[ILUG] Disappointment with OpenOffice

[Timothy Murphy]

On Monday 25 October 2004 18:28, John Madden wrote:

> On (25/10/04 13:52), Timothy Murphy didst pronounce:

> > However, I tried editing the .xls file in OpenOffice under Linux,
> > and was really quite disappointed with the result.
> > In fact I didn't trust the program, and so gave up using it.
>
> Your email seems to suggest that this is the fault of the OOo team.
> However, IMO, the blame falls on Microsoft.

I didn't "blame" anyone.
I was simply describing my experience.
I was given an Excel file to edit -
a list of children at a school, together with their dates of birth, etc,
which had to be corrected and brought up-to-date.

I don't normally use Windows at all,.
and had to dig out a copy of MS Office-2000
which I bought at college several years ago for 20 pounds Irish.
I was quite surprised to find it installed without problem on my laptop.

Also, my problems with OpenOffice were not entirely due to the MS format,
since even when starting from the .csv file I still had problems.

I should say I have used gnumeric quite a lot with no problems at all,
and would recommend it as a spreadsheet program over OpenOffice.
I don't know if it accepts .csv files,
and didn't have time in this case to see if it could have been used
to edit the Excel file.


-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland