Linux for small business

[Carl Parrish]

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). 

Carl P.