Slashdot Mirror
OpenOffice 2.0 vs. Microsoft Office
Jane Walker writes "Slashdot's own Robin 'Roblimo' Miller compares OpenOffice 2.0 and Microsoft Office in a recent interview with TechTarget and, when asked to identify one of the main obstacles facing widespread adoption, calls for the OSS community to deliver personable, usable training for new OpenOffice and open source software users."
In the corporate world, Excel is more of a platform than a simple spreadsheet these days. I have seen a multi-million dollar company essentially run off of three Excel spreadsheets with a ton of macros. The input data would come from some reports we generated off the database for them, and the finance people would enter them into the spreadsheets and let the macros morph the data into the views the senior management wanted to see.
I rather liked this arrangement because it empowered the users in finance by giving them a tool they could modify on their own, and it let us focus on building reports that made sense to finance without distilling it down to bullet points for senior management. It also meant we weren't in the direct line of fire when management didn't like the numbers they saw.