[plug] Linux Desktop Market

[Craig Ringer]

On Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 02:37:34PM +0800, Cameron Patrick wrote:
> Craig Ringer wrote:
> 
> > Yep. OO.o is getting pretty good. Calc in particular seems to be 
> > lightyears ahead - I still loathe spreadsheets, but when forced to use 
> > them now I don't have to reboot to use them with my sanity intact.
> 
> Heh, interesting.  For the things I use a spreadsheet for (graphing
> and simple data analysis), I still find Excel much nicer to use.

Oh, certainly. Graphing in particular. It also has genuinely useful
built-in help to counteract the bizarre insanity of spreadsheet
functions. OO.o's is usually only really useful if you already know how
to do what you need to and just need a reminder on syntax.

However, I find O.o 2.0 sufficiently functional - for a spreadsheet -
that I can actually work with it. This wasn't true of 1.1, which
required some horrifying hacks to get many simple things done. The fact
that the kind OO.o folks fixed {SUM(IF(...))} alone makes such a
difference that it's amazing.

If I had to choose between extensively using OO.o 1.1 Calc and buying a
retail copy of MS Excel at a bit under $500, I would've taken Excel
anyway. With OO.o 2.0, it's improved enough that that's no longer true.
Being a dirty rotten student now, I still got Office, but I don't use it
much since a somewhat fixed up early OO.o 2 build shipped in FC4.

I should note that I learned Excel /after/ OO.o, so what problems I have
with the latter are certainly not due to greater familiarity with
Office.

-- 
Craig Ringer