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Alternatives to Microsoft Office


Shindo_Hikaru

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It is an Outlook replacement that exists primarily in the unix world. The link I posted is to a win32 port of it.

Outlook is commonly the main reason why people stay with MS Office. Its calendaring and workgroup features/integration are still somewhat hard to replace.

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It is an Outlook replacement that exists primarily in the unix world. The link I posted is to a win32 port of it.

Outlook is commonly the main reason why people stay with MS Office. Its calendaring and workgroup features/integration are still somewhat hard to replace.

Great link TAiN!! Definately going to try this. As a T-Bird user, the calender function will be a nice addition with getting everything else included. How well does this setup on a home network with having all user folders on a file server?

I'd seen Evolution with some of the Linux distro's I've been checking, but never really got involved with it.

Thanks Again

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If all you want is calendaring with your Tbird you can use Sunbird. There is also an extension version to add it into Tbird.

Evolution's network support is fine for me so far but I haven't tested extensively in a workgroup environment. Mostly just checking it out for now.

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If all you want is calendaring with your Tbird you can use Sunbird. There is also an extension version to add it into Tbird.

Evolution's network support is fine for me so far but I haven't tested extensively in a workgroup environment. Mostly just checking it out for now.

TAin, Thanks man. Sunbird looks promising. :thumbup Will also be trying the Evolution package too.

Thanks Again

jd

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gMail + gCal + gSpreadsheet + .... :D

gMail... Sure, if you like it (I didn't like it whatsoever, but why not). That's if you want webmail that's read/analyzed/data-mined/hosted/logged by another company (and never truly deleted)... Still one of their best [few] products.

gCal? No thanks. Sync'ing is a joke. Sucks all around IMHO. Again, it's a hosted app that requires an internet connection and all.

gSpreadsheet? Took me an hour to stop laughing at that and finally picking myself off the floor. Saying notepad is a match for Word would be far more accurate than saying this is a Excel equivalent. It's a TOTAL JOKE. Pathetic. Sucks. Ridiculous. It has 1% of Excel's features at most. No charts? No pivot tables? No scripting (like VBA) nor any VSTO equivalents. Functions beyond the basics aren't there. Nothing like v/h lookup. Formatting sucks. Sorting is very basic. No conditionnal formating. Format support sucks. No OLE-like functions (to get data from other sources like DBs - something I use all the time). Low dimension limits.

It relies on a ridiculous amount of javascript (like google maps), and it's only going to get worse as they add features. On a slower PC (or one that's actually doing something else), it gets sluggish pretty quickly. And at that size, it must really suck over dialup (it's like if microsoft made you download MS office's ISO each time you wanted to use it). Bandwidth waste. And being javascript, it sometimes crashes (far more often than any real spreadsheet). And it lags badly.

Hell, claris works in the WFW / OS/2 era was MUCH more powerful & far better. Heck, I'd go back to lotus 123 for dos over that. There are TONS of better spreadsheets than that one (although that's no feat - I've yet to see one that was worse), including free/OSS ones that aren't online/javascript based.

I wish to nominate Google Spreadsheet at the most pathetic, laughable, crippled, underpowered, ridiculous, sucky web app of 2006 (it WOULD win the prize if there was such a constest)

Anyways. OOo and WordPerfect Office (too expensive though) are perhaps the best two alternatives out there. But indeed, there are more (StarOffice, gnome/kde apps, etc). Also, MS Works could be sufficient for a lot of people (although the WGA like stuff could become an issue here too).

Evolution is nice, but it's not quite a match for outlook if you're using Exchange (I truly hate outlook though; stuck with it at work, but using thunderbird at home)

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Google Spreadsheets is the worst unforunately, I only use it because it uses my google login and it is still faster than opening OO Calc. :) However I am really impressed by Zoho Sheet in particular, and I am patiently waiting for Google to release Writely again.

Despite all that I am sure Portable OpenOffice will always be on my hard drive, because I can therefore always have my documents and the files will always be open format and private if need be. What I would really like to see is AbiWord and GNUmeric get a little bit better :)

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If what you need is a kick a$$ wordprocessor, WordPerfect is by far the best.

No styles, use html type codes to format your document and if formatting is screwy, go into reveal codes to fix it.

Don't need to decipher style sheet dependencies.

Edited by saugatak
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If what you need is a kick a$$ wordprocessor, WordPerfect is by far the best.

No styles, use html type codes to format your document and if formatting is screwy, go into reveal codes to fix it.

Don't need to decipher style sheet dependencies.

yeah but the only downside to that is no unicode support :(

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If what you need is a kick a$$ wordprocessor, WordPerfect is by far the best.

No styles, use html type codes to format your document and if formatting is screwy, go into reveal codes to fix it.

Don't need to decipher style sheet dependencies.

yeah but the only downside to that is no unicode support :(

Yes but it still does have support for lots of languages. But if you require unicode, WP is not for you.

Depends on what languages you need and how complicated your documents are. long complicated documents with multiple styles can be a mess in Word or Writer, but very easy to work on and fix in WP.

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