[Troy Mangum quotes eWeek] October 14, 2002 Linux Is Ready to Roll, With or Without Office By Peter Coffee
Troy Mangum
Without Office By Peter Coffee
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http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,633898,00.asp
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When I construct a spreadsheet in Microsoft's Excel, I typically use only one
layer of formulas and data. When I save the result, I often "Save As" an Excel
2.1 Worksheet, rather than take the default of saving a more complex Workbook
of multiple Worksheets (all but one of which would be empty). In a typical case
that I just tested, the difference is a 3KB Worksheet compared with a 14KB
Workbook containing exactly the same stuff.
Multiply that difference by the number of spreadsheets stored on your company's
PCs, and you won't wonder why disk space grows more quickly than any other
dimension or capacity of desktop computing.
This comes to mind whenever someone tells me that it's not practical to move
corporate PC users to Linux-based desktop machines; not until there are
feature-for-feature competitors for the Microsoft Office applications that
dominate most office settings. If ever there were a case of the tail wagging
the dog, this is an example.
I'm not dismissing the benefits of a suite as capable as Office. I wrote my
first book with my highly customized copy of Mansfield Software Group's KEdit;
I wrote my second with Microsoft Word. The outline mode in Word made it
wonderfully easy to reorganize chapters by moving paragraphs, or subsections,
while using a high-level structural view.
On the other hand, I also had opportunity to appreciate Word's file recovery
mechanisms on the several occasions when it crashed—something I don't believe
has ever, ever, ever happened in my decade or so of using KEdit with what have
sometimes been truly enormous files of data as well as text.
<<snip>>
For complete article see:
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http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,633898,00.asp
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Troy Mangum
(The Mangums - Troy, Carolyn, and Jessica)
http://troymangum.tripod.com -> homepage
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