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The right question would involve working with and exchanging Microsoft Office documents, in which case your answer is OpenOffice.org, and you can start off by running that under Windows, and continue to run it on machines that remain Waindows for whatever reason.

In general, you should be replacing apps that are tied to Windows with portable ones (e.g. replace IE with Mozilla) first or in parallel with setting up a thin-client LAN.

I use both WINE and Win4Lin in LTSP-like situations. Win4Lin is actually running Windows, so of course compatibility is much better, but Win4Lin isn't any good for high-bandwidth (video) or 3D (games) stuff, even not over a LAN. Both WINE and Win4Lin usually run an app noticeably faster that it would natively on the same machine.

Sound is also very expensive on bandwidth. For these situations, running the app locally is often appropriate. Even a Pentium 133 with 32M of RAM will play Oggs and MP3s without flinching.

In terms of workstations, network and video card, in that order, are most important, followed by RAM. Run the workstations through a switch, not a hub. If the link switch-server can be gigabit, even better. It's actually hard to buy seriously crappy-spec video cards these days (although SiS are working hard to fill this niche), but if you can get, for example, TNT-2 cards to replace S3Virge cards cheaply, then do it. A good card will give much more satisfying results, even if (as in this example) the driver itself (nv, but you also have the choice of NVidia's binary-only drivers which are much faster and slightly buggier) isn't so hot.

If you're buying diskless workstations new, then a well-chosen nForce board is good. If you put a hard disk in the workstation, you find that the board is trying to do too much, and you often get glitches and low performance; but if it's only running LAN and video, it seems to get along just fine. It's also hard to buy less than 128MB of memory these days, which makes the option of running multimedia apps locally (shipping only the compressed source data over the LAN) much more attractive.

Huh? Many of the software packages I use are configured via plaintext files and perform extremely well, and are very easy to maintain in an enterprise enviroment.

For those that still don't know, OpenOffice's native format is XML.

Memory usage seems worse then Excel

This is true - the main problem with OO is that it is a bit of a memory hog. Hopefully this will change over time.

Doesn't support the macros in my Excel sheets

That would require a full VBA runtime for OpenOffice, which as well as being insecure (where do you think those Office document macro viruses come from) is undocumented, propriatery and probably patented / copyrighted to litigation hell should somebody try to reimplement it.

any Plans for DRM in OpenOffice

I bloody hope not. At the end of the day, DRM as a technology is plain broken. Yes, it's nice to think that we can use DRM to specify what people can do with our data (You can read this for the next week, but not distribute it or print it off), but DRM is an attempt to solve a social / legal problem by technical means. Since it can never be made to work, even in theory, I don't see the point in trying, given all we stand to lose, like the concept of fair use.

Still, kudos to you for wanting to contribute. The OpenOffice site has plenty of documentation on submitting bugs and patches.

Well I did. here is the link. Ms Office Professional. $519.00 from warehouse.com. It does not include project, nor project server, no visio, no MapPoint, or Publisher. All of those cost extra.

Let's do a quick calculation shall we.

Office Pro $519.00
Visio Professional $439.95
Publisher Deluxe 139.95

And sorry warehouse does not sell mappoint and insight does not publish their prices on it so let's presume that mappoint is actually free. What have totaled so far? Why it's over $1098.00.

I am glad you Mr Anonymous Coward posted that message. I now feel proud to have educated not only you but all other slashdot users on where they can get quality Ms products and how much they should expect to pay for it.

For those users who are interested in getting most of the functionality of Office for free or a fraction of the cost may I reccomend the following links.

Open office
KDE/Koffice
The Kompany
602 Office
IBM/Lotus
Corel

Please people don't get ripped off voluntarily it makes you look stupid. I am sure you can put that thousand dollars to better use right? Don't you kids need dentures or a collage education?

+3 Insightful? What the hell?

You, sir, are a troll.

Web designers can't test web pages properly because most of their users use a browser that doesn't exist for the Macintosh (IE 6.x)

As is well known, the Mac IE code base is completely different from the Windows IE code base. There is NO major feature that I am aware of that is present in the current version of Windows IE that is missing from the Mac version of IE. If I'm mistaken about this, please point me in the direction of something that references such a feature.

