Arthur Fuller
fuller.artful at gmail.com
Thu Jan 29 04:51:28 CST 2015
You're probably right on all counts, John; that said, the new CEO, Satya Nadella, seems to have got it right, IMHO. The free release of the next Windows upgrade is IMO a portent for the future. MS is a corporation with a responsibility to its shareholders, which means they must end up in the black ink rather than the red. But they can do that bundling Windows with laptops and tablets and even phones. and with Office atop that, they're pretty much home-free. OpenOffice and OfficeLibre are players, to be sure, but let's face it, they are small players: MS Office owns the roost. I champion the efforts of OpenOffice and OfficeLibre, but my personal and client-problem is that I have developed a bunch of Office-Integration code that blends Word, Access and Excel into powerful solutions, and I cannot as yet achieve these results in either OpenOffice or OfficeLibre. Both these products go just as far as the end user is concerned, and ignore the situation where 500 users are involved. Frankly, I have no idea how OpenOffice or OfficeLibre can surmount this gap, but until they figure it out, I can't recommend replacing the MS Office suite with either of these babies. One case in point. A few years back I wrote an Excel app for an investment corporation. The app visited about 100 folders and opened the Excel workbooks therein, grabbing the totals from various pages, and created a new WorkBook consisting of about 100 sheets, one for each investment fund, each containing last year's monthly results and this year's monthly results. I cannot do that in either OpenOffice or OfficeLibre (well, maybe it's possible but I haven't yet figured out how). So thus far, I cannot recommend replacing MS Excel with their free replacements. I would be most happy to learn from listers how to achieve this result on either of these free equivalents. Any ideas? A.