You may have heard that since Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, most of the OpenOffice developers bailed and that they have produced a fork with a commitment to faster adoption of good ideas.
Here's your chance to finally dump that not-compatible-with-anything software that you've been hanging onto since the '80s.
Some things that may interest others:
Huh? Which SW do you mean? I do use MS-Works for office bookkeeping. Because it, well, works. Anything after version 6.0 seems wobbly to me though so I prefer the older releases.
Meantime I do use OpenOffice quite a bit and not MS-Office much. Except when it comes to VBA where you just need Excel. But that's mostly my clients, those that have lots of engineering hours invested in VBA routines. My only gripe with OO is that it is rather slow and also has a large footprint. But I can live with that. Its database is not useful at all to me.
MS-Works import filters are nice, although I rarely missed that.
[...]-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/ "gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam. Use another domain or send PM.
Specifically, I was saying that with the LibreOffice import filters, you may be able to have 1 fewer app on your HDD.
Well, if you're going to bring up the *results* thing... 8-)
With LibreOffice's more liberal attitude (than Sun's or Oracle's), I'm expecting to see ever more compatibility in the VBA realm.
I'll be interested to see how the splinter group handles that (better code optimization??).
With the new liberal approach, I'm wondering if LibreOffice will grow to be significantly larger than even OOo. If that gives more capability, however...
Java-based. 8-( I think you are in a sizable majority there.
This gives you an option you didn't have before[1] ...if you find that more useful than having 2 apps on the HDD. . . [1] (Payware) StarOffice had this before.
Like getting rid of OpenOffice? :-)
That would be wonderful.
Probably requires major de-cluttering, removing fluff, and so on. Software is like a garage, gets more full over time. "Nah, might be useful some day, I think I am going to hang on to that pile of metal".
Sure, but if running it on a low horsepower netbook becomes a drag people might not use it at home either.
Well, it probably works, in some way. But a database that isn't file compatible with much of the rest of the world will never be really useful. Like with VBA, there is usually too much vested in existing databases. Definitely in my office, I do everything in databases if it can be done that way. Makes report generation a breeze.
The usefulness goes way beyond the original purpose of a database. For example, my billing database contains details about the work provided. So a client one day said "I am not sure whether it was you or another consultant, but someone redesigned the XYZ gizmo and now we'd like to do the same on the ABC gizmo" ... "Let me look" ... tap, tap, tappiditap ... "Yeah, I did that, in February 2006" ... now it only took another
10sec and the schematic popped up. They were impressed.
If it can cleanly read and write in MS-Works database format I am certainly game. But it has to be 100%. I am not going to re-write all my book-keeping routines. Certainly not in view of the fact that a license for MS-Works can be had for $30 retail and sometimes goes on sale for $5:
Version 6.0 was much better IMHO. Nowadays Works comes with lots of fluff as well but I only use the database. You click on a file, whambam, open. No splash screens, no wait.
The best: The footprint of wksdb.exe in RAM is slightly over 3MB. If I wanted to I could use my old DOS license and it'd run in 200k or so. OpenOffice needs a whopping 65MB.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/ "gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam. Use another domain or send PM.
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