Of course, MS probably likes to perpetuate this myth by not bumping the version number of its Mac product....

The other browsers for the Mac are either immature (Chimera, Safari), obsolete (IE 5.x) or clunky ports (Mozilla).

Maybe Chimera and Safari are immature, but IE5 for Mac is certainly not obsolete, and the statement that Mozilla for Mac is a clunky port (but the Windows version isn't) is just silly. If you don't like those, there's also Opera or OmniWeb, both mature browsers that are also highly standards-compliant.

Microsoft Office is behind the Windows version and StarOffice only runs under X-windows.

MS Office for Mac is "behind" the Windows version how, exactly? Mac Office doesn't have Access, so if you need Access, then the Mac isn't for you. Other than that... No speech recognition? I don't consider that a problem. VBA support slightly behind in some areas? Ditto. What else is there?

And there most certainly IS a Mac version of OpenOffice.

I'm not saying that Apple is going out of business but there is a problem with the fact that the Apple is always an afterthought for application developers.

For some developers, Apple is an afterthought, yes. But there are plenty of other developers for which Apple is not an afterthought, and believe it or not, Microsoft has been one of them. You make it out to sound like the state of software on the Mac is in the dark ages or something, but the truth is that in the two areas you mention, web browsers and office software, there are plenty of good choices out there. The only major area I can think of that is lacking on the Mac is gaming.

And besides, if you consider this such a problem, why not just get a Windows PC and be done with it? The rest of us will happily continue using our "obsolete" web browsers and office software.

(There. I've fed the troll. Now I feel better. :)

Two Words:

Open Office.

How hard is it to put in an a href??? Now every person who wants to visit your links will have to copy and paste them. And to top it off the second one won't even work because the crappy Slashdot software put a space in it.

http://www.theopencd.org/mirrors.php
http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/source/1.0.2/in dex.html

Well, I think the solution here is obvious.

Sorry, couldn't resist. :-)

Nevermind that you HAVE to send out .DOC format resume's to find a job anymore.

But why pirate MS Office, when OpenOffice.org can export into .DOC format?

Yes, it may be unknown to most users, but that doesn't mean it's hidden any more than most features in Office.

Anyway, AFAIK a better (non-ODBC) MySQL driver for openoffice.org has been up there on their to-do list for quite some time.

So why not scratch that itch instead?

As a mac user only really currently on the outside of the open source movement I mostly want to see how this links with the development of Open Office, which I am very interested in...

Building software to Unix specifications (POSIX) offers the software to retain its portability, but the games you and many are talking about were designed not to be portable. Most games are built to be platform-specific with no ability for the end-user to migrate them to another platform. Gaming companies know they can make more money by letting the platform obsolete itself and then make the game new to sell on the next platform. Although companies that offer a platform that retains portability with previous platforms will have good profit and retain its end-users verry well.

Enter Unix; the platform is but an obscure puzzle peice that is omnipotent and fits every puzzle ever made.
Enter GPL; software *can* be made portable.

Thanks to the GPL, OpenOffice is platform independant.

When is the last time you looked at OpenOffice? It already has good macro capabilities and supports OLE automation via the UNO inteface. You are probably thinking of the old StarOffice 5.2 which is a whole different story.

Key features of the Network Audio System include:

• Device-independent audio over the network
• Lots of audio file and data formats
• Can store sounds in server for rapid replay
• Extensive mixing, separating, and manipulation of audio data
• Simultaneous use of audio devices by multiple applications
• Use by a growing number of ISVs
• Small size
• Free! No obnoxious licensing terms

• Festival - The Festival Speech Synthesis System.
• mpg123 - a command line MP3 player
• GAIM - a free AOL IM client
• OpenOffice (StarOffice) - the (now opensourced) StarOffice Suite has built-in NAS support for the Solaris and Linux Platforms.
• The Qt Library - from Trolltech supports NAS natively. You will need to pass the '-system-nas-sound' to './configure' before building.
• libSDL - SDL, the Simple DirectMedia Layer library, now has native NAS support thanks to Erik Inge Bols\x{00F8}
• XAnim - the X Animation viewer
• XBoing - a blockout type X game
• XPilot - a multiplayer client/server space warfare game
• Xemacs - the best cross-plaform, cross-language IDE
• Alsaplayer - A NAS Output plugin written by Erik Inge Bols\x{00F8} is now supplied with the Alsaplayer distribution.
• X MultiMedia System (XMMS). A NAS Output plugin written by Willem Monsuwe is available at ftp://ftp.stack.nl/pub/users/willem/
• Wine. A NAS plugin written by Nicolas Escuder is now available with the WINE distrubution.

