MS office for Linux

[jpaulb]

Microsoft (http://www.microsoft.com/) will release a version of Office to run on Linux within the "next couple of years", according to the chief executive of the Open Source Development Lab (http://www.osdl.org/) (OSDL).

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2162570/microsoft-office-linux

[fos]

While this is a good development, I doubt that I would be willing to pay Microsoft for another version of their office suite. That is one of the reasons I like OSS, you don't have to pay for every upgrade that comes down the pike obsoleting earlier versions to the point where documents written with the older versions will not be fully compatible with new versions.

Just my $0.02 worth.

fos....

[AndreL]

Fully agreed...

[danieldk]

As long as OpenOffice doesn't work half-decently (sorry), people will run MS Office. So, I think it is a good development. (Though I highly prefer free software.)

[benjaminq]

OpenOffice managed my PhD thesis in one single document (212 pages), took all the graphics, tables, OLE's, formulas, footnotes, endnotes, page styles and even exported it at the end nicely into PDF. OOorg also made all the scientific presentations and the A0 posters. All without hassle.

It's slow to start, but then it stands like a rock and does what it is told to do ... so I for one can say it does work more than half decent.

What was the probem for you Daniel?

MS-Linux-Office will NOT come. They plan a "cheap version" no one needs, no one using Linux wants find himself stuck to another format-lock-in, especially not in "a few years", when companies have migrated to Linux AND OOorg. It does also not make the slightest sense from the economical point of view for MS: why offer another way to avoid MS Windows?

Linux-users and migrators do know the advantage of OSS. Its free as in freedom, and this is a thing MS won't offer.

[bluesdog]

After wasting more hours than I care to remember battling with ill-mannered microbleep, from win 3.1 to xp, there is no way I would ever consider installing msoffice on my machine.

I don't even like using the win32 codecs... :smiley7:

[jpaulb]

While this is a good development, I doubt that I would be willing to pay Microsoft for another version of their office suite. That is one of the reasons I like OSS, you don't have to pay for every upgrade that comes down the pike obsoleting earlier versions to the point where documents written with the older versions will not be fully compatible with new versions.

Just my $0.02 worth.

fos....
There are many people that would pay, reason being MS office is familiar territory. More small business owners would probably embrace Linux; but . . . . . . Then comes a million excuses. The bottom line being we are afraid of change, our data is locked into a format, yada yada yada.

I've stayed away from MS office all these years, there is no reason use it even if it was free. free as in Bill Gates

[krp]

I have never used MS Office and shall not start.

Abiword works just fine, so does Gnumeric and other GNU products.

Besides why in the world would anybody want to place a piece of proprietary garbage on their GNU/Linux system? The mere thought is disgusting.

[Harold]

I can't say that I'm enamored with either Abiword or Openoffice. Abiword chokes when opening medium-sized documents. Openoffice I just don't like. I really liked Textmaker for Linux when Softmaker introduced it in 2002. It hasn't been updated since, and there have been so many changes to Linux these last four years that Textmaker 2002 is no longer stable. I wish the Softmaker would get their keisters in gear and do an update. Oh well, I can try kword, and I can try running Textmaker 2006 for Windows on Wine / Crossover Office.

Duh! Signature made a comeback all by itself! ?!?!?!?

[bhobjj]

I prefer Abiword and Gnome. They work well for me. I haven't had the problem with larger documents. I have printed out severl user SOP manuals and regulations over the past year a couple of these with 200 - 300 pages each with Abiword.

Nobody seems to have any problems with the "doc" files that I send them (in rtf) with Abiword.

However, I get a few government documents /week and the headers are always messed up in Abiword, taking up a full page instead of the top 15%, but I can deal with it. The rest of the documents are fine.


I work more with spreadsheets than "wordprocessors". I use Gnumeric every day and for the past several years with zero problems. I had been using OpenOffice (and StarOffice) before that and had multiple bugs. MicrosoftOffice is not much better than OpenOffice and they are both bloat-ware. The problems show up when you are doing a recalc of a sheet with many formulas.

What I really want is a light-weight (but powerful) spreadsheet with 1-2-3 keybindings. I tried Sc (vi-like) and Oleo (emacs-like), but I think that there has not been much development on those projects in the past 15 years.

I wouldn't buy a Microsoft Office product. Maybe it could do well in the click-n-run (Linspire) warehouse? Although Office has a huge market, it is not a great product.

[morgoth]

Actually, I think that this is a good idea. A solid idea. I know not many of you like Microsoft products, and not many people consider them stable and reliable (including myself), but for many, computers are Microsoft. For many, doing a letter means MS Word. Whether you like it or not, that's the way the world is. If Microsoft ports MS Office to Linux, then that's a good thing imho, they're learning to play nice with the competition to at least some degree, and that's better than the Microsoft of the past.

