Hi :) Yes, but the 1 program/suite approach is convenient when you have to do something only once a year or even less often and are able to do so with fairly familiar tools, or at least with familiar support (such as this mailing list)
Writer is not a truly amazing DeskTop Publishing program but it is pretty good at all that and for me it beats Publisher and definitely beats Word in producing good quality documents. When you don't need DTP and just want to write a quick letter it's more obvious how to do things and easier to hunt around the menus then the ribbon so it's easier to find new tricks. I keep saying that Gnumeric is 'better than' Calc AND Excel but only in cases where the person clearly needs a specialist program, or just to try it out for a bit. The database people talk about keeping the data separate and using Base to manipulate the data and then passing the result seemlessly along to familiar tools. This makes a lot more sense and keeps the whole thing much more scalable. You can change the type of back-end to suit different needs without having to redesign all the front-end stuff nor the data-manipulation stuff. Office Suites fill a very big niche and LibreOffice is the best fit for that niche (ime), if only more people outside of these mailing lists would realise it. Regards from Tom :) On 22 May 2014 15:37, Virgil Arrington <cuyfa...@hotmail.com> wrote: > > On 5/21/2014 6:50 PM, Tom Davies wrote: > >> Hi :) >> >> Those are specialist tools each for a single purpose. They are mostly >> part of the same eco-system as LibreOffice. LibreOffice is the only one >> that does so many different things and is the only office suite. For >> example Lyx is not a better spreadsheet program. So you are not being >> disloyal or anything like that. Even if any of the other 3 were direct >> competitors it would probably be better for us to know so that we could >> figure out how to compete fairly. >> >> > I hate to say it, but in the realm of individual components, these > programs *are* direct competitors. > > Think about it. The database folks keep talking about other programs being > better than Base. You have often written about Gnumeric being more useful > than Calc. My Atlantis, while not nearly as full featured as Writer, is > much easier to use (precisely because of its feature limitations), as well > as fast and rock solid. Oh, and btw, while Atlantis is written only for > Windows, it behaves very well in Ubuntu with Wine. > > Yes, LO is an office suite, but how often do people actually use the > integrated features of the suite? Once a year, I take an address list > created in Calc and run it through Base, so I can print out labels in > Writer for Christmas cards. Several years ago I did the same thing with > Microsoft Works and it was *much* easier (and I am no fan of M$). Aside > from that, I never import data from one component to the next. I use each > component as a standalone program. The fact that a program is an integrated > office suite means little if, for any one of its given components, there is > a smaller, quicker, easier or more stable alternative. > > So, I ask myself, instead of constantly wrestling with the depth of a > complex office suite, would I be better off using standalone programs like > Gnumeric and Atlantis? > > Virgil > > > > > -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
