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
I've found LO spreadsheets to be easier to work with that the Microsoft counterpart. We programs that output information on product, I cannot tell you the number of times I've foamed at the mouth by Excel converting the UPC into scientific notation. LO seems to understand that the column is text, but no matter what we do with Excel, it always wants to turn UPC, EAN, GTIN-14 into a number.
Additionally, we find that working with large documents to be easier and more fluid with LO than Word or Excel. If someone jacks up the formatting in Word it's a weeks worth of recovery just to get things sane again. In LO it is literally minutes at best. LO handles spreadsheets of 500,000 rows plus way better than Excel any day.
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:2)
I've found LO spreadsheets to be easier to work with that the Microsoft counterpart. We programs that output information on product, I cannot tell you the number of times I've foamed at the mouth by Excel converting the UPC into scientific notation. LO seems to understand that the column is text, but no matter what we do with Excel, it always wants to turn UPC, EAN, GTIN-14 into a number.
Additionally, we find that working with large documents to be easier and more fluid with LO than Word or Excel. If someone jacks up the formatting in Word it's a weeks worth of recovery just to get things sane again. In LO it is literally minutes at best. LO handles spreadsheets of 500,000 rows plus way better than Excel any day.