[wplug] What about spreadsheets?

[Alexandros Papadopoulos]

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On Monday 10 February 2003 16:28, Scott Kiesling wrote:
> I was just beginning to work on a spreadsheet a colleague had sent
> me, in Excel format of course. Can someone say what the .txt or .rtf
> equivalent would be for spreadsheets (pdf doesn't work b/c I want to
> be able to modify it)?

Unfortunately there is no universally acceptable standard when it comes 
to spreadsheets. OpenOffice.org, as others suggested, runs on most 
(all?) major platforms and handles Excel spreadsheets pretty well, not 
lacking any serious functionality as far as I can tell (my only 
complaint is the more advanced Pivot Table tool in Excel, but what 
percentage of Excel users even know what PTs are all about?)

A couple of weeks back, I was in my usual hot-headed mood after someone 
asked me how do I "manage" to do my CMU work "without using Office!". 
That annoyed me to no end, until I put up a webpage and got it off my 
chest. Disregarding the emotional statements, I believe that a database 
of Windows-to-Linux applications would be valuable in convincing new 
users that by switching to Linux they don't necessarily kiss off their 
ability to do "real work".

http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~apapadop/linux/applications.html

I would encourage anyone with similar examples of Linux applications to 
send screenshots and short descriptions.

Last week, I was amazed to see two CMU students frantically trying to 
find a KOrganizer port for Windows, after they saw me using it on my 
machine. They loved it on first sight, and wanted to use it. Little by 
little, incidents like this could reverse the "without Windows I can't 
have all my applications" mentality, to the realization that "without 
Linux I can't have all these great applications".

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