True, Microsoft's products suck, but alas, sometimes you're just stuck with them for a variety of reasons. After seven months of using Microsoft Windows I'm really sick of it already to be honest, yes it does work [mostly], but it has some vastly annoying things. Proprietary software leaves me cold as well, but that's another story. Sadly, until my 1D is supported in GNU/Linux as a FireWire device (sorry, using a card reader is not fixing the problem as far as I'm concerned), and Photoshop CS2 runs in Linux without issues (not even CrossOver Office supports it), then I'm stuck in Windows land.

My honest thoughts are that the big Linux supports (IBM, Novell, HP) need to start helping software vendors financially to port software across to Linux. Once this happens, you'll start seeing Linux take off, until them it's just another hobby operating system imho. And no, the GIMP doesn't cut it for me one iota.

Dave

[fos]

Welcome back Dave. I appreciate your comments.

fos....

[benjaminq]

I now have since 2 months the (dis-)pleasure to use MS Word again. If it weren't for the integration with the INPROTEC thing which is rather nice and a fix-point in the IT of the firm I work for, I would kick MS Office any day for OOorg and an PIM app that actually starts even when it can not connect to the MS Exchange server. Damn Outlook refuses to show the calendar or the Adressbook when it can not connect to the MS Exchange server ... wow. Maybe its the IT department that slept well to put everything on the server, I don't know. Anyway, the behaviour of MS Word (2K) is as best annoying. Having stable templates is one thing I love with OOorg, with MS you never know what happens to any paragraph if you delete the paragraph before or after it, you never really know why it indents (or not) ... if you write like MS wants you to write everything is smooth, but if you happen to have some own ideas how to structurize a text you have to constantly work against Word. It sucks. It is fast and rather stable and most of the time it behaves reproducibly, but it is just a pain. I haven't yet managed to insert a textbox write "draft" into it, send it into the background and then turn it by 45 degrees. Why sould I want it? (says MS) Because I want to (says Benjamin)
:-)

[fos]

I feel your pain.

Where I work, all of our files are now stored on a central server - everything. Two weeks ago, that central server's hard drive bit the dust. All computing came to a screeching halt. They sent the hard drive to a recovery company. The "recovered" the files. They all seem to be there however about 50% of the files are corrupt, but not like you would think. You would think that a corrupt file would be gibberish. Some are, but many are jumbled, pages from different documents are mixed together in strange ways.

I needed several emails from last years archive. Nothing prior to August of this year is available. Before things were centralized, I had my emails all the way back to 2000.

I can no longer install any software on my personal computer or the student computers in my classroom. I had a virtual lab set up for today. None of the student computers would run the lab since the central server hard drive was full.

I sent a nasty gram to the IT department. It should be available tomorrow. ????

All of this in the name of progress and security! ?????

grrrrr

fos.....

[mdevour]

My wife writes and edits lengthy grant applications and research papers for the organization she works for, using Microsoft Word.

It is an absolute certainty that Word will corrupt your file at least once during the process of putting together your project, usually just before deadline. You are then forced to start a new file, cut and paste -- but only without formatting! -- whatever pieces you can recover from the ashes of your file and previous versions you were smart enough to save.

Word chokes on large files if you save too often, you try to move text boxes and pictures around... The longer you work on it the bigger the file gets and the more unstable Word becomes, until it barfs.

She now knows to anticipate and plan for it. She's got the recovery tactics down pat, but still, always, loses a few hours of work on the day before deadline. :smiley7:

Thought you'd like to know! :smiley4:

Mike D.

[uteck]

Were I used to work, we usually had Word and Excel crash and mess up the files people were working on. I would get called to 'recover' the file which was just a matter of using OO.o to open the 'corrupted' file. OO.o had no problem with it and usually returned the file to were it was when they last saved. And most problems were on Macs running Office, so it was the program, not the OS that has issues.
Also, opening a document on a PC that was created on a Mac caused all sorts of formating and pagination changes, which could result in odd pages with a few lines of text and skewed images and tables. So Office had problems with itself between versions.

OO.o did have it's problems as well, but most were addressed in version 2. The boss can't tell what is created with OO.o anymore so it can be used despite her ban on using it.

[morgoth]

Well, in all honesty, I haven't had excel crash on me once in 7 and a bit months of usage at home (using Excel 2003). And this is on a large 11mb spreadsheet that I use to log my helpdesk calls. I haven't had word crash yet on me in a few years, although I typically don't have large word files. True, MS Word is horrid for things like inserting images and wrapping text (I'd rather much use Lyx for that type of thing, which is ported to Windows btw).

I haven't seen a BSOD from Windows since I've been working from home, but it does some odd things from time to time. Outlook 2003 has a weird habit of locking the toolbar icons on a newly opened email for a few seconds, so I have to wait before I can use the icons (very annoying). Outlook 2003 locks files/folders if they've been used to send as email attachments, even long after you've sent the email. Internet explorer has a weird habit of damn well resizing the window for no apparent reason, resulting in you having to fix it. I've had that happen several times and it's really annoying.

