On Monday 08 December 2003 12:04, Mark Knecht wrote: > As someone who runs a business, why would I want to pay > someone $600 to fix 10 documents when I can buy Microsoft's > tools for $300 and have guaranteed compatibility? Oh, I don't think you'll find Microsoft guarantees any such thing. ;) Seriously though.... It's a game of percentages. When StarOffice 5.2 was around, it was okay for maybe 5% of Word/Excel users. With OpenOffice 1.1 I have yet to meet a user in real life (I've heard lots of accounts like your own on the net and I believe you, but in business I gotta rely on the experiences of those who pay me) who's unable to use it for basically everything for which they used Word/Excel previously. So I'm going to go out on a limb and say that number is a lot larger than 5% now, and is growing with each release even if the market share's a lot slower due to the primary marketing being word of mouth. I'm surprised the low end PC makers aren't already preloading it in lieu of MS Works or WP Office, but I bet they do sooner or later. I always recommend to people to keep one PC with Word and Excel on it in each department "just in case", or when dealing with customers who send documents that cause problems. Generally speaking, those PC's are remaining unused, but it'll be a while before I stop that recommendation. Crossover Office is great not only for that stuff, but for running a certain subset of internally created VB apps that seem to crop up in every medium to large organization. Usually, though, the org has a ton of Windows licenses around and can just spare one for that one box. But the long term solution is going to involve OpenOffice, and eventually the people with huge Excel macros that won't run in anything else will wind up like the people who had all those huge WordPerfect macros that wouldn't run in anything else... keeping Excel around on a few machines as a legacy app because the rest of the world moved off of it. Some companies (law firms in particular) still have machines running DOS and WP51, some have migrated their macros to newer WP Office versions, and some have bit the bullet and ported to something else, and not always Word. If you remember, Lotus 1-2-3 was the same back in the day; I saw a distressing number of real core business apps implemented as Lotus macros and when they broke, boy, they really broke. Those who'd move from VBA-scripted apps to OpenOffice have an additional incentive to do so in that the OpenOffice guys are dying to get their hands on Word and Excel macros that won't work in OpenOffice, so instead of paying someone 600 bucks it may be possible (in less sensitive instances) to send your sheets off and check back when the next version comes out to see whether they run. Anyway, Gnumeric is a nice program too, and has had the distinction of being able to open a few corrupted sheets that neither Excel nor OpenOffice would touch, and then saving them back out again all repaired. I think it belongs in everyone's toolkit for just that reason even though I think OpenOffice gets the "most likely to succeed" plaque. None of which lets my Windows and Mac loving friends get CEP/Audition, Cakewalk or Protools working under Linux, but if you can get an avalanche going, a few pebbles will usually get pulled along with it ;) Rob
