusing that he showed a list of all his icons, including a Kubuntu icon, and then none of the KDE apps had the Kubuntu icon. I guess if you want to run KDE apps you should use Ubuntu instead of Kubuntu? :-/
I was also amused that he saw Lotus Symphony as a replacement for Microsoft Works. (IBM calls Symphony "Aw
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...because every machine has to have QB on it as opposed to just the person who does tha acounting? And I suppose it won't run in a VM either?
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``I was also amused that he saw Lotus Symphony as a replacement for Microsoft Works. (IBM calls Symphony "Award-winning office productivity software".) Heh.''
Pardon my ignorance, but what is the joke here? I don't know Lotus Symphony at all, and have only the barest of experience with Microsoft Works.
Office Apps For Linux? (Score:2, Funny)
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I still use ed you insensitive clod!
?
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Not impressed (Score:3, Interesting)
I am not impressed at all with the article. One example:
"Sunbird"..."but with so many comparable Web-based calendars available (all editable via a site), why bother? Sunbird is a pretty solid and straightforward stand-alone app, even if the utility of such a piece of software is in question."
Who is writing this stuff? Is he comparing to an in-house web-based calendar or something non-local like Google? If we are taking about Google/etc calendars:
1) Many people do not want their calendar tied to the web-only experience
2) Many companies might not want to be THAT dependent on a live, must-be-last, always there Internet connection
3) Many people do not want their sensitive data in the hands of some other company (like Google)
4) There are significant performance advantages to having a local calendar
5) Maybe a business wants their calendar tied to their local Email for alerts and reminders, not a third party
Why was this "questionable" status just stamped on Sunbird and not the other "stand alone" apps listed? Why was Evolution not mentioned? Why is "calendar" software considered "Office Suite" software but not Email? Why in their "communications" software article don't they stamp the "questionable" status on all the Email clients?
so which is faster? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do they even read what they write?
"OO.o Writer is the fastest and most responsive word processor available for Linux today."
"KWord is fast. It's probably the fastest-loading and maybe the most responsive word processor in the roundup."
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Do they even read what they write?
"OO.o Writer is the fastest and most responsive word processor available for Linux today."
"KWord is fast. It's probably the fastest-loading and maybe the most responsive word processor in the roundup."
Apparently they didn't try AbiWord [abiword.org] then.
On my desktop box, it's up an running within a fraction of a second. Yes really.
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Editing makes mainstream media less credible. Or something.
Dissapointed... (Score:2)
I *really* want to find a good quality contact management program. By this, I don't mean an address book, per-se, but - rather - an application to help me keep in touch with diverse contacts (private and professional) who, otherwise, I'd quickly forget about.
I need, for example, to keep logs of interactions, so - if I contact them - I can be sure what we last talked about, and when. I'd like it to integrate with my iCal calendar so that I can schedule tasks to follow-up, when - otherwise - I'd forget.
It's
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Maybe it wouldn't scale to your needs, but I find Tomboy Notes [gnome.org] pretty handy. I use it keeps notes of whatever, including follow-ups with contacts (not as an address book). It does full text indexing, making it easy to find the note(s) I'm looking for.
Useless databases review (Score:2)
I hoped to find some new information about database frontends, but the first paragraph makes it absolutely clear there won't be any, and makes you wonder why the reviewer even bothered with filling the rest of the page [tomshardware.com]:
First off, I am not a database user. [...] MS Access isn't the industry-dominating title that Excel is. So, we won't be looking for Access replacements here.
So what will he be lookiing for ? An Excel replacement ? Well, that is suposed to be covered on another page.
we're comparing these apps to Access, something similarly clean, user-friendly, and scalable.
So he's not looking for an Access replacement, but will compare to Access??
Anyway, the result is still that there is no Access equivalent on Linux, and that is the main problem I have
Open Office anyone (Score:1)
Better Enterprise level solutions and there all free, lets see windows say that. (without crashing)
Re:Not good enough if you deal with customers. (Score:4, Insightful)
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If you've never run into this between versions of MS Office, then I'd say you've not used Excel often enough.
Unless you're saying the way you "control" these imperfections is to have multiple versions of MS Office installed/laying around. That's not wha
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.
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``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.''
I agree. On the other hand, if you are concerned about your document rendering a specific way, none of the Microsoft Office programs are actually the way to go. That's not what they are for. The Microsoft Office products are for quickly whipping up documents, spreadsheets and simple data entry applications. If you want professio
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If you want to make a diagram so complex that it would be difficult to make it in dia, you are doing it wrong.
Remember -- diagram is an illustration, not a formal specification.
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You make a very good point.
In fact, I think even Dia is overkill. I would like to specify just the few elements that my diagram has in a simple text file, then have that render to some kind of standard (scalable and/or pixmap) image format. Preferably it would try to automagically lay out the diagram elements in a sensible way, so that I don't have to specify positions for all of them. Something like pic or dot might do very nicely.