Alan Pope wrote: > On 15 September 2010 09:10, Mark Harrison <m...@ascentium.co.uk> wrote: > >> 1: I've not used MS Office for about 5 years now, however the one time I >> needed to was in 2007 for a really complex mailmerge, which is one area >> where MSO is still better than OOo :-( >> > I once made the mistake of saying on a LUG mailing list "I have to use > Microsoft office at work" at which point it was pointed out that I > didn't have to work for that company by one of the members of the > list. This is of course true, and for some people it is indeed > possible and desirable to make a career choice based only on whether > they get to use free software all day or not. An example of such a > person would be Bradley Kuhn. Personally that's not a choice I'm going > to make because I'm a pragmatist, and the software I use on a daily > basis is only part of the decision making process. > > Unfortunately OpenOffice.org is incompatible with the systems we use > at work every day. This frustrates me, but that frustration is > tempered with the knowledge that we have hundreds of quite chunky > boxes powering the Enterprise that are all running Linux :D >
I too have to use MS Office 2007 at work. We used to use MS Office 2003 which was quite good, but 2007 is really lousy to use, with a terrible ribbon interface and it seems quite a few bugs. I would much prefer to use OpenOffice.org at work, or other high quality software. A friend of mine recently bought an Apple Mac, which came with MS Office 2008. Compared to the Windows version 2007, the Mac version is fantastic. It has menus, a toolbar and a floating palette like a DTP program. This Mac version of Office is definitely a well-designed program, and something that the Linux community should be looking to emulate. I hope that future software will NOT have stupid ribbon interfaces, but will continue to have sensible menus and palettes that help people to be more productive. Where I work, the switch to Office 2007 has seriously reduced productivity. The only plus side to this is that I have been getting more overtime (and thus more pay). But it really has caused a lot of headaches. I really wish that OpenOffice.org was up to the task of doing what MS Office can do (in relation to what we need to where I work, which does not include mailmerge, but does include a lot of page layouts, complicated financial charts and lots of complicated nested tables). At least I know that the company does use Linux, at least for its file servers, but we have Windows XP on the desktop. I expect they could change everything to either Linux or Mac, but within a large organisation getting everyone retrained is expensive and time-consuming, although they have wasted a lot on changing to Office 2007. But I do believe that for startups and small companies, using OpenOffice is probably the best option for an office suite rather than any MS software (as well as Linux on the desktop instead of Windows). David King -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
