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sujoy
April 21st, 2008, 11:07 AM
any light wieght alternative to open office? i use gedit, vi, etc for word processing needs, at most abiword (for formated doc files).

any light weight apps you know of that supports xls files and spreadsheats and presentations ?

darrelljon
April 21st, 2008, 11:11 AM
SIAG Office (http://siag.nu/).

ibutho
April 21st, 2008, 11:41 AM
Koffice is one alternative. For xls files, also take a look at gnumeric.

BrendanM
April 21st, 2008, 11:53 AM
You could check out the new IBM Lotus Symphony Suite, it's free (as in beer) and available for Linux: https://www14.software.ibm.com/iwm/web/swerplotus/LotusSymphonyPick.html

I haven't used it myself, but I've heard good things.

FredB
April 21st, 2008, 11:55 AM
Gnumeric could do the trick for spreadsheet.

IBM Symphony ? It uses part of the code of OpenOffice.org

barbedsaber
April 21st, 2008, 11:58 AM
whats wrong with OO.o? if there is somthing you dont like about it, why dont you ask for help before you dismiss it compleatly.

then again, maybe you have a valid reason, oh, and abiword.

quinnten83
April 21st, 2008, 12:58 PM
OO.o is just heavy and slow.
Yes I use it, because i don't mind the speed.
I hope OO.o3 offers better performance.

billgoldberg
April 21st, 2008, 01:02 PM
I use gedit :p

No seriously.

There is koffice, staroffice (from sun).

Otherwise there are apps like abiword, gnumeric and dozens of others.

Browse the office section of "add/remove" and you'll find a ton of apps.

sujoy
April 21st, 2008, 02:06 PM
open office is just slow. its ok for my desktop with 1 gig ram or for that matter my lappy with 512, but recently i installed it in a machine with 128MB ram and it almost crawled.

abiword IMO is perhaps a tad better. but what about presentation files (ppt) ?

EDIT: gnumeric too is working fine :) thanks a lot for this

Onyros
April 21st, 2008, 02:19 PM
Hehe, SIAG, huh? Nice one :)

Beaver is my editor of choice, so I won't say anything else about that recommendation :P

Gnumeric is a far better replacement for Calc than AbiWord is for Writer.

Actually, Gnumeric is far, far superior to OOo's spreadsheet software. For presentations, the only app I know that is compatible with Microsoft's ppt's is Impress (other than the already mentioned bloatware). There just is no light alternative for Powerpoint files.

init1
April 21st, 2008, 02:56 PM
Google Docs is very good. There's even something called Google Gears that allows you to use it offline.
http://docs.google.com

geoken
April 21st, 2008, 03:06 PM
Is IBM's app Java based? My main issue with Open Office is it's 'out of place' -feeling UI.

GMU_DodgyHodgy
April 21st, 2008, 03:29 PM
As an empoyee for IBM - I can answer some questions about Lotus Symphony. The core code is based on OO.org. IBM has dedicated 65 full time developers for OO.org to address bugs and feature requests. Internally, IBM has been aggressively pursuing the use of open source software like Linux, OO.org, and enterprise level applications.

Lotus Symphony ports the OO.org code to Eclipse - which provides a very nice interface. It will still be different than the Gnome and KDE standard interface - but it is clean and very usable.

Currently, Symphony is in Beta 4. The primary focus is to increase performance eliminate bloat and make the underpinnings of the software much simpler, more organized and just faster. They are providing any new enhancements back to OO.org.

I like Abiword and Gnumeric. Gnumeric does a great job on hard core accounting applications (if it only had pivot-tables it would be perfect). I just wish the original intent of Abi-Word was followed through - a full lightweight - but integrated office suite. If someone could get Abi-Word, Gnumeric, Planner, and Dia to share components, have similar UIs, widgets, and data-objects, etc - it would be the best Office Suite.

sujoy
April 21st, 2008, 03:47 PM
Hehe, SIAG, huh? Nice one :)

Beaver is my editor of choice, so I won't say anything else about that recommendation :P

Gnumeric is a far better replacement for Calc than AbiWord is for Writer.

Actually, Gnumeric is far, far superior to OOo's spreadsheet software. For presentations, the only app I know that is compatible with Microsoft's ppt's is Impress (other than the already mentioned bloatware). There just is no light alternative for Powerpoint files.

well if i have to go with impress, then i might as well get the whole open office suite.
i will try and avoid ppts for as long as i can on that 128MB machine and when all else fails, i would hope that open office gets better and lighter. :)

Jackster
April 21st, 2008, 03:54 PM
You might want to try Google's online office. I've tried to use it and I've tried to like it but it's just not quite there yet. It's a great idea though, I'd love to start using it so I could access my documents anywhere. The main problem I have with it is the UI seems more like a WYSIWYG input thing for forums rather than a word processor but who knows, maybe they were going for that?


As an empoyee for IBM...

A slight (well, massive) tangent, but you wouldn't happen to know anything about an OS X release for Symphony?

GMU_DodgyHodgy
April 21st, 2008, 04:07 PM
You might want to try Google's online office. I've tried to use it and I've tried to like it but it's just not quite there yet. It's a great idea though, I'd love to start using it so I could access my documents anywhere. The main problem I have with it is the UI seems more like a WYSIWYG input thing for forums rather than a word processor but who knows, maybe they were going for that?



A slight (well, massive) tangent, but you wouldn't happen to know anything about an OS X release for Symphony?

It is in the works for the first release candidate - there is a lot of internal work on OSX as well.

One third of laptops issues to employees are using Linux
and all our Lotus Notes products and Web-sphere have been ported to Linux. We also have a huge internal Open Source employee group that spans our technical and functional groups. OSX support for Lotus Symphony has been a consistent request internally.

syncdram
July 19th, 2010, 02:52 PM
whats wrong with OO.o? if there is somthing you dont like about it, why dont you ask for help before you dismiss it compleatly.

then again, maybe you have a valid reason, oh, and abiword.

I think its utterly amazing that someone can come into a linux forum, ask a question such as this, looking for a alternative, even explaining the reason why and is replied back with a derogative question persuading this person that he should not move from open office. This is the pinnacle of whats wrong with the linux community and the direction we have gone. Sad.

Johnsie
July 19th, 2010, 02:58 PM
Microsoft Office is pretty good at dealing with those type of files and it's pretty fast.

philinux
July 19th, 2010, 03:00 PM
Necro thread, Die in peace old friend.