Date: Sat, 06 Oct 2007 00:14:55 -0500 From: icantthinkofone <icantthinkofone@charter.net> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: good replacement for open office Message-ID: <470719CF.7030502@charter.net> In-Reply-To: <1191546543.61533.202.camel@pinot.fmjassoc.com> References: <1191546543.61533.202.camel@pinot.fmjassoc.com>
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Frank Jahnke wrote: >> what would be a good replacement(s) for most of it's functionality >> (word processing and spreadsheets are what matter to me) >> > > You really have to decide what you want to suite to do. Otherwise, your > problem is underspecified. > > 1) Collaboration (complex). If you collaborate with colleagues who use > Word (for example) then practically you have to use Word if you deal > with complex documents. By "collaborate" I mean exchanging documents > back and forth, with edits in each pass. Mine are always heavy in > equations and chemistry. > > Run it in a virtual machine (VMware, Win4BSD, qemu/kqemu) on XP, W2K or > 98SE. You probably don't need the latest and greatest version of Word > unless you colleagues are very sophisticated. Word 2000 has been fine > for me. > > 2) Document creation. If you only want to create documents, and Office > compatibility is not that important, then there are many options: > Abiword/Gnumeric are quite good if you want WYSIWYG (but do install all > the extensions), the formatters TeX and groff are exceptionally powerful > if you learn them well. Abiword does not read Word files well; Gnumeric > has many short-comings in reading Excel (particularly for graphics) but > is very good otherwise. Personally I use the groff family for all my > complex documents, but I have used it for 25 years and know it inside > and out. (Well, it was troff and friends long ago.) > > 3) Read-only. You can use Antiword to get the raw text, but you lose > all formatting. It is a pretty lousy choice in my opinion. > Textmaker/Planmaker do a very good job for this. > > 4) Mixture. If you have a general mixture of these tasks and don't want > to set up a VM, use Textmaker. The programs are quite good, they are > quite compatible with Office (but choke on obscure files I use > regularly, as does OO.o and all the others), and much better than OO.o > and Aibword/Gnumeric in my opinion if you like Word. They are also > quite inexpensive -- you can often find them for $20 or so on sale from > the publisher. > > Personally, I use groff (with chem, grap, pic, refer, tbl and eqn for > all the heavy text formatting), VMware/XP/Office 2003, > Win4BSD/W2k/Office 2000, Textmaker/Planmaker, OO.o, Abiword/Gnumeric, > and Windows computers. What I use depends on what I am doing. > > Good luck! > > Frank > > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe@freebsd.org" > > Why not use Google Docs?
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