Re: small school: replacements for MS Word and Excel
On Sun, May 20, 2001 at 04:53:19PM +0000, joe golden wrote:
> I am trying to switch our small (12 machine) NT network over to Linux. Some
> of the main computer applications at our school are web browsing , word
> processing and spreadsheets (MS Internet Explorer, Word and Excel).
>
> I am running Linux debian 2.2.18pre21 and just updated last week.
>
> Netscape makes a great replacement for Internet Explorer.
>
> Abiword seems to work OK, but sometimes appears to split lines and I've had
> problems importing an image into a document. I haven't used Abiword much,
> but have already seen these problems. What is a better alternative that
> isn't too bloated. This is the major application we need for the school.
>
> For spreadsheets in school, you need to make graphs. Gnumeric seems slick,
> but last time I checked, *no graphs*. I need graphical representation of
> data for test scores, etc.
>
> Is Star Office the answer? Can the huge Star office package be broken into
> smaller more manageable parts?
I feel like total crap writing this (see my email addr), