Office Programs

[Doctor V]

I just got an excel file that I have to modify.  Kspread wouldn't open it.  Which Office program do you suggest I use?  Open Office, Star Office?  I'm using Mandrake 9.0, I had star office on 8.1 and I have it on a CD.  It will still work right?

Thanks V

[Master of Reality]

OpenOffice will work, but if you have staroffice you could use it. I use staroffice 5,2 but i might switch to openoffice after using it in redhat 8.0

[Doctor V]

Installed StarOffice 5.2, but it just didn't cut it.  It opened the file I needed, but didn't have the character support I needed.  So uninstalled SO5.2 and DLed Open Office 1.0.1, and it works great.  I did get scared when I first opened the spreadsheet and things didn't display at all, but changing the font fixed that.  Both SO5.2 and OO1.0.1 kinda are resource hogs.

Seems theres nothing Windoze can do that Linux can't.  But there are plenty of things Linux can do that Windoze can't.

V

[voidmain]

It's strange. Under RedHat 7.3 I downloaded and installed OpenOffice 1.0. I was not at all happy with the performance. Then I installed RedHat 8.0 which comes with OpenOffice 1.0.1 as part of the installation and it is *much* snappier. I don't know what's different to make it so much faster but it is. I don't know if it's the slightly newer version or if RedHat threw some voodoo compiler options on the thing. But yes, they are resource hogs (I've got 512MB of RAM so I'm covered).

[Calum]

openoffice comes with red hat 8? very cool.
so should i buy openoffice 1.01 for

[voidmain]

Calum, as I said 1.0.1 is much faster on my machine using RedHat 8.0, but again I don't know if that is because of a difference in the *.*.1 version or if RedHat specially compiled it to make it faster. So I can't recommend one way or the other.

As far as Abiword. I've never had much luck with it personally. Although it is lighter weight, it doesn't seem to be nearly as compatible with MS Office.

[pkd_lives]

Just for information. Scroll down to the Bug fixes. There are two issues involving Excel that were fixed for 1.0.1. Whilst they may not be directly conected to teh excel problem, it shows that some development has happened from that direction.

http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/source/1.0.1/release_notes_1.0.1.html

Hope this throws a little light on the topic.