[NBLUG/talk] Use of Linux w/o an Office Suite?

[Bill Kendrick]

On Thu, May 15, 2003 at 10:20:53PM -0700, E Frank Ball wrote:
> Your right Linux doesn't have an office suite - it has a bunch of
> different ones.  We have just been talking about openoffice and
> staroffice.  KDE has koffice, which I know almost nothing about.  Gnome
> has some pieces like gnumeric for spreadsheets, and other stuff I'm not
> familiar with.

Abiword is very popular.  It's based on GTK+ (and probably Gnome), and
is very light.  It's not a full-fledged office suite, like OpenOffice.org
or KOffice try to be.  (Though, honestly, KOffice is more the name of
a set of components and applications, rather than one large all-encompassing
app., like OpenOffice.org is.)

Abiword is just a word processor.


>  There is also applixware, abisuite, wordperfect, ...
> Codeweavers has a package that runs the official Microsoft viewer
> programs for word, powerpoint, and excel (via wine, read only).  All but
> a couple of them are free.  Pick one.

I think you're talking about CrossOver Plugin, which is meant to let people
run things like Apple's Quicktime viewer, Macromedia's Shockwave viewer,
and Microsoft's Windows Media Player.

What one would really want, though, is CodeWeaver's CrossOver _Office_,
which allows you to run things like Internet Explorer, MS Office,
Quicken, Photoshop, etc.


I installed the trial version of CrossOver Office onto LUGOD's demo machine
for our booth at the Government Technology Conference (GTC) last week.

With CrossOver, I was able to easily (all by pointing & clicking) install
Internet Explorer 6 (which it downloaded for me off of Microsoft's website),
Microsoft Office 2000 (off of a CD which was donated to our LUG),
and a demo version of Macromedia's Flash MX editor (which came off of an
evaluation CD that we picked up from Macromedia's booth a few aisles down
from us at the GTC expo floor!)

Pretty cool!


> Why would I want an office suite at home?  I'm frequently amazed by
> people who can't make a list of three items without using excel, or
> can't write a 4 line memo without using msword (those are not
> exaggerations).

Agreed.  I came up with a joke that Microsoft should make a new version
of Excel that can't do any graphic or calculations, rename it
"MS Table", and sell it for $100 bucks a pop.

People would buy it to do things like corporate phone lists,
website sitemaps, and all of the other bizarre-assed stuff I've seen
people create using a spreadsheet! :^)


-bill!