[dba-Tech] [AccessD] Microsoft stock price crashed today

When it comes to LibreOffice calc, to the best of my knowledge cascading spreadsheets are pretty standard fare. 

A client that I install LibreOffice on, a number of years ago, has their entire accounting system assembled on the spreadsheet. I did nothing to help them; they did it all themselves so it couldn't have been that difficult but, personally I have no experience with LibreOffice's product line (other their Writer).

I would think that if you spent as much time on LibreOffice's spreadsheet program as you obvious did with the Microsoft Excel applications, I would suspect you could duplicate the results...any results.

North America has not been very fertile ground, especially within the office, for the evolving and new order of business applications as the rest of the world has. Governments in Germany, France and Italy has embraced these new office production products and obviously have not been impacted by any serious limitations.

Maybe it is just that we are getting old and set in our ways and not as adventuresome as the kids are? ;-)

Here is a list of features compared between the two products:

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_LibreOffice_-_Microsoft_Office

Note: that both application are in flux and in full development mode, so what is one product's limitation today will no be longer tomorrow.
 
Jim   

----- Original Message -----
From: "Arthur Fuller" <fuller.artful at gmail.com>
To: "Discussion of Hardware and Software issues" <dba-tech at databaseadvisors.com>
Sent: Thursday, 29 January, 2015 2:51:28 AM
Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] [AccessD] Microsoft stock price crashed today

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.
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