MS Office alternatives?

[dcraig]

Quote from syswizard:

Well, I checked-in with them....and they are simply overwhelmed by the whole project, despite having an agreement with Microsoft.
Look, Guys....Office is complex. Excel alone is UNBELIEVABLY complex...it possibly is the most complex piece of software ever developed when you consider it's programmability and object model. If you look at history, you'll find a guy named Jonathan Sachs, a gifted programmer with a photographic memory, who on his 5th attempt, created Lotus 1-2-3....the precursor to Excel.
I would say OpenOffice is 2-3 YEARS away from cloning Excel satisfactorily. My estimate is that Excel 2003 edition is a compilation of 100+ man-years of effort.
If someone on this group starts now, and is as talented as Sachs, you'll be dead before you finish the job.

It doesn't have to clone Excel or Word exactly and that is not it's aim, though it does aim to be able to read and write MS office documents.

For most purposes OO will do just fine. The major exception is complex applications in Excel using VB. If you are doing that you need to use MS Office.

Some OO deployments:

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.org_Deployments

 

[giles117]

Quote from dcraig:

It doesn't have to clone Excel or Word exactly and that is not it's aim, though it does aim to be able to read and write MS office documents.

For most purposes OO will do just fine. The major exception is complex applications in Excel using VB. If you are doing that you need to use MS Office.

Some OO deployments:

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.org_Deployments

Between OO and TF I prefer TF.

 

[Tums]

more free web based goodies.

this one is a flow chart drawing app.

http://www.cumulatelabs.com/draw/draw.html?release=0.4.7

 

[maxpi]

Quote from lilboy716:

http://docs.google.com

decent, collaborative

The text editor is barely good enough to keep a diary or some notes. It keeps resizing my fonts for no reason, etc. It's a toy at this point but the funny thing is I love it. Any computer, any time, anywhere, I can open my documents. No CD's, no thumb drive, no version control problems from one computer to the next... it is the future for me. I really wish they would replace that editor with something serious soon.