[clug] OpenOffice

[Hal Ashburner]

On 21/12/2009 3:03 PM, Jessica Fryer wrote:
> I'm one of those office girls who has to be across office productivity
> software and have usually used open office at home (from the days when it
> was Star Office) so I'm happy to give any advice on specific tasks.  My
> guess is that there should be general info available online in tutorials.
>
> My understanding is that Gnumeric is much better than Base so the community
> effort has gone that way - but I have no first hand experience with Gnumeric
> because I haven't felt the need to go to something else.
>
> I've also had some experience of trying to get the Microsoft files to work
> in OO and vice versa and all I can say about that is good luck! Things get
> REALLY weird when I try to send complex documents home to work on!
>    
Gnumeric is an alternative to Calc rather than Base and works much the 
same way as Excel, opens .xls files and so on. It has the advantage of  
functions that calculate correctly (ooh novelty) which is particularly 
noticeable if you happen to be doing any statistical work. The Gnumeric 
team shares code with the R project to achieve this. Gnumeric is a thing 
of beauty and a joy forever and vastly superior to everything else but I 
would say that, so add salt to taste. ;)
I think Glom is the gnome-ish project in approximately the same space as 
Base but I've not used either so I haven't got anything much useful to add.

Hal