I've been trying to migrate people _away_ from windows, this only makes it easier for them to stay ;-)

I disagree. Take a longer term view. This makes it easier for them to leave Windows. Nothing happens overnight. And won't happen as quickly as I would like.

While so much noise and attention is being focused on Linux, I think the biggest threat to Microsoft is, once again, sneaking in under the radar. (Step 1: First they ignore you.) The biggest threat: cross-over applications. Stuff like OpenOffice. Or the GIMP. (And yes, I understand that GIMP is not a competitor to professional Photoshop users.)

It seems like more and more cross platform tools and toolkits are available. This was once the holy grail, and there were basically NO solutions. Now, a recent slashdot article reveals many ways to develop cross platform applications and gui's.

KDE and Qt are both being ported to Win32 (with GPL license). At some point, expect a flood of KDE applications, including another free KOffice suite, to be available for Windows. Other projects such as The Open CD and GNU Win II only help accellerate the acceptance of not only free, but open source applications by ordinary windows users.

Eventually, users recognize: hey the OS is irrelevant!

In the meantime, Linux on the desktop will have improved a great deal. Or instead, perhaps the recent RelaxOS?

Work is underway to give OpenOffice first a Quartz interface then a full Aqua interface. The current OpenOffice for the Mac depends on X11 and is clearly labeled as a "Developer's Pre-release".

OpenOffice on OS X only exists in it's current form so that the backend code (common to all ports - filters and so forth) can be debugged insofar as the non-GUI parts don't like Darwin. Once the core is solid and clean on Darwin then it will get an interface that is more pleasing. If they had to make a native interface for it before doing anything else, it would take much longer for a solid OS X port. The roadmap is here.

You're larger point may be valid but the OSX port of OpenOffice (as it currently stands) is not a valid example.

Just because you don't know of any legal P2P File Sharing doesn't exist. Here is Open Office v1.2 [magnet],
OMFG! p2p is so advanced, they've got newer versions than openoffice.org!

(We wanted the program eventually to be sold as MacWorks, but early versions were called BSWorks, for Bob & Scott.)

Of course, the most intriguing part is,

Scott Holdaway, Scott Lindsey, and Carl Grice, did rejoin Apple as employees when Gobe failed. They won't tell me what they are up to (even off the record!), but whatever it is, it does not involve the Gobe Productive codebase. Nor, I am reasonably sure, does it involve the ClarisWorks / AppleWorks codebase.

Wow. That's really strange. I always considered powerful scripting languages as a major advantage that Unix/Linux had over Windows.

But you seem to want to script desktop applications - which I suppose is fair enough. Not my cup of tea, but OpenOffice seems to be working on polishing their API.

I must confess, though, that the idea that somebody would really want to script large desktop apps in VB is really foreign to me. I sometimes see users who have done strange, evil things with VB scripts, and it always makes me cringe. Can you give an example of an application for this?

Need bugfixed way faster SW to write Banned Publications (Ploy to stay somewhat close to subject) head over to OpenOffice and get version 1.02 released today. Gave up on submitting stories to /..

Perhaps they are already porting OpenOffice or KOffice

yup

Now, I find it ironic that Linux is more of a threat to people who have helped the free software movement than it is for people who have not.

Well, unless you count the fact that I wrote open source software living off of the savings I earned after working as a contracter for Microsoft for three months.

- Sam

Sent this as a story submission. Guess WizardOfFoo beat me too it, or perhaps it's just because his was shorter. :-) Anyway here goes my review:

So OpenOffice.org released the final beta version of OpenOffice.org 1.0.1 X11 for Mac OS X yesterday at MWSF. I'm surprised to have not read about it on any sites yet. I managed to download it pretty quickly off of one of the mirrors (probably because the downloading frenzy hasn't begun yet). My first impression is that it does appear to be very stable, but it's not quite polished enough to replace Office X for the everyday Mac user.

Yesterday Apple also quietly released a beta version of X11 for Mac OS X which is an optimized version Xfree86's X server that also includes a speedy quartz based window manager. It works much like Orobourosx but much faster thanks to Apple's optimizations. I bring this up because it looks like the new OpenOffice build was unfortunately built before anyone know about Apple's new X11. After installing OpenOffice.org, a nice "Start OpenOffice.org" icon is created in your Applications folder. Double clicking it the first time asks you what program to use as your X11 server. I choose Apple's X11, but after a minute or tool, Console is nice enough to report that soffice.bin has crashed. So no go with a nice double click to start up OOo. I'm sure this will be fixed by the time it is finally released though. Fortunately, I had no problems starting it from within an xterm or adding it to the X11 Applications menu by entering the command "/Applications/OpenOffice.org1.0.1/program/soffice "

On from there it looks to be very stable. The few Word and Excel documents I opened loaded perfectly and printed without a hitch. I didn't have to do anything special to make this happen. Just open and print and done. So the basics are definitely there.

Printing is a little confusing though from a user feedback standpoint though, as it does not go through Print Center. And it prints so fast through CUPS (on a TiBook 667) that I wasn't even sure anything had been printed until I went to the other end of the office to check the printer. Maybe if we are lucky it will use Printer Center in the final release.

My last gripes are that as far as being a Macintosh program it's just not there yet. I don't fault anyone for this as this release based on the X11 version does not attempt to be a full fledged Mac program anyway. No attempt has been made with this version to follow the Aqua Human Interface Guidelines of course. And since it uses X11 instead of Aqua, menu bars are of course within each window instead of in the standard menu bar (as with any X11 program running on Mac OS X). All the shortcut key combinations use Ctrl instead of Cmd. This means that you hit Ctrl+S to save and Ctrl+P to print instead of Cmd+S and Cmd+P respectively. I was also not able to hit some of the key combinations such as Ctrl+F7 to bring up the Thesaurus. These problems should of course be addressed when OpenOffice.org completes their native Aqua port which is currently under development.

All and all it looks like OpenOffice.org has built a very solid application that anyone coming from Unix/Linux should feel very comfortable using and save them from having to fork over cash to Microsoft in order to edit Word documents on a Mac. For people that are used to the beauty and consistency of Macs and Mac apps, they are probably still better off spending the money to purchase Microsoft Office X if they need to work with these documents everyday. But for anyone that doesn't spend much of their time in a word processor, perhaps less than once a week, this is definitely a great alternative to spending $500.

Sent this as a story submission. Guess WizardOfFoo beat me too it, or perhaps it's just because his was shorter. :-) Anyway here goes my review:

So OpenOffice.org released the final beta version of OpenOffice.org 1.0.1 X11 for Mac OS X yesterday at MWSF. I'm surprised to have not read about it on any sites yet. I managed to download it pretty quickly off of one of the mirrors (probably because the downloading frenzy hasn't begun yet). My first impression is that it does appear to be very stable, but it's not quite polished enough to replace Office X for the everyday Mac user.

Yesterday Apple also quietly released a beta version of X11 for Mac OS X which is an optimized version Xfree86's X server that also includes a speedy quartz based window manager. It works much like Orobourosx but much faster thanks to Apple's optimizations. I bring this up because it looks like the new OpenOffice build was unfortunately built before anyone know about Apple's new X11. After installing OpenOffice.org, a nice "Start OpenOffice.org" icon is created in your Applications folder. Double clicking it the first time asks you what program to use as your X11 server. I choose Apple's X11, but after a minute or tool, Console is nice enough to report that soffice.bin has crashed. So no go with a nice double click to start up OOo. I'm sure this will be fixed by the time it is finally released though. Fortunately, I had no problems starting it from within an xterm or adding it to the X11 Applications menu by entering the command "/Applications/OpenOffice.org1.0.1/program/soffice "

On from there it looks to be very stable. The few Word and Excel documents I opened loaded perfectly and printed without a hitch. I didn't have to do anything special to make this happen. Just open and print and done. So the basics are definitely there.

