Linux for small business

[Craig White]

On Mon, 2002-04-29 at 09:14, Carl Parrish wrote:
> On Fri, 2002-04-26 at 15:02, Craig White wrote:
> > On Fri, 2002-04-26 at 12:10, David Mandala wrote:
> > > I am sorry that you don't think it is accurate. So some points:
> > > 
> > > It is quite clear that you have not looked at KDE & Open Office in the
> > > last 6 months. There is very little if any retraining costs involved.
> > > Since they primarly use the accounting software that will still be
> > > installed there again there is no cost of retraining.
> > ----
> > This isn't the case - KDE isn't ready for prime time yet - KWrite
> > doesn't convert Word Documents accurately enough - KSpread doesn't come
> > close to converting Excel documents properly so KDE isn't gonna make it
> > in an environment that already has a base of Microsoft documents.
> > Perhaps Abiword and Gnumeric are ready for prime time - I have no real
> > experience with them but it would seem that Star Office 5.2 is the only
> > serious player in Desktop suites at this point.
> > 
> 
> My personal thoughts on Abiword and Gnumeric. Well Gnumeric seems to be
> ready for primetime to me. In the last few weeks I've put together some
> complicated (for me) spreedsheets and I've been able to convert them to
> excel and back quite often. Charts I sometimes have to play with going
> from gnumeric to excel but never the other direction. Its *much* faster
> than OpenOffice's spreedsheet. My only real problem is that I can't
> figure out how to repeat the header colums and rows when I print, but I
> supect that this is simply because I gave up looking. For Abiword I'd
> say it's *almost* ready for prime time. Converts back and forth from
> word fine. Its still missing tables however. Most of the time *I* don't
> need tables but when recieving word docs I often get one with tables and
> then I have to open it in OpenOffice. As soon as Abiword supports tables
> though I proably won't have to open OpenOffice for anything (execpt
> presentation slides). 
> 
----
a business that has Excel spreadsheets & Word documents isn't going to
be impressed by the failures to convert - KDE Office is much the same.
So far, it's Star Office. I can't wait until Open Office is ready for
prime time.

Craig