Tom's Definitive Linux Software Roundup: Office Applications

[jrch2k10]

scribus is not designed to compete with publisher (wich i dont like btw), scribus is a contender again st adobe indesign and quarkpress aka professional level page layout design, that is why there is no such things like bussiness card templates

 

[jrch2k10]

you should test openoffice again once tomorrow k/ubuntu 10.04 LTS get released, cuz ooo 3.2 have a nice set changes and improvements that really worth to check them out

 

[BigBlueDart]

When I got married I had to get my wife to start using Quicken. When I switched to Linux I had to convince her to switch to KMyMoney. It was a fight both times, but it's pretty smooth sailing now.

Linux is getting more and more usable every day. I'll be backing up my files and downloading a Kubuntu 10.04 torrent for installation this weekend. I can't wait to see what's in store!

 

[Guest]

What about MS Office?
Office 2007 Runs fine under Wine. At Least Word and Excel do, for the most part. Crossover Office has some tweaks that make it more pleasant, but it's quite usable under the Free GPL version of Wine.

 

[Guest]

"Lotus Symphony's spreadsheet function has small cells by default. This caused entries with more than seven characters to appear as pound signs (#) until column width was manually adjusted (Ed.: Excel does this, too)."

That's not true in Excel 2007; I just tested it. When the adjacent cells are empty, Excel will "overflow" the number into the cells. If you're editing a single column at a time, the column will resize as necessary to fit the number you're entering. When you hit about 7-8 digits, Excel switches to scientific notation.

In short, Excel 2007 basically does everything possible to avoid the "#######" scenario. I'm not sure what version the editor tested.

 

[djackson_dba]

[citation][nom]rfox[/nom]Open Source is the future. Screw companies that profit millions or billions off of proprietary software. They are what hold us back.[/citation]

Do you work for free? Probably not, but if you do I have some projects for you! ;-)

 

[Guest]

Re: "You can also publish your calendar to a Web site, but with so many comparable Web-based calendars available (all editable via a site), why bother?"

Well, what if you have a netbook (like I do), and you don't have mobile internet access (I don't) and you want to take your calendars with you, despite also publishing them on the web?

 

[Guest]

One other thing I think you left off is collaboration... what really puts PowerPoint ahead of Keynote (other than the fact it runs on Windows) is that you can share your presentations with others with full, integrated version control.

Keynote is a better product, for a company of one. But most companies collaborate on documents-- something Microsoft Office excels at.

 

[mitch074]

@Miharu: MS Access' format is understood by... MS Access alone on Windows only. And even 'better', full interoperability will be limited to people with the same Access version running on the same Windows version. That's not really interoperable. Compare with the following...

When creating a "worthy" database in OOo Base, you'll probably end up installing MySQL somewhere, and use Base as a forms and states editor. Until you do, you won't be able to make use of table joins, complex subqueries etc. (OOo Base's integrated DB engine is VERY basic).

So, at that point, you'll have a MySQL database on one side, and a form file on another. That database can have:
- an HTML frontend,
- OOo Base's frontend,
- another DB frontend...
And, since OOo runs on Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris, you can access said DB from any system, whether there's OOo on it... Or not.

Calling MS Access interoperable is like saying the Sun is cold.

Now, about differences between documents opened under OOo and MS Office...

Create a Word document in Word XP. Open it under Word 2007 on another machine with a different printer. Oh goody, the layout's gone crazy!

Open it under OOo. Yes, it's gone crazy too. But not worse than one Word version compared to another. Why is that?

The algorithm used to draw a document in MS Word changed on each and every version; those changes are hardly documented, and took into account the default printer on the computer used to create the document. So, OOo Writer has to guess what Word version was used, what the printer measures were (they weren't stored in the document until Word 2003)... And it can't. Because that data ain't stored in the Word document.

So, OOo gave arbitrary values (reasonable approximations) to the measures used in all Word versions on all printers. That means no perfect pixel-to-pixel fidelity, but it also means that variations due to different document sources won't impact it too badly (while this can CRASH Word).

If you want perfect fidelity, you should export as PDF - like OOo does. Even better, OOo allows you to edit a PDF (with a free extension).

@randomizer: about Calc being slow... You should send a slow document to the OOo authors so that they can find what makes Calc slow, they might just solve it for OOo 3.2.1. Or it may actually already be solved in Novell's OOo build.

@adamovera: I guess we have different expectations on what a publishing too is. For me, a publishing tool is the stuff I'd use to make a flyer, a pamphlet, a book, a newspaper, whatever. Scribus does that - almost as well as Quark Xpress. Publisher doesn't. And yes, I've tried all of them (Xpress on a 256-pages CMYK book containing mixed text, ads and shapes, Publisher on a 128 pages mixed content in BW, Inkscape on several jobs). A publishing tool is not, however, a collection of templates; for that, you may as well get OOo templates: either Draw or Writer have good enough layout and style capabilities, with PDF export, to do a good job on those "fast" edits.

