I am not a "windows consultant", whatever that might mean.... prophecies of doom and gloom about this "kludgy piece of crap" become true...
It means that part of your income is derived from selling people on the Windoze monopoly. I'm not sure what kind of income you get off some $20 program, but it's all the more surprising that you would advocate an upsell to Vista. If your software resembles your comments, it too is a kludgy piece of crap dependent on specific versions of Windoze.
Vista will be Microsoft's best seller ever. You wait and see.
I don't have to wait - the Vista upsell has already generated record interest in my desktop Linux class. As the bad reviews continue to pour out, Vista is going to sell the competition like no Windoze before.
Woot - they did not get that big on low margins now did they? I hope you buy a dozen of them. The $600 price is about $200 more than I paid on the last computer I bought and built myself. But hey, a guy like the Bungi can afford to pay more for less.
On second thought - don't buy a dozen. You will pass the cost on to someone I might have to do business with.
This guy found an E520 (the Intel core 2 with 1G RAM) with a smaller hard drive and Windoze that was $240 cheaper. That difference should get a lot of hard drive these days, so you are paying the Windoze tax and then some as usual for Dell.
Something makes me think they just want to avoid the Windoze refund and sucker a lot of people at the same time. Boooo.
um...that isn't the same computer at all, the one in the article had a dual amd64 3800 and that one you linked to had a celeron/pentium 4/pentium d...very different computers.
ojustgiveitup, a nice name but no I won't.
The visible differences between the open source E520 on the left side of the "open source" page and the E520 on right hand side of the Windoze bargain page are:
The "open source" has a 250 GB hard drive, the Windoze a 160.
The Windoze version says it comes with a 16x DVD, no such thing is specified for the "open source" version, which may make the FreeDOS install difficult.
Those differences could hardly come up to $230, so you are paying the Windoze tax and then some for the illusion of avoiding it. Same box, same stuff in it, the one with Windoze costs less. What a dissapointment.
If I could not find a cheaper Intel or AMD system or just had to buy the Dell, I'd get the one with Windoze and try to return it... that's probably what this is designed to thwart... and use the difference to buy a nice LCD. Given the apparent dishonesty, Dell is going to be the last place I look.
It will probably work about as well as this picture from the zune site. Ghostly, for sure, but right in line with other dissapearing data formats. It worked OK until Word 2025 came out and required an upsell.
But the version of OSX that was available 6 years ago was a lot worse than the current one. Apple has made a lot of improvements over the past 6 years.
Who said that Vista was as good as OSX was six years ago? Transparency is not a stubsitute for system usability or stability. They have yet to catch up to the decades old Unix user management, filesystems and networking.
This supposed expert's head is filled with contradictions.
ODF has simply not been designed with the goal of being able to represent all the information possible in an MS Office document; this makes it poorer for archiving but paradoxically may make it better for level-playing-field, inter-organization document interchange.
That after saying that OOXML implementers do not need to follow all 6,000 pages of specs. If we accept his logic, OOXML will not be able to represent all the information possible in a M$ Office document. We, of course, should reject his logic because it's silly to think that M$ has anything that any normal typesetter could not represent.
That's double think and it's bad but what follows is even more amazing.
[it (original was a typo, "if", which makes me think he uses Word more than he lets on)] offends me a little to see the ISO process get slung with this kind of mud. I suspect that many technical reviewers for National Bodies will take a dim view of vague or stupid claims.
Is he really suggesting that the torrent of paid edits that's about to hit the Wiki is going to come from unpaid experts? Where were they before the M$ money came out? Yeah, right, that's what I thought... they were writing the articles full of "FUD" to begin with. That or just ignoring it all and voting as they see fit. It's not like a real expert on a National Body wold be swayed by a Wiki Article, well not since M$ started paying to spam it.
The killer feature, to me, is the unlimited download subscription service. I've been having a lot of fun with that.
That's about the only positive thing anyone ever says about any M$ player. The problem is that most of them don't want it enough to pay for it and hate the software so much that they don't use it even when they have been forced to pay for it by their school. I'm glad you are happy with it, but you would have been happier with just about any other player when you realize how bad the battery life is.
According to CNET, there's a bunch of entries in the 30GB category.
But how many people who don't buy an iPod are going to spend more than $200 on something that M$ just crapped on? Their entry into the market by screwing every one who bought into "Plays for Sure" Digital Restrictions, has sent a clear signal to everyone. It's too bad all of those makers played the pawn for M$ and agreed not to support OGG for the M$ approval. Can't sell to Linux heads, Mac people or Windoze Slaves, they now have zero market.
