Microsoft Office 2007: NICE!

[Dr Mordrid]

Yup....and there is also Oo2's Calc (spreadsheet), Draw (vector/bitmap graphics) and Math (symbolic math) tools.

Heaven

Dr. Mordrid

[Jerry Jones]

The Open Office 2 "Draw" program is quite sophisticated -- with features that resemble those of Corel Draw and... yes... Ulead VideoGraphics Lab's CG Infinity.

You can export from the Open Office 2 "Draw" program to a wide selection of export file formats, including SVG, EMF, WMF, FLASH, EPS, PDF and many bitmap files types.

Great value!

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Brian Ellis]

I tries OOo2 about 12 or 18 months ago, when it was in in late beta. I was underwhelmed, especially as I found it very unstable. With the eulogies in this thread, I thought I'd have another look with v. 2.0.3.

It is now stable. I agree it is excellent value for money

There are, however, a number of negative points. In many ways, the three workhorse modules are little better than Office 2000. Writer will not accept some wpd or docx files or even doc files with some of the more sophisticated stuff. Calc will accept only simple xls formats, Impress will not accept ppt docs with animation or video and some transitions are hairy. Perfect interchangeability is not guaranteed.

It may be academic for most users, but Calc is limited to 64 k rows where Excel 2k7 allows 1 M rows.

What I don't like with Writer is, from a summary look, no synchronised paning of documents as in both WP and Word2k7, an extremely useful editing tool. It opens in separate windows. Above all, no Reveal Codes or Find/Replace tags.

As I said, excellent value for money and general ease-of-use, but with some limitations, especially for such things as committee editing (unless everyone is using OOo2). Even Word97 was unsurpassed for that and WP and OOo2 have some way to go to catch up with Word2k7 for this feature (and I don't often say good things about MS products).

The choice between them is very personal. For those on a tight budget, not doing ultra-sophisticated work, OOo2 is a natural. For those wanting a good, easy-to-use, flexible, word processor at a reasonable cost, WP is my choice and the spreadsheet and presentation softwares are good. For those with much corporate/committee interchange of documents, MS Office is recommended, even though the word processor is not the best. although Excel is unsurpassed. I detest PowerPoint as being the worst presentation software. The biggest problem with MS Office is $$$.

IMNSHO, FWIW

[Sasq]

my office runs on PPT and excel forms.
in terms of the compelxity of whats needed 002 fills the min requirement, we insist all of our customers send data to us in work 97 formats anway.

We will be migrating my whole (small) office over to 002 shortly.

Yes, if you need compelx spreadsheets, or really compex word/presentation documents, the choice becomes harder.

But realistically, for our day to day work, OO2 fits the bill, even if we need to keep a couple of MS office licences around for the really compex things, most of us never need to go there.

[Nowhere]

I wonder...is anyone here aware of the thing that Excel apparently makes errors (while Gnumeric doesn't)?

Some quotes about Gnumeric from Wikipedia:

Other popular spreadsheet programs are limited to 256 columns and 65,536 rows, but Gnumeric can be compiled from source code that allow users to change these limits (as RAM permits).

The Gnumeric developers pride themselves on the accuracy of their software; Gnumeric has established a niche among people using it for statistical analysis and other scientific tasks. For improving the accuracy of Gnumeric the developers are cooperating with the R Project.

[Dr Mordrid]

Yup, Gnumeric is an excellent tool and Excel has accuracy. In our situation, and I'm sure many others running small businesses, we don't need either as our spreadsheets aren't that large or complex. Oo2 fits the bill nicely, and combined with the rest of the package & zero cost it's a freakin' godsend.

Dr. Mordrid

[Nowhere]

OK...but the point the papers make is that Excel isn't as acurrate as, for example, Gnumeric (which is apparently preffered in some circles for some types of calculations)

(and yep, I agree OOo2 is enough for almost everybody...but still, almost everybody, at least here, think that MS Office is a "must" on every computer)

[Dr Mordrid]

They're obviously incorrect

Dr. Mordrid

[Jessterw]

Actually Excel does have some issues when it comes to rounding given certain levels of precision. At least it used to - entirely possible that the errors that occur could have been fixed in the last few versions, but it was enough of a problem before that, at my former employer, we had to write some custom statistics software to handle the sort of applications that Excel was unable to.

The larger problem with Excel is when you start using VBA (which would be a problem in all VBA-enabled Office apps) because of the long-standing errors in the math calculations Visual Basic uses. Most people don't run into them and unless you are required to report to a specific precisions, most people even in scientific areas don't either.

I am unaware of whether similar issues are present in other spreadsheet-like software packages like OO Calc and Gnumeric.

[Jerry Jones]

PC World Magazine's take on the forthcoming Office 2007:

http://tinyurl.com/ezebx

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[GNEP]

Yes, Excel has certain issues (one being precision, although that has improved somewhat since Excel-97). And VBA hasn't really been updated in years - you know you still can't use a blimming scroll wheel in the interface?

HOWEVER, as I think I've said here before, when you're doing large/complex spreadsheets that will be used/viewed on more than one machine, Excel is the only choice. OK, there are better tools for working in more than 2.5 dimensions. Yes, there are better statistical tools. Yep, some things work better for shed loads of data (e.g. a database!). Yes, almost any other program can perform the same calculation quicker... OK, as soon as any information is put in a spreadsheet, any hint of auditability is lost. Aye, if you've got >200 or so unique formulae in a spreadsheet, I can almost guarantee that there will be errors in it. And of course, there are a lot of quirks and bugs in Excel that you have to work around.

BUT: if you want to develop a financial or quantitative model quickly, which stands a chance of being understandable and accessible by others, and probably gives you the right answer, there is no better tool than Excel. And in business quick, (therefore cheap), easy (skills are readily available on the marketplace, therefore cheaper and also more likely than an IT resource to understand the fundamental issues of the business, no offence to IT professionals intended), and probably right (pareto 80/20 hehe) is the way to go.

I've kept eyes on the alternatives for some time, (actually to be fair I first started with Lotus 1-2-3 v1a) but Excel is the clear leader at the moment for anyone that puts their business skills/knowledge first and their tool skills/knowledge second.

Sorry - very badly worded rant, and I really really would like to see the day when I don't have to buy a copy of Excel for my home machines, but I don't see it being very close yet. But then I'm probably in the minority given that my job is playing with financial models and data at the moment

[Jerry Jones]

Another interesting office suite called "ThinkFree" is described here:

http://tinyurl.com/kbncn

PC Magazine's take on Apple's iWork '06 suite:

http://tinyurl.com/qljtq

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net