 

[Guest]

@author : About K-spread : About the 'Strangely, the entries in the last column' part, it's standard for most spreadsheets (maybe all, not being multi OS/app for some time XP(darn)/OOo(Yes!)): if the next right cell is empty (null) the left cell can span, since there is nothing worth mentioning to its right, and at will untill a same row cell isn't empty. Change that with a space, just for fun, and you're done.

 

[futureperfect]

Rather than using Sunbird calendar (multi-platform) and KDE's KAddressBook or Gnome's Rubica (Linux platform only), consider Lightning and the Thunderbird Address Book. Lightning is based on Sunbird, but Lightening is still being developed (Sunbird isn't). Thunderbird is a multi-platform e-mail client (but you can just use its Address Book by itself if you want--I do). So you get both a calendar and address book that run on multiple platforms. Plus, Thunderbird's Address Book has a great layout which many prefer over the Rolodex metaphor that KAddressBook and Rubica use.

 

[Guest]

Just use Google Docs.

 

[Guest]

Smart phones are ever popular and growing.
How easy is it for people to sync their contacts, calendars, and email with these Linux applications?

 

[Guest]

I have I have 5 PC running Linux in the Living room, 2 more in the bedroom, and a couple of other scattered around the house. And, I have one more PC in the bedroom that runs Windows XP just so I can run MS Office. I am so ashamed.... But, I have to use Windows and Office at work. And, I have a bunch of Excel spreadsheets that I use in teaching. All of those spread sheets depends on Excel's ability to do iterative spreadsheets. O can not run these spread sheets. The bug report number is 956 and it dates back to 2001. Current bug report #s are over 100,000....

Gnumeric won't run those spread sheets. KSpread will run them if you don't mind hitting f9 several thousand times Google Office doesn't can't run them. That type of spread sheets are used in ME, EE, Biology, economics. You name it. It is a very important feature.

As far as I can tell the reason that none of the FOSS or even just F(ree) spreadsheets provide this feature is because the people developing those spreadsheets do not use spreadsheets the way spreadsheet users use them. And, they don't have to listen to the users because they do not have to create software that people are willing to buy. This is the only case that I have been able to identify where the FOSS process does not produce software that is better than commercial products. But, since it forces a huge number of people, including me, to use MS software it is holding back the spread of FOSS software into a whole long list of fields that would love to have a spreadsheet that can be run on a wide range of super computers.

It is really sad that people who are willing to spend thousands, even hundreds of thousands of hours developing these applications are not willing to listen potential users. There seems to be no one going around asking why people do not use FOSS and even if someone did that, the developers have no reason to listen.

 

[BigBlueDart]

@olBob - Sounds like you just need to write a code to do what you're doing, or consider using something like Matlab.

 

[adamovera]

[citation][nom]blakeyrat[/nom]"Lotus Symphony's spreadsheet function has small cells by default. This caused entries with more than seven characters to appear as pound signs (#) until column width was manually adjusted (Ed.: Excel does this, too)."That's not true in Excel 2007; I just tested it. When the adjacent cells are empty, Excel will "overflow" the number into the cells. If you're editing a single column at a time, the column will resize as necessary to fit the number you're entering. When you hit about 7-8 digits, Excel switches to scientific notation.In short, Excel 2007 basically does everything possible to avoid the "#######" scenario. I'm not sure what version the editor tested.[/citation]
He's pretty die hard about 2003. I don't blame him though, the TH chart templates are optimized for it, 2007 screws them all up - 2010, forget about it. Wait a minute, that sounds like a prime candidate to become an O convert...

 

[Guest]

This is totally weird. You say you are reviewing KOffice 1.6, and some of your comments, like the one on the document structure viewer show you did that. But your screenshots are from on of the 2.x versions. KOffice has released the first release candidate of 2.2 yesterday. It's still not end-user ready, though, although some components are pretty good already, like Krita.

 

[Guest]

I use Windows and while I like Excel 2007, I also keep an alternative suite around for when Microsoft apps import or export data incorrectly. One problem is that Excel only exports .csv "correctly", which is to say, by only using quotation marks when it is needed (to contain a field with a comma in it). I had to work with some old accounting packages that literally required quotation marks around all fields, and OpenOffice could do that.

Another project I deal with every year, though, pretty much requires Excel, since I'm not limited to 65,536 rows.

Do any of the alternative apps reviewed meet Excel 2007's row limitation of 1,048,576?

