Date: Sun, 6 Jun 2010 23:03:11 +0200 From: Roland Smith <rsmith@xs4all.nl> To: Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de> Cc: Chip Camden <sterling@camdensoftware.com>, FreeBSD Questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: office apps Message-ID: <20100606210311.GA20105@slackbox.erewhon.net> In-Reply-To: <20100606223826.62a42f7a.freebsd@edvax.de> References: <20100606203416.GF46089@libertas.local.camdensoftware.com> <20100606223826.62a42f7a.freebsd@edvax.de>
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On Sun, Jun 06, 2010 at 10:38:26PM +0200, Polytropon wrote:
> On Sun, 6 Jun 2010 13:34:16 -0700, Chip Camden <sterling@camdensoftware.c=
om> wrote:
> > This might not be the right list for this question -- if so, please slap
> > me over to the right one.
> >=20
> > Does anyone have a recommendation for a lighter-weight office suite?
> > OOo is such a pig. It takes a good minute to start it up and open a
> > spreadsheet.
Indeed.
=20
> There are office conglomerates both for KDE and Gnome, KOffice and
> GOffice. If you already have either of them installed, you may try
> this.
>=20
> An acceptable stand-alone word processor is Abiword.
=20
Don't forget LaTeX! Especially since it is quite easy for scripting languag=
es
to generate LaTeX code (automation).
> > Short of the full suite, how about just a spreadsheet program that supp=
orts
> > complex formulas and charting?=20
>=20
> Gnumeric.
Second that. Especially for quick & dirty jobs.
> > If it could also be used without X11 when
> > charting isn't needed, that would make my day.
>=20
> CVS for data, C or awk for processing, gnuplot for plotting. :-)
For real data munching, programming languages do a much better job indeed. =
May
I also suggest Perl, Lua and Python al alternatives to C and awk? And 'make'
to tie everything together. Unless your machine is severely underpowered or
your datasets are _huge_, scripting languages tend to be fast enough for da=
ta
processing, IMHO.
The general weakness of office suites is _automation_, something that progr=
ams
following the UNIX philosophy excel at. (pardon the pun). Quoting Doug McIl=
roy:
This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it
well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text st=
reams,
because that is a universal interface.
Roland
--=20
R.F.Smith http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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