On Thu, 13 May 2010 20:00:04 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

> I tried KOffice. It works, but it doesn't seem to *do* very much, and
> it's infuriatingly fiddly to operate. (Especially the spreadsheet. In
> fact, I've yet to find any spreadsheet that works as well as Excel -
> which is worrying, considering that Excel wasn't work fantastically.)

oocalc works very well, I find - I do a *lot* of data manipulation in my 
job, and I find that oocalc works as well as MS Excel - certainly well 
enough for the manipulations I do.  The recent expansion of the number of 
rows & columns really got rid of the last limitation I ran into (as I 
often deal with fairly large data sets).

My only complaint, in fact, about OpenOffice is that the database really 
isn't that useful - it's more of a front-end to bigger database engines 
(from MySQL to things like Oracle), but doesn't seem to work with MS 
Access databases (not that I need them that often, Jet is itself a pretty 
poor database engine, but it's handy for dealing with mid-size datasets 
where multiuser access isn't an important factor).

> I thought WordPerfect died about 20 years ago?

Um, no:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordperfect

WP Corp was bought by Novell and then sold to Corel a few years later.  
It's still in heavy use in some industries (such as being the preferred 
application of many people in the legal profession).

Jim

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