No argument that MS wants to kill COM in favor of .NET, and once they do that, they will churn the market again as soon as they can manage it - it's what they do. They've been sufficiently ineffective at it that the result is hardly "writing software over and over" but it is very annoying to watch working things break over time. These annoyances combined with the general merit of Linux distributions of late led me to make the switch. In short, you are preaching to the choir :)
Let's be honest a third time :) Word is trash. Open Office Calc is really pretty good. Since you (wisely) distrust Microsoft, I find it strange that you are content to throw around the "Office is standard" mantra. True or not, there are alternatives (in the case of LaTeX, a paradigm shift from fussing with formatting to thinking about structure) and ways to have data in simple formats that will still be around long after Microsoft starts to kill off .NET's successor. You can set yourself up for more pain, or design for the minimum amount of Microsoft involvement that will solve your problems. There are some good options in this thread, or you can polish up your .NET compiler, while it still has time ;) Good luck! Bill ________________________________________ From: pharo-project-boun...@lists.gforge.inria.fr [pharo-project-boun...@lists.gforge.inria.fr] On Behalf Of Friedrich Dominicus [fr...@q-software-solutions.de] Sent: Wednesday, September 01, 2010 3:09 AM To: Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] What are you using to write reports? "Schwab,Wilhelm K" <bsch...@anest.ufl.edu> writes: > If you must push into Excel (it's far easier to let it import from > text), you will be using Windows, and therefore could perhaps create > something with VBA. I'm usin VBA currently, the problem with it is that MS want to get away from it. And so I should probably long for something with .NET in it's name. But well if MS wants to get rid of it, one day we may stay in the rains as e.g the VB6 people have been treated. Sure currently MS is all just .NET (in whatever) shadow. But nobody knows how long, and let's be honest who likes to write the same software over and over and over again just because the development tools and/or languages were deprecated. And let's be honest a second time. MS-Office is the Standard by any means. Yes there is LaTex and yes there is OpenOffice but sorry if anyone talks about Office Software they mean MS-Office. And we have to admit that the MS-Office tools are extremly useful, especially Excel is quite good at that spreadsheets can do ;-) > > OpenOffice has some type of (Java??) scripting interface. That might > be a little better and perhaps even friendlier than MS' offerings and > might then be induced to create .xls files. Well VBA and Excel is well working, I doubt that OpenOffice Basic can compete with it. Regards Friedrich -- Q-Software Solutions GmbH; Sitz: Bruchsal; Registergericht: Mannheim Registriernummer: HRB232138; Geschaeftsfuehrer: Friedrich Dominicus _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project _______________________________________________ Pharo-project mailing list Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pharo-project
