[gobolinux-users] open office versus OO.o

[Sean E. Russell]

On Saturday 15 July 2006 19:14, MJ Ray wrote:
> As I understand it, Microsoft Word doc is little more than a binary
> dump of objects used by Word, so it is really awkward to write.  If

And yet OpenOffice does it, really well.  Not only for Word, but for Excel and 
PowerPoint, and in business these latter two are almost more important than 
the first.

> you just need to send them files which can be loaded into Word, RTF
> works well enough.

Not well enough for business.

>
> > Btw.  I have searched long and hard for a way to be able to read and
> > write Excel sheets in emacs, so you can see how much OO.o would be
> > against all I believe in. :-)
>
> I think there's xsl2csv around and Excel can load csv.  It depends
> what you're tying to get Excel to do.  Play Doom?

This is unacceptable for casual users.  Bloated or not, OpenOffice is the only 
thing that allows me to use Linux on my desktop at work.  I've got enough to 
do without having to dick around with manually converting files back and 
forth.  CSV loses formatting, which -- again -- is unacceptable for any 
non-trivial spreadsheets.

No, I have to agree with Rohan.  If Gobo wants to target more than just hobby 
hackers, OpenOffice must be included on the CD.  If business users aren't a 
high priority for Gobo -- and this may be a valid, reasonable assumption -- 
then OO is not necessary.  I suggest that that is the question that needs to 
be addressed.

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