Printing is a little confusing though from a user feedback standpoint though, as it does not go through Print Center. And it prints so fast through CUPS (on a TiBook 667) that I wasn't even sure anything had been printed until I went to the other end of the office to check the printer. Maybe if we are lucky it will use Printer Center in the final release.

My last gripes are that as far as being a Macintosh program it's just not there yet. I don't fault anyone for this as this release based on the X11 version does not attempt to be a full fledged Mac program anyway. No attempt has been made with this version to follow the Aqua Human Interface Guidelines of course. And since it uses X11 instead of Aqua, menu bars are of course within each window instead of in the standard menu bar (as with any X11 program running on Mac OS X). All the shortcut key combinations use Ctrl instead of Cmd. This means that you hit Ctrl+S to save and Ctrl+P to print instead of Cmd+S and Cmd+P respectively. I was also not able to hit some of the key combinations such as Ctrl+F7 to bring up the Thesaurus. These problems should of course be addressed when OpenOffice.org completes their native Aqua port which is currently under development.

All and all it looks like OpenOffice.org has built a very solid application that anyone coming from Unix/Linux should feel very comfortable using and save them from having to fork over cash to Microsoft in order to edit Word documents on a Mac. For people that are used to the beauty and consistency of Macs and Mac apps, they are probably still better off spending the money to purchase Microsoft Office X if they need to work with these documents everyday. But for anyone that doesn't spend much of their time in a word processor, perhaps less than once a week, this is definitely a great alternative to spending $500.

I've been using OOo on Linux for about a year now. Yeah, it's competent, I guess. But it's not good, and it's office compatibility is not all it's cracked up to be.

Look, for instance at their own screenshots. Here the fonts are completely different, causing line breaks to take place in the wrong place, page breaks to do the same, orphaned half paragraphs and assorted shit that I'll have to go through and fix before I can print the bloody thing. Don't ask what happens when I forward the document to a colleague who uses word.

Sure, it's 99% there, but that's not enough. It's another demonstration of the "saving money by pushing my car around town" effect.

Dave

more detailed schedule found here

Still a long way to go, but if they get it aquafied, MS might eventually get hurt. Offcourse, they'll change doc format faster than you can say 'blub'...

Screenshots comparing OpenOffice.org with Office v.X show quite how far it has to go. It simply looks ghastly.

as long as they don't adopt the aqua interface, I doubt that they'll grab any serious marketshare. Mac is all about look & feel. About interface (you know, the lickable one...)

Currently openoffice runs only under X, which is butt-ugly and completely windows oriented. Not exactly what 'switchers' have in mind IMHO.

here is a screenshot that shows the diff between X and aqua (MS Ofifce in background). The price difference not withstanding, MSOffice is hands down the winner here.

So says this page.

"The 1.0 sources build for Quartz (Mac OS X native). OpenOffice.org doesn't work there yet, but the program compiles and links, a large first step towards beginning our Quartz and Aqua tracks. If you're a developer, find out how to build and help us get the Quartz version finished and move onto our Aqua redesign effort! Special thanks to Dan B. and Dan W. for helping to push this along!"

"Here you are, a nice shiny new computer. What do you do with it? Why, plug it in, of course". About the best learning software I've seen (and admittedly I haven't looked recently) was MathBlaster. Better tools and better training for the teachers is what is really necessary to make computers work in schools.

What absolute drivel!. I teach in a school division that has increased the student:computer ratio to about 2:1 over the past two years. MathBlaster and Reader Rabbit are nice cute diversions, but they are rarely used as part of a true educational curriculum. They are toys at best, that allow teachers a few moments to do some marking or other preparation work for which they do not get nearly enough time.

