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On the developer front:

If you have a lot of database stuff, Visual Studio can be much cheaper to develop for, so long as you ignore Microsoft's Architectural Group. For me, moving to Linux isn't just about saving money, really, its to break free from the corporate brain cramp that is Microsoft Architectural guidelines. Visual Studio and C# are great tools, but, if you have to use evaporate 2x as productive multiplier to do 10x as much stupid stuff, there's hardly a savings.

On the office front:

OpenOffice's spreadsheet is not even close to Office 2007 Excel. We developers can say Open Office spreadsheet is good enough, but telling that to someone who lives and breaths Excel is only for laughs.

However people that use their spreadsheets for statistics will tell you that using Excel for you calculation is about as productive as using substituting rand() for your equations.

Here is one of several papers about the fact that Microsoft has no interest in fixing the broken nature of excel for statistical work.

I guess nobody told her about how proprietary Excel is inferior to libre Gnumeric in having quite a few errors in its statistical functions and how when apprised of errors the Gnumeric folks fixed them quickly while the Excel folks either never fixed them, did it slowly, or introduced new errors? See the report by Drexel University statistician B. D. McCullough.

gnumeric - great at what it does, but rather featureless.

Name those 'certain functions' that prevent switching. C'mon. I dare you.

Still quiet, eh? Thought so.

Perhaps you meant the statistical functions in Excel which are broken (warning for PDF) and MS has refused to fix, going on quite a few years now. You can't be serious about Visual Basic macros. MS is phasing them out so that's not a reason to hang back on last decade's technology either.

It's the color of broken statistical routines.

Although some clueless idiots marked me as flamebait, I would suggest to use for example Gnumeric instead of Excel. Excel is broken, it won't be fixed, get over it.

Slashdot - marking people as flamebait for telling the truth.

You choose the one function it does not support, and ignore the huge number of unique features. You also ignore the fact that Excel is not accurate and Gnumeric is accurate.

On another note, you might not want to do too much statistical analysis in MS Excel. (Maybe not in OOo calc either) http://www.practicalstats.com/Pages/excelstats.htm l/ http://www.csdassn.org/software_reports/gnumeric.p df/ http://www.daheiser.info/excel/frontpage.html/

• Problems with Using Microsoft Excel for Statistics
• Fixing Statistical Errors in Spreadsheet Software: The Cases of Gnumeric and Excel
• Using Excel for Data Analysis
• Statistical Flaws in Excel
• On the Accuracy of Statistical Distributions in Microsoft Excel 97
• On the Reliability of Microsoft Excel XP for Statistical Purposes
• Use of Excel for Statistical Analysis
• Reliability of Statistical Procedures in Excel
• Association of Statistics Specialists Using Microsoft Excel
• Statistical Analysis Using Microsoft Excel

The OpenOffice version of the first doesn't scale near to where I need it

As a hardcore spreadsheet user

excell handles curve fits much better than open office,

and it statisical anaylis of data is much better also.

For the software errors, do they mean the problems listed here?

They focused on fixing errors in Excel first.

Furthermore, Excel (every scientists best friend), is still far and away the best spreadsheet application
[...]

Not every scientist agrees with that.

Gnumeric is better. As a statistician, he should be avoiding Excel anyway due to its known innacuracies in calculations. Gnumeric is better on that front, too.

But Gnumeric is a very good choice. Here is a detailed write up of Gnumeric. The Computational Statistics & Data Analysis Statistical Software Newsletter has a report reviewing Gnumeric vs MS-Excel titled Fixing Statistical Errors in Spreadsheet Software: The Cases of Gnumeric and Excel (Warning for PDF) Regardless, of which spreadsheet you use, it's worth a read. Some excerpts:

When apprised of the errors in v1.0.4, the developers of Gnumeric indicated that they would try to fix the errors. Indeed, Gnumeric v1.1.2 has largely fixed the flaws, while Microsoft has not fixed its errors through many successive versions.
...
Persons who desire to use a spreadsheet package to perfome statistical analyses are advised to use Gnumeric rather than Excel

Using Excel for school level science may be acceptable but as the UK NPL and others have found, Excel is the one that is not up to par, Gnumeric is greatly superior and scientists should not blindly trust the software they use anyway - especially when the only way to verify it's reliability is to treat it to empirical scientific investigation itself, amusing though that may be.