My biggest hate at the moment is something broke with updates that were applied on the 10th August, thus screwing up my Canon software. When I plug the camera into the FireWire interface, it should automatically open up my Canon software but it doesn't. The camera is being used for a period fo time, and the Canon software will NOT open at all whilst the camera is being accessed. I've spent probably 20 hours trying to figure this out, been through Canon's support (tier 1/tier 2/camera specialist, software specialist, then visited Canon with my camera to have it tested). Canon says it's a result of the Windows Firewall blocking the 1394 interface. The Windows firewall is turned on, and greyed out, so that I cannot turn it off. It says that my security policy is being pulled from the domain server, but Warren says that he doesn't have it turned on, and no other PCs on the network have an issue. Of course, I can turn off the Windows firewall service, but that's a bad hack in my eyes. I searched Microsoft's kbase resources, fiddled with the Firewall from DOS, it doesn't turn on/off like it should, even when being forced to from DOS. I suspect something is screwed badly with Windows in this respect.

My other pet hate is 3rd party software on Windows does NOT completely get removed when I uninstall it. I really *wish* governments would introduce legislation to force software developers to totally remove their software, not leave a bunch of shit behind like what currently happens. This really angers me. I spent near 3 hours editing the registry to remove references to the Canon software...I was not a happy camper. Canon refused to tell me *which* files were installed on my system, and what registry entries were installed for the EOS Utility (which is what was not working properly). I'll probably write a stern letter to Canon Japan about it.

Some good news - the Canon software specialist dropped the hint that Canon is working on Linux software/drivers for release in the future!

Dave

PS I have xnview installed, gimpshop, inkview, lyx on my Windows desktop ;-)

[benjaminq]

You cannot simply remove software form Windows. Sometimes you cannot even get it working properly, like the Palm Desktop Software that I can only use as Admin ... until recently, now it starts and crashes. Plunging to the registry and removing every bit of Palm from it and you can at least install it again and have it running, but after trying to access the desired function (delete all old events) the crash cycle is there again. Palm does not have an updated version and thus Linux offers mor functionality with the little Z22 than Windows does ... and with Linux its a 1 out of 6 to get a sync.

Well I spare my story about installing a HP printer (the story can be found somewhere in the Libranet archive ...). I really ask myself why they (Windows and related) never get those stuff fixed although they have an extremely long life cycle, a stable API, ...

Shared dll's are possibly the second most idiot idea and the reason for quite some trouble.

Dave: there are programs that watch over the installation process and give you the possibility to really completely remove the program. As usual, they come with a price.

I don't really understand why those things are furnished by third party programmers and not by MS itself. This is a piece of software that should be included in an OS, not a media player ...

[muskrat]

[qoute]
Actually, I think that this is a good idea. A solid idea. I know not many of you like Microsoft products, and not many people consider them stable and reliable (including myself), but for many, computers are Microsoft. For many, doing a letter means MS Word. Whether you like it or not, that's the way the world is. If Microsoft ports MS Office to Linux, then that's a good thing imho, they're learning to play nice with the competition to at least some degree, and that's better than the Microsoft of the past.
[qoute]

I don't think it's so much as learning to play nice as it's covering all the bases, Linux desktop is spreading, OO.org is doing like wise. AN MS is just putting into place a safe net to stay in the game if they lose anymore ground on the desktop market,

In the US microsoft is holding thier ground, but around the world there are companies and goverments that are tried of the extortion, and also they distrust the closed source, not knowing if uncle sam is in bed with minisoft or not.

I am an american, and I will say I distrust MS for the reason they only got thier hands slapped for anti trust violations, yet others go to jail for lessor offenses. I have no grounds to base this on but I believe Uncle Sam ask MS to place some code in that great closed cource code for them.

It's a known fact they placed code for china. what's to stop them from doing so for thier own goverment.

[jpaulb]

I I have no grounds to base this on but I believe Uncle Sam ask MS to place some code in that great closed cource code for them.

It's a known fact they placed code for china. what's to stop them from doing so for thier own goverment.

This was quoted as one of the arguments the German government used when they started phasing out MS 4 or so years ago. Who would want a foreign software maker handling your finance or national security departments.

[morgoth]

Dave: there are programs that watch over the installation process and give you the possibility to really completely remove the program. As usual, they come with a price.

Benjamin, I realise this, but my point is that the software vendors should have a legal responsibility to ensure the total removal of their software, not just parts of it that they see fit. If they can't write a proper uninstallation script, then they shouldn't be allowed to write software. Simple.

Dave

[benjaminq]

Benjamin, I realise this, but my point is that the software vendors should have a legal responsibility to ensure the total removal of their software, not just parts of it that they see fit. If they can't write a proper uninstallation script, then they shouldn't be allowed to write software. Simple.

Dave

:-) There are so many things that shouldn't be allowed ... in the first place EULAS should be forbidden and software with a price tag should come with a guarantee like every product with a price tag. This would help a lot.

Benjamin