Just the same, it's hard to believe that Zune got 10% of the market, unless they include a bunch of boxes that will sit on shelves. Zune is going to repeat the Dell Jukebox story. No one is going to buy them despite promotion that includes giving them away until they withdraw from the market with their tail between their legs.
I'd like to see the makers take their revenge and offer free software friendly players. It's not like M$ can treat them any worse.
Yes, I'd rather Google not do to books what iPod did to music. They came late to the party, added DRM and several layers of obfuscation, and gave the entrenched monopolies of the past a toe-hold in the digital future. The net result is that the nicest of hardware is also the some of the least friendly to free software and it's users. Others have been publishing ebooks without the restrictions. I'm not going to be happy if the only way to get newer books is going to boil down to a choice between ever more expensive pulp and DRM. That is the choice the non free publishers want to give you: surrender your freedom or be banished from your own culture.
I'll be very sad if Google has joined the wrong side of the American publishers war against libraries. The most distressing sign is that they will point to Ammazon before they point to Project Gutenburg and other free sources. They have been very good about pointing to free software, creative commons and other free culture. Books and academic publishing is just as important and freedom needs powerful friends like Google.
The fact that it's free means it will cost less, but it doesn't mean it will work better. Do you understand this? And you "showed" absolutely anything other than your preference for OO Calc, however, that is your opinion and personal preference.
Wow Bungi, you are something dense. I'm not sure if it's because you are stupid or just a fanboy. Let me summarize what I've told you.
I've used Excel for years but that it's easier to do things in Open Office Calc.
I listed several ways the menu system was easier to get to and required fewer clicks
I listed several formatting details which looked better and said why.
That's three ways that Open Office Calc is better, only one of which is related to personal taste though most people would share that taste because I never see anyone present the defaults from Excel. I also compared Excel to another program, gnumeric, which I'm almost equally familiar with but like better. You can't name one useful feature Excel has that any other spreadsheet does not. Yet still you try to pin me into some kind of free software Zealot hole, while declaring M$ Excel the best spreadsheet.
That has nothing to do with "better" or "superior", and it is a choice based on cost, or perhaps simple predisposition or ideological preference (in your case). It is not a choice made on the basis of functionality or return on investment. Your problem is that your flawed ideology is more important than simple, basic functionality.
The fact that it's free means that it will cost less and work better, as I showed. Can you tell me, what "feature" Open Office is missing, other than a $400 price tag?
Don't you have some $19.95 buggy whips or something to be selling to the clueless?
Wow, I missed this one a few days back. It looks like the entire contents of your automobile, including your laptop, is fair game at the US Canada border.
Once again, leave your data at home and get to it though password protected and encrypted network access.
Would the readily-apparent evidence suffice to justify confiscating and reading someone's diary?
The airport case in question, you are screwed. The courts reasoned that searches at airports are routine, so just about anything goes. They should be ashamed of themselves. Until they come to their senses, I suggest you keep your diary, paper or electronic at home. The electronic one is easier to access, but you better move it around by ground transport.
Regardless of how one feels about the right to individual privacy in the workplace, surely we can all agree that the government conducting warrantless searches on a business' property without the consent of the business and without cause is a bad thing, right?
Yes, that's bad. Is it legal? Part of the fourth amendment warrent requirement was to keep the government from being used as a tool against your business competitors. The spirit of it is that reasonable suspicion will stand up to public scrutiny and must be presented before the public and passed by an impartial judge before police can turn your home or business upside down.
Whatever the case may be, the best idea is to protect yourself from everyone by doing the actual computing and data storage at home. With Linux, this is as trivial as ssh - X username@my_homebox_ip. This has the additional benefit of keeping all your private email in one archive without futher effort. Kontact works well though the crappy 60 kB/s upload most ISPs allow. I'd surf that way too, but I own my laptop, not my employer, and anyone without a warrent wanting to search it can kiss my ass.
So in other words, OpenOffice's chart making is no better than Excel's.
No. A quick trial of OO Calc shows that it's much better, even though I don't know how to use it. It's been a while since I've done anything with OO Calc because I like gnumeric better. Rather than claim OO is better I just left them as both nebulously annoying because Calc tries to hard to be Excel. A quick trial shows how Calc 2 is better than the recent but not 2007 copy of Office I tried yesterday:
It was much easier to make. The dialogs are easier even though I did not know them.
