The problem with F/OSS office suites is that their audience tends to be uncritical, so much as in the fairy tale "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" (but in inverse), professionals have stopped listening.
I remember at least three incidents where I was instructed to evaluate Open Office, Libre Office or other F/OSS word processing or layout packages. In each instance, the F/OSS products fell short in fundamental ways, and were a total disaster for larger documents. Their main strength was that it was often easier to ex
OTOH, I have "saved" several Word/Excel documents that had become too corrupted to be used in Microsoft Office. All I had to do was load them in OpenOffice and then save them with a different name, and they suddenly worked again in MS Office.
Well, about 6 months to one year back I was trying to show a friend that OpenOffice (or was it LibreOffice, can't remember) was a nice alternative to Microsoft Word. I typed some text in a OpenOffice Writer file, saved it as a doc and went to open it on Microsoft Word. The point I was trying to make was that it was interoperable with the de facto standard office suite. And she would have it legally.
As soon as I opened it on Microsoft Word, it crashed the program. It had about 20 characters of text. No form
"The hands that help are better far than the lips that pray."
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
The problem with FOSS office suites (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with F/OSS office suites is that their audience tends to be uncritical, so much as in the fairy tale "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" (but in inverse), professionals have stopped listening.
I remember at least three incidents where I was instructed to evaluate Open Office, Libre Office or other F/OSS word processing or layout packages. In each instance, the F/OSS products fell short in fundamental ways, and were a total disaster for larger documents. Their main strength was that it was often easier to ex
Re:The problem with FOSS office suites (Score:5, Interesting)
OTOH, I have "saved" several Word/Excel documents that had become too corrupted to be used in Microsoft Office. All I had to do was load them in OpenOffice and then save them with a different name, and they suddenly worked again in MS Office.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, about 6 months to one year back I was trying to show a friend that OpenOffice (or was it LibreOffice, can't remember) was a nice alternative to Microsoft Word. I typed some text in a OpenOffice Writer file, saved it as a doc and went to open it on Microsoft Word. The point I was trying to make was that it was interoperable with the de facto standard office suite. And she would have it legally.
As soon as I opened it on Microsoft Word, it crashed the program. It had about 20 characters of text. No form