Re: VDQ M$

Beartooth wrote:

>In the course of discussion with an unenlightened good friend, I'm looking
>to refute the contention that linux can never hope to amount to anything
>because of M$ market domination particularly with office apps; he says you
>have to be able to copy & past between Excel and Word, etc.
>
Well, you can.

>
>
>I rarely use any word processor, and then only for the most elementary
>purposes; I've never had to use any M$ office app whatever, nor ever will,
>now.
>
>I know Abiword can do a lot of things I've never even needed to know about
>-- like what a spreadsheet is, or a power point, let alone a slide show
>(if there's now a computer thing called that). And I assume that at least
>one reason Abiword opens so much faster than OOo is that it doesn't have
>to prepare itself for all sorts of things too fierce to mention.
>
>The friend however, poor soul, is condemned to such work for a few more
>years. Otoh, he runs MS mainly just because it's not Apple, which he
>detests even more. He might be interested in trying linux if I can find
>knowledgeable assurance that he can do what he must with it.
>
What does he need to do?
He sounds like a newby in an advanced state of rawness, even with regard
to Winduhs.
You can do /just about anything/ with free/open source.
There's a learning curve, but once past that, you never go back.

I go along with another poster with regard to Abiword and Gnumeric being
all a small business requires.
I think Open Office has taken the wrong direction in attempting to
provide an equivalent to Microsoft Office.
Why attempt to compete with a case of bloat brought on by the need to
create a 'one-size-fits-all' mentality, and loose all that personalised
configurability advantage and data space?

Use those as your base apps, then slowly start becoming familiar only
with the apps you need after that to answer to /your/ requirements.
I've learnt every nuance of Xfig and QCad, for example, because I need
them, but if I didn't, I wouldn't have them on my system.
Regards,

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Received on Fri Jun 9 14:00:12 2006