The default fonts are well scaled for the graph.
The number formating was sane, 0 instead of 0.00E00 for example.
It's much easier to grab the part of the graph you want to modify when you try. Getting your mouse to grab the X or Y axis takes a microsurgeon's hands in Excel. Right clicking anything gives you a menu with Chart Area, Axis and Grid each with submenus such as X Axis and Y Axis for Axis.
I would not be ashamed to give an OO graph to someone informally and could, with a little effort, make it into something that could be published.
Just the same, if the two were identical and I had no other choice, I'd use Calc. Can you tell me why you would spend $400 for something you could have for free, especially when the free thing is actually easier to use?
The biggest fallacy in the book is thinking that gold has any intrinsic value outside of its industrial uses. The price of gold is just as arbitrary as the 'price' of a dollar. Having no intrinsic value means that extrinsic value -- price -- is its only value.
The problem that Mr. Greenspan noted forty years ago is that you are not free to chose your store of value. When people are free to chose, government has no choice but to follow. Fiat currency only has value because you are not free to chose another.
What does the majority of the market want? Observing my fellow college students, they want a shiny, nice to hold DAP that does just one thing: play music.
That and they want it to be easy. They want it to plug into their computer, get exactly what the user wants from the user's well organized collection and then play it randomly, all without fuss. M$, because it's more concerned with DRM and marketshare, does not get it right either. The things they do to thwart free software and lockdown content make life hard. That and crappy software to start.
M$'s real problem with iPod is how to unseat them with a cheap competitor without encouraging free software use. That's why cheap players don't do ogg and they promote the inferior MTP over UMS. Between that and DRM demands, they can't win. What they have ended up with is Zune, with it's distinguishing characteristic being crippled wireless.
The hardware to make things easy exists and is cheap. They work just fine under Amarok and would be cheaper and eaiser still if it were not from all the anti-competitive activity of a few nasty companies.
You really have no idea whatsoever what "groupware" is (I assume you mean "enterprise collabrolation" here, because otherwise even OE is great). Or for that matter how Outlook is used. Do you?
Well, happy Twitter fan, I'm not sure what groupware is because I've never worked in a business that really used it. The pieces were mostly scattered, constantly replaced and never worked together well. KDE is now offering most of what a company wants in a way that works. Free software is like that.
That Uncle Sam returning that nice interest free loan you have given them by over witholding is "Giving you money back". Biggest fallacy in the book...
The biggest fallacy in the book is that fiat currency has an intrinsic value. Look up Alan Greenspan's little essay on the gold standard, and realize that you are not free without a secure store of value. The withholdings are a time consuming but insignificant part of the bigger scam.
Sure, but it's easier to get the forms with a browser and KPDF than it is to drive to the library. Also, it's easier to add the stuff up with gnumeric than it is to use a calculator. After that, the check's in the mail.
Of course, all of it's a stupid curse. Uncle Sam knows exactly what you made and has the resources to present it to you over the web. Taxes should be as easy as going to a web site and choosing between "I agree" and "I have something else to report" then doing it.
I'm going to continue to use paper as long as Uncle Sam does, mostly because the programs made to do taxes have proved themselves less than trustworthy.
It's funny, but just this afternoon I tried to help someone make a simple graph with Excel and can say most of the things you did about Open Office. The graph defaults sucked and while I remembered every one of the tweaks to fix it, it was irksome to have to. Calc is not that much better but Gnumeric is. It requires substantially less modification to have something that looks good. The long and short of it is that everything takes time to learn, you might as well learn the one that's free and improving.
As much as anyone cringes, Excel is the best tool for accumulating, plotting, and exporting (to Word, e.g.) data and charts. Yes there are better tools, but they are not as easy to use and they are not as well integrated with the other tools of the trade.
Eh, no Excel sucks. Even on Windoze, stuff like Sigmaplot should be used to graph anything you want to share with anyone else. I've been using gnumeric for all of my quick sheets and had forgotten just how bad Excel is for graphing. The defaults for scatter plots, for example, stink out loud. From the crummy grey background to the crazy out of proportion fonts and bizare 0.00E00 formating, inconsistent grid lines and ugly colors, everything has to be tweaked to be presentable. I used to think Excel worked and even liked it, but that was just because I was used to doing all the tweaks. Sigmaplot, Gnumeric, Grace and even gnuplot do a better job by default and everything but gnuplot is dead simple to modify to suit any quirks you might have. Calc is not as handy as Gnumeric, but it's not as sucky as Excel.