 

[Tjik]

[citation][nom]Delusionn[/nom]Another project I deal with every year, though, pretty much requires Excel, since I'm not limited to 65,536 rows.Do any of the alternative apps reviewed meet Excel 2007's row limitation of 1,048,576?[/citation]
Maybe it's not your own decision, but is it really wise to make use of such Godzilla big Excel sheets? To me it more sounds like the wrong application or approach was chosen for the task. Excel has had several bugs resulting in wrong numbers, and if such a bug hits you when working with 1 million row sheets, you won't be particularly productive. The code behind Excel is monstrous.

Every one is free to make his/her own choice, but I would feel quite uncomfortable choosing a closed document format for such documents, which obviously is a product of big investments in time and hence money.

Just a thought, not meant as criticism of your person.

 

[Silmarunya]

Having both Org and MS office on my PC, I have to say I still prefer MS Office, but only for its UI. There isn't a single thing I do with documents that would be impossible in Open Office. If it wasn't because I could get it bundled with Windows 7 truly dirt cheap, I'd be using O as my main office suite.

Although for any serious document, I use LaTeX rather than an XML office suite.

 

[Guest]

So you are "not a database user", but will write a review anyway?

And, even though Access is about the only real Office database app, and is used for a huge number of small (and not so small) custom business applications, you "won't be looking for Access replacements". But you changed your mind in the next sentence, and you will be "comparing these apps to Access" after all.

I'm sure this will be a very insightful review...

 

[mitch074]

@Silmarunya: LaTeX is a different beast altogether (not that it's a bad thing, mind you!), and doesn't exactly fall under the scope of this article: the best alternative to LaTeX on Windows is LaTeX on Linux.

 

[adamovera]

[citation][nom]rduke15[/nom]So you are "not a database user", but will write a review anyway?And, even though Access is about the only real Office database app, and is used for a huge number of small (and not so small) custom business applications, you "won't be looking for Access replacements". But you changed your mind in the next sentence, and you will be "comparing these apps to Access" after all.I'm sure this will be a very insightful review...[/citation]
1) It's not a review (or a shootout), it's a roundup (think first impressions). The point is to find the applications that Windows users (90%+ of all computer users) will be able to install easily and feel at home with.
2) What we were NOT looking for is compatibility with MS Access native file formats, like we did with Excel and Word. What we were looking for is "A nice graphical way for the rest of us to construct, organize, enter, and sort information. In that respect, we're comparing these apps to Access, something similarly clean, user-friendly, and scalable." I see that you couldn't even quote the full sentence, not to mention the two sentences that lead into it. If that is how you read, I can understand how you'd get confused. Would I be wrong to assume that this isn't the first time this has happened to you?

 

[WheelsOfConfusion]

[citation][nom]olBob[/nom]All of those spread sheets depends on Excel's ability to do iterative spreadsheets. O can not run these spread sheets. The bug report number is 956 and it dates back to 2001. Current bug report #s are over 100,000....Gnumeric won't run those spread sheets. KSpread will run them if you don't mind hitting f9 several thousand times Google Office doesn't can't run them. That type of spread sheets are used in ME, EE, Biology, economics. You name it. It is a very important feature.As far as I can tell the reason that none of the FOSS or even just F(ree) spreadsheets provide this feature is because the people developing those spreadsheets do not use spreadsheets the way spreadsheet users use them. And, they don't have to listen to the users because they do not have to create software that people are willing to buy. This is the only case that I have been able to identify where the FOSS process does not produce software that is better than commercial products.[/citation]
On the other side, I remember a white paper a few years ago that looked at how Gnumeric and various versions of Excel handled statistical functions. When the developers were made aware of problems with the algorithms used by each, Gnumeric made changes across the board to use strong algorithms in the next version while Excel didn't. This gave Gnumeric the recommendation for use in statistics-heavy fields since it could accurately handle Poisson distributions, binomials, and a bunch of others I can't recall. I think the paper was by McCullough. Though that was before Office 2007.

To tell the truth I'm not a heavy office suite user (just started refreshing my memory on spreadsheets a month ago with some exercises to calculate how many fish I could put in an aquarium of given size). On Ubuntu I liked using Abiword when I needed to open a rich text document, or just wanted a nicer-looking layout for text than Gedit without having to awaken the beast that is O. I'm really surprised at the sheer number of personal finance programs that made it into the article. Had no idea that many existed under Linux period, let alone had a GUI or features to be included in an ease-of-use focused roundup. Almost makes me eager to manage my finances... almost.

 

[Guest]

I see that you couldn't even quote the full sentence, not to mention the two sentences that lead into it. If that is how you read, I can understand how you'd get confused. Would I be wrong to assume that this isn't the first time this has happened to you...