The best educational software I have seen is a combination of OpenOffice and Mozilla. I have heard of Grade 6 students using the presentation software to create stories (illustrated with pictures found online), then going into the grade 1 classroom to present their stories to the younger students using a data projector (after having the stories proofread and checked over by their teacher, of course). I do not think that it is a coincidence that both of these are free (both types) products; they don't have a large team of marketing trolls developing educational support materials so their products can be rammed down the gullet of a starving educational system! These programs are run on a *nix based system, including the use of LTSP to allow access to all terminals in the school in a very cost effective means. Maybe the first step to making computers useful educational tools is to install a linux distro, so that M$ and (it pains me to say) Apple, and all the educational software companies, can't get their claws into the schools

Oh my but I did have the good rant going there, didn't I?

I know that OpenOffice has had problems running with glibc 2.3.1 (see this bug) so I find it interesting that it will be included. I haven't been able to get it to work, but RedHat must have worked around it somehow.

Check out Musicbrainz for an official description, but it's basically a music metadatabase like freedb or cddb.

OpenOffice

I suggest that everyone intrested in alternate office suites check out OpenOffice which is like StarOffice without the fat. I have used MS Office products for the last 8 years almost exclusively and I can honestly say that OpenOffice is ready for the needs 99%+ of MS Office users. I am already using features in OpenOffice like Cross-Referencing and automated indexing that I never figured out in Word (if they exist, which they probably do.)

I started my first real project with it 2 days ago (which is documentation for a program I wrote) and everything is moving quite smoothly.

Overall, it is both Free and highly recommended by me. If you want to ditch office please look at OpenOffice!

To clear up some points people have commented on (based on a very preliminary inspection plus a lot of discussion at the conference):

1. The default save format is still .doc (ie you have to go the extra click to save in XML format)
2. If you pick to click it, the default XML format is MS's own office-document vocabulary, which retains all the formatting, held in attributes. Hairy but processable, and they will be shipping their schema for it so people can reprocess it externally. But this format will (of course) only represent the appearance, not any structure.
3. It will also let you specify your own schema (or an industry standard one) and let you supply a binding of named styles to your element types, so you can edit using what look like styles but actually get represented in the saved file as XML markup. There is some debate as to whether this constitutes "being an XML editor" or just "being a wordprocessor that saves data in XML" (my money is on the latter).
4. It will not support DTDs, so you're stuck with W3C Schemas whether you like them or not*
5. The discussion over a [more?] suitable schema/DTD for handling office documents (wordprocessing, spreadsheet, presentation) continues at the OASIS TC on Open Office XML Formats **

* [Bias note] I think W3C schemas were a big mistake; provision for data content typing and validation, namespaces, and extended grouping could have been achieved by extending DTD syntax; and wimpy programmers who moan about having two syntaxes to handle should get a life - it's not a big deal, the code is free and has been in use for 15 years :-)

** Sun has donated the OpenOffice (aka StarOffice) XML file formats to the public domain. It's worth remembering that {Star|Open}Office has been saving in XML as its native format for some time now, and has a lot more experience at this than MS.

MS is the FIRST Office suite vendor to store documents as XML
or really? besides, microsoft has the OPTION (read: not it's primary, default format)

openoffice has been xml for quite a while now, and I'm sure there are others as well.

oh yeah, why do you have me listed as a foe? hope I'm not raining on your parade.
sorry man, my bad.

your right they dont back open source at ALL

nope not backing it at all
and well your at it do me a favor and call the gnome developers and ask them if sun has thrown any money their way.

If the original idea of splitting MS for good had gone ahead, how many months to an openoffice version for windows?

?

either your post isn't very clear, or you don't read much

For a TV demonstration, try CD Burning.
I installed knoppix on my IBM thinkpad, default install (which may be the only way with knoppix) and plugged in my USB CD/RW drive, it was automatically detected as a SCSI device. Launch CDBakeOven as root (also already installed), drag and drop, and done.

It's as simple as using Roxio/Nero under windows, which means it's come a long way from writing bash scripts for mkisofs and cdrecord.

As it's something that people do regularly, it would be nice to show off that linux can be user friendly for day to day tasks.

Also, OpenOffice.org is quite impressive, intuitive, and visual.

In my (humble) opinion, the programmes included with the knoppix distro are a good general selection for showing off. (:

Open/Star Office to my mind already has a "Java flavor". You can write add-on components and macros in Java, as well as embedding running applets in your documents.