Putting the result into anything but Word is also dead simple. Gnumeric pastes into Kword without a hitch, and just about everything makes images (png or svg) that can be put into any document.
In short, the only "tool of the trade" that does not play nice is M$ Office, which should be replaced.
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I am not a "windows consultant", whatever that might mean. ... prophecies of doom and gloom about this "kludgy piece of crap" become true ...
It means that part of your income is derived from selling people on the Windoze monopoly. I'm not sure what kind of income you get off some $20 program, but it's all the more surprising that you would advocate an upsell to Vista. If your software resembles your comments, it too is a kludgy piece of crap dependent on specific versions of Windoze.
Vista will be Microsoft's best seller ever. You wait and see.
I don't have to wait - the Vista upsell has already generated record interest in my desktop Linux class. As the bad reviews continue to pour out, Vista is going to sell the competition like no Windoze before.
Woot - they did not get that big on low margins now did they? I hope you buy a dozen of them. The $600 price is about $200 more than I paid on the last computer I bought and built myself. But hey, a guy like the Bungi can afford to pay more for less.
On second thought - don't buy a dozen. You will pass the cost on to someone I might have to do business with.
It looks like they have an almost identical E520 for $240 less - if you vote for M$. No thanks, Michael Dell, if I'm going to pay extra to avoid giving my money to M$, I'll give my money to someone who's not giving it to M$.
This guy found an E520 (the Intel core 2 with 1G RAM) with a smaller hard drive and Windoze that was $240 cheaper. That difference should get a lot of hard drive these days, so you are paying the Windoze tax and then some as usual for Dell.
Something makes me think they just want to avoid the Windoze refund and sucker a lot of people at the same time. Boooo.
um...that isn't the same computer at all, the one in the article had a dual amd64 3800 and that one you linked to had a celeron/pentium 4/pentium d ...very different computers.
ojustgiveitup, a nice name but no I won't.
The visible differences between the open source E520 on the left side of the "open source" page and the E520 on right hand side of the Windoze bargain page are:
Those differences could hardly come up to $230, so you are paying the Windoze tax and then some for the illusion of avoiding it. Same box, same stuff in it, the one with Windoze costs less. What a dissapointment.
If I could not find a cheaper Intel or AMD system or just had to buy the Dell, I'd get the one with Windoze and try to return it ... that's probably what this is designed to thwart ... and use the difference to buy a nice LCD. Given the apparent dishonesty, Dell is going to be the last place I look.
DELL IS TERMINAL.
It will probably work about as well as this picture from the zune site. Ghostly, for sure, but right in line with other dissapearing data formats. It worked OK until Word 2025 came out and required an upsell.
But the version of OSX that was available 6 years ago was a lot worse than the current one. Apple has made a lot of improvements over the past 6 years.
Who said that Vista was as good as OSX was six years ago? Transparency is not a stubsitute for system usability or stability. They have yet to catch up to the decades old Unix user management, filesystems and networking.
This supposed expert's head is filled with contradictions.
That after saying that OOXML implementers do not need to follow all 6,000 pages of specs. If we accept his logic, OOXML will not be able to represent all the information possible in a M$ Office document. We, of course, should reject his logic because it's silly to think that M$ has anything that any normal typesetter could not represent.
That's double think and it's bad but what follows is even more amazing.
Is he really suggesting that the torrent of paid edits that's about to hit the Wiki is going to come from unpaid experts? Where were they before the M$ money came out? Yeah, right, that's what I thought ... they were writing the articles full of "FUD" to begin with. That or just ignoring it all and voting as they see fit. It's not like a real expert on a National Body wold be swayed by a Wiki Article, well not since M$ started paying to spam it.
The killer feature, to me, is the unlimited download subscription service. I've been having a lot of fun with that.
That's about the only positive thing anyone ever says about any M$ player. The problem is that most of them don't want it enough to pay for it and hate the software so much that they don't use it even when they have been forced to pay for it by their school. I'm glad you are happy with it, but you would have been happier with just about any other player when you realize how bad the battery life is.
According to CNET, there's a bunch of entries in the 30GB category.
