Speaking of MS Office, my BIGGEST gripe has been Microsoft's refusal to port
the entire application suite to the Linux platform. Had they done so, I
would have changed OS by now.
StarOffice and Open Office are two major attempts to wean MS Office users
away from Darth Vader's camp but unfortunately, I haven't been all that
convinced to leave just yet. While both of these may be able to support
Word/Excel files, the one thing that would leave me cold would be their
inability for me to reuse keyboard hotkeys and shortcuts, which are now part
of my staple for more than ten years. The speed at which I can use Word in
particular has been largely due to how used I am with its interface plus its
shortcuts. They really do make things very easy and fast for me.
Stuffs like F5 for Spell, F7 for Thesaurus, F12 for Save As and dozens of
others make short work out of even the most complex documents I might want
to craft and for me at least, these are enormous advantages that I want to
continue with. If these are not possible or if I have unlearn and relearn,
then that's going to be a problem - I just don't have the luxury of time to
embark on another learning curve...
There was once upon a time when some upstart called Lindows promised
something I had been dreaming and wishing for but if I'm correct, they got
sued out of their pants by Darth. With Lindows, I could use MS Office,
CorelDraw and a few other premier title apps and that's a cinch for me and
I'm sure there were many others like me too. So they died. Then came
CorelLINUX, another wonderful solution. But Corel went aground and that was
that too.
So here's my early wish list for Santa - get me an open-source office app
that not only reads MS Office but will port in all the shortcuts et al. This
reminds me of Flock, which is almost a direct imprint of Firefox. Firefox
died on me just a week ago with some of the strangest problems and I got
tired of updating, uninstalling, reinstalling blah blah. So I downloaded
Flock and it's been fairly ok since. The good thing about Flock - being
open-source - is that every bookmark in Firefox is entirely usable (although
the nested sub-folder structures are all screwed up :( ) and all the
extensions and plug-ins for Firefox also works here. Now if only OpenOffice
could do exactly the same thing with Darth's Office......THAT would be
good...
K.
On 22/05/07, Chris Barker <ftog@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> If it doesn't, Moose, try Open Office (openoffice.org). The Mac
> version works beautifully. They are up-to-date with the xml file
> formats as well, which is one reason why O97 might not work much
> longer for you.
>
> Chris
>
> On 22 May 2007, at 00:32, Moose wrote:
>
> > Simple example, I've been using MS Office 97 Business since about '97
> > off an OEM CD I got for a song on the 'Bay. It still does everything I
> > need without a hitch. MS has since revised some of the file
> > formats, but
> > they provide free viewers for the new formats that will also
> > convert to
> > my older formats. What's not to like?
> >
> > Of course, I just knocked on wood that it will work under Vista. :-)
>
>
>
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--
"To sin by silence when we should protest makes cowards of people" - Emily
Cox
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