OpenOffice actually includes a specification for extensibility in arbitrary scripting languages (provides someone bothers to write the support). Currently, C,C++, Python, Java and are supported to some degree. No real reason for Perl, Python, Ruby, Common Lisp not to be, if anyone can be bothered.

See UNO UDKon the OpenOffice Site.

do you build apps w/ Office? or use it as a Word Processor, Spreadsheet && presentation software?

outside of scripting and Access (which is mostly a convenience and not a show-stopper) what does M$office do that you need?

95% of M$office users could very easily switch to OO.o -- like Ive directed everyone who used to ask me for Office.

"I would like to take a look at OOo"

Why not try it out yourself?

My experience is, more reliable (less crashes and lost work), and much less annoyances dealing with the IT department to get licenses for the desktop, laptop, etc. The only drawbacks I've encountered is first a much slower startup time, but that is only for the first document, and second it's very close but still not 100% capable of reading and writing MS formats with no formatting mistakes.

MSOffice _more_ productive? On what planet?

Just this week, I had to rush out a large document for a customer. But it needed some final preparations before I could send it off. I opened it, in word2000 (the company standard...), started editing, moving things around, etc, and poof. An error box pops up and bye bye word2000. Restarting word, document not recovered, it just showed a new empty document. Oh great! And this is on win2000, so don't blame it on winme. Anyways, here is the switch ad: So I ditched word2000 and used OpenOffice and finished the document in time without any problems.

Where do all these myths come from that MSOffice is more productive than the other office suites? If it's not MS FUD, then it's got to be inexperience using any of the other office suites out there.

If it's the only ice cream you've ever had, you'll think it's the greatest... even if it's not.

Think of the [...] billions of documents that you would need to convert if you switched away from Windows and Office.

Then why don't you try OpenOffice for your .doc files and Evolution for your 5 years worth of mail?

"an 71 MB XLS workbook"

You seems surprised that "importing" an Excel workbook into Excel went faster and with less problems than importing the same workbook into other programs. Why not import a sxm file into Excel for comparision?

Since Adobe itself is heavily into SVG, it (SVG) is positioned to become the leading display document format. This is, in some ways, ironic, because most people think of SVG as an image format.

Consider:

1. Autotrace will generate PS (PDF's older brother) and SVG (among other things)
2. FOP will generate document output as PS, PDF, and SVG (among other things).
3. Most vector graphics programs for Linux have some SVG support, and Sodipodi uses SVG as its native document format. Open/StarOffice will generate SVG as well.

It's in the developer builds.

Under UNIX based systems where spadmin, the printer administration program, uses ghostscript, ps2pdf, etc. We're working on a new 'create PDF' feature on all the platforms we support, you can find it in the 'developer' builds today.

The full document is Here

There isn't really a good alternative to Visio of the same quality of open office. I believe Visio is the only missing piece for me to switch completely to Linux, because there are a lot of Word docs with embedded Visio diagrams that cannot be correctly rendered by Open Office. I wish Open Office had a Visio replacement. Perhaps the OOo Chart project will grow up to be that missing component.

Another minor quip is that there is no PDF export from Open Office that correctly renders document links and references as PDF links the way Adobe PDFMaker does it. Maybe it will come in some future OOo versions, however it doesn't seem very likely to happen soon. The announced PDF export feature seems to be just another link to printing to PDF via ghostscript.

There are also some attempts related to the KDE project worth evaluating.

• Kivio - for all types of diagrams
• Umbrello - for UML

There isn't really a good alternative to Visio of the same quality of open office. I believe Visio is the only missing piece for me to switch completely to Linux, because there are a lot of Word docs with embedded Visio diagrams that cannot be correctly rendered by Open Office. I wish Open Office had a Visio replacement. Perhaps the OOo Chart project will grow up to be that missing component.

Another minor quip is that there is no PDF export from Open Office that correctly renders document links and references as PDF links the way Adobe PDFMaker does it. Maybe it will come in some future OOo versions, however it doesn't seem very likely to happen soon. The announced PDF export feature seems to be just another link to printing to PDF via ghostscript.

There are also some attempts related to the KDE project worth evaluating.

• Kivio - for all types of diagrams
• Umbrello - for UML