But how many people who don't buy an iPod are going to spend more than $200 on something that M$ just crapped on? Their entry into the market by screwing every one who bought into "Plays for Sure" Digital Restrictions, has sent a clear signal to everyone. It's too bad all of those makers played the pawn for M$ and agreed not to support OGG for the M$ approval. Can't sell to Linux heads, Mac people or Windoze Slaves, they now have zero market.
Just the same, it's hard to believe that Zune got 10% of the market, unless they include a bunch of boxes that will sit on shelves. Zune is going to repeat the Dell Jukebox story. No one is going to buy them despite promotion that includes giving them away until they withdraw from the market with their tail between their legs.
I'd like to see the makers take their revenge and offer free software friendly players. It's not like M$ can treat them any worse.
Yes, I'd rather Google not do to books what iPod did to music. They came late to the party, added DRM and several layers of obfuscation, and gave the entrenched monopolies of the past a toe-hold in the digital future. The net result is that the nicest of hardware is also the some of the least friendly to free software and it's users. Others have been publishing ebooks without the restrictions. I'm not going to be happy if the only way to get newer books is going to boil down to a choice between ever more expensive pulp and DRM. That is the choice the non free publishers want to give you: surrender your freedom or be banished from your own culture.
I'll be very sad if Google has joined the wrong side of the American publishers war against libraries. The most distressing sign is that they will point to Ammazon before they point to Project Gutenburg and other free sources. They have been very good about pointing to free software, creative commons and other free culture. Books and academic publishing is just as important and freedom needs powerful friends like Google.
The fact that it's free means it will cost less, but it doesn't mean it will work better. Do you understand this? And you "showed" absolutely anything other than your preference for OO Calc, however, that is your opinion and personal preference.
Wow Bungi, you are something dense. I'm not sure if it's because you are stupid or just a fanboy. Let me summarize what I've told you.
That's three ways that Open Office Calc is better, only one of which is related to personal taste though most people would share that taste because I never see anyone present the defaults from Excel. I also compared Excel to another program, gnumeric, which I'm almost equally familiar with but like better. You can't name one useful feature Excel has that any other spreadsheet does not. Yet still you try to pin me into some kind of free software Zealot hole, while declaring M$ Excel the best spreadsheet.
That has nothing to do with "better" or "superior", and it is a choice based on cost, or perhaps simple predisposition or ideological preference (in your case). It is not a choice made on the basis of functionality or return on investment. Your problem is that your flawed ideology is more important than simple, basic functionality.
The fact that it's free means that it will cost less and work better, as I showed. Can you tell me, what "feature" Open Office is missing, other than a $400 price tag?
Don't you have some $19.95 buggy whips or something to be selling to the clueless?
Wow, I missed this one a few days back. It looks like the entire contents of your automobile, including your laptop, is fair game at the US Canada border.
Once again, leave your data at home and get to it though password protected and encrypted network access.
Would the readily-apparent evidence suffice to justify confiscating and reading someone's diary?
The airport case in question, you are screwed. The courts reasoned that searches at airports are routine, so just about anything goes. They should be ashamed of themselves. Until they come to their senses, I suggest you keep your diary, paper or electronic at home. The electronic one is easier to access, but you better move it around by ground transport.
Regardless of how one feels about the right to individual privacy in the workplace, surely we can all agree that the government conducting warrantless searches on a business' property without the consent of the business and without cause is a bad thing, right?
Yes, that's bad. Is it legal? Part of the fourth amendment warrent requirement was to keep the government from being used as a tool against your business competitors. The spirit of it is that reasonable suspicion will stand up to public scrutiny and must be presented before the public and passed by an impartial judge before police can turn your home or business upside down.
Whatever the case may be, the best idea is to protect yourself from everyone by doing the actual computing and data storage at home. With Linux, this is as trivial as ssh - X username@my_homebox_ip. This has the additional benefit of keeping all your private email in one archive without futher effort. Kontact works well though the crappy 60 kB/s upload most ISPs allow. I'd surf that way too, but I own my laptop, not my employer, and anyone without a warrent wanting to search it can kiss my ass.
My biggest fan asks me:
So in other words, OpenOffice's chart making is no better than Excel's.
No. A quick trial of OO Calc shows that it's much better, even though I don't know how to use it. It's been a while since I've done anything with OO Calc because I like gnumeric better. Rather than claim OO is better I just left them as both nebulously annoying because Calc tries to hard to be Excel. A quick trial shows how Calc 2 is better than the recent but not 2007 copy of Office I tried yesterday:
I would not be ashamed to give an OO graph to someone informally and could, with a little effort, make it into something that could be published.
Just the same, if the two were identical and I had no other choice, I'd use Calc. Can you tell me why you would spend $400 for something you could have for free, especially when the free thing is actually easier to use?
The biggest fallacy in the book is thinking that gold has any intrinsic value outside of its industrial uses. The price of gold is just as arbitrary as the 'price' of a dollar. Having no intrinsic value means that extrinsic value -- price -- is its only value.
The problem that Mr. Greenspan noted forty years ago is that you are not free to chose your store of value. When people are free to chose, government has no choice but to follow. Fiat currency only has value because you are not free to chose another.
What does the majority of the market want? Observing my fellow college students, they want a shiny, nice to hold DAP that does just one thing: play music.
That and they want it to be easy. They want it to plug into their computer, get exactly what the user wants from the user's well organized collection and then play it randomly, all without fuss. M$, because it's more concerned with DRM and marketshare, does not get it right either. The things they do to thwart free software and lockdown content make life hard. That and crappy software to start.
M$'s real problem with iPod is how to unseat them with a cheap competitor without encouraging free software use. That's why cheap players don't do ogg and they promote the inferior MTP over UMS. Between that and DRM demands, they can't win. What they have ended up with is Zune, with it's distinguishing characteristic being crippled wireless.
The hardware to make things easy exists and is cheap. They work just fine under Amarok and would be cheaper and eaiser still if it were not from all the anti-competitive activity of a few nasty companies.
You really have no idea whatsoever what "groupware" is (I assume you mean "enterprise collabrolation" here, because otherwise even OE is great). Or for that matter how Outlook is used. Do you?
Well, happy Twitter fan, I'm not sure what groupware is because I've never worked in a business that really used it. The pieces were mostly scattered, constantly replaced and never worked together well. KDE is now offering most of what a company wants in a way that works. Free software is like that.
That Uncle Sam returning that nice interest free loan you have given them by over witholding is "Giving you money back". Biggest fallacy in the book ...
The biggest fallacy in the book is that fiat currency has an intrinsic value. Look up Alan Greenspan's little essay on the gold standard, and realize that you are not free without a secure store of value. The withholdings are a time consuming but insignificant part of the bigger scam.
It's still pen and paper for me
Sure, but it's easier to get the forms with a browser and KPDF than it is to drive to the library. Also, it's easier to add the stuff up with gnumeric than it is to use a calculator. After that, the check's in the mail.
Of course, all of it's a stupid curse. Uncle Sam knows exactly what you made and has the resources to present it to you over the web. Taxes should be as easy as going to a web site and choosing between "I agree" and "I have something else to report" then doing it.
I'm going to continue to use paper as long as Uncle Sam does, mostly because the programs made to do taxes have proved themselves less than trustworthy.
It's funny, but just this afternoon I tried to help someone make a simple graph with Excel and can say most of the things you did about Open Office. The graph defaults sucked and while I remembered every one of the tweaks to fix it, it was irksome to have to. Calc is not that much better but Gnumeric is. It requires substantially less modification to have something that looks good. The long and short of it is that everything takes time to learn, you might as well learn the one that's free and improving.
As much as anyone cringes, Excel is the best tool for accumulating, plotting, and exporting (to Word, e.g.) data and charts. Yes there are better tools, but they are not as easy to use and they are not as well integrated with the other tools of the trade.
Eh, no Excel sucks. Even on Windoze, stuff like Sigmaplot should be used to graph anything you want to share with anyone else. I've been using gnumeric for all of my quick sheets and had forgotten just how bad Excel is for graphing. The defaults for scatter plots, for example, stink out loud. From the crummy grey background to the crazy out of proportion fonts and bizare 0.00E00 formating, inconsistent grid lines and ugly colors, everything has to be tweaked to be presentable. I used to think Excel worked and even liked it, but that was just because I was used to doing all the tweaks. Sigmaplot, Gnumeric, Grace and even gnuplot do a better job by default and everything but gnuplot is dead simple to modify to suit any quirks you might have. Calc is not as handy as Gnumeric, but it's not as sucky as Excel.
Putting the result into anything but Word is also dead simple. Gnumeric pastes into Kword without a hitch, and just about everything makes images (png or svg) that can be put into any document.
In short, the only "tool of the trade" that does not play nice is M$ Office, which should be replaced.