OpenOffice vs Abiword vs Gnumeric etc etc etc ...

[heinz57g]

where can i ask this question, not really UBUNTU specific, and get some neutral and balanced answers?

obvioulsy, a forum dealing with say Abiword mainly would be the wrong place.

i need wordprocessing and spreadsheets where the real critaria is the compatibility with windows progs
and data. what options do i have?

fairly simple letters, and not overly complicated spreadheets will come in from all over the world, i have no
control with which progs (90% WIN) or which version they will be made.

so compatibility both reading and writing back is the major, if not only, point.

personally, i find the OO suite rather bloated, but do i really have another choice?

if this is not the right place to ask, can someone guide me along?

greetings - heinz -

[mrgnash]

Like you, I dislike bloat, so I prefer Abiword and Gnumeric -- not that I do any WYSIWYG word-processing these days anyway, given that I write everything in LaTeX. But if the real criteria is compatibility with MS products, then I believe that OOo is somewhat ahead of Abiword/Gnumeric. I don't have any figures on that, but from my experience, OOo seems to do a better job in terms of both importing and exporting MSOffice formats.

[Rhubarb]

I would lean towards Open Office.org - as there are plugins for it that'll read Office 2007 docx format (I believe it can also write out the format too).

Or better still, use Abiword for everything, then in the chance you get a document you can't open, use OOo in that scenario.

[heinz57g]

>> But if the real criteria is compatibility with MS products

unfortunately, in this case and by powers far above me, yes.

>> ... better still, use Abiword for everything, then in the chance you get a document
>> you can't open, use OOo in that scenario

not possible in this case, as the computers will be used by people who might not even know they use linux,
or think this is an african animal. and by the time they load something and write it back out, and THEN it
turns out to be in-compatible or screwed up, hell would break lose.

different story on my very own computers, though.

greetings - heinz -

[gsmanners]

There are some other options, but this page does a better job explaining:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_office_suites

[heinz57g]

well, i guess wherever i look, and whoever i talk to, OOo seems to come up the only choice here - so thats what it will be.

greetings - heinz -

[boomtisk]

I tried to use Abiword for a while but last time I tried, it didn't support the idiosyncratic way quotes in inverted commas work in German (at the start of a quote, you're supposed to put the first quotation mark upside down „like so“, kind of like exclamation and question marks in Spanish) which made writing German texts a pain in the butt. I eventually went back to Open Office which has no problem with non-English usage of quotation marks, only to discover that it even performed a bit better than Abiword despite being so "heavy".

[elmer_42]

I really like AbiWord way more than OOo. As long as I save all the files in the .doc format in the save dialog, I have no problem opening it up in my Windows partition.

[igknighted]

IBM's lotus symphony (while just as bloated as OO.o) has by far the best MS compatibility, you should check it out.

[Jack Waugh]

OOo calc crashes frquently.

[overdrank]

http://img147.imageshack.us/img147/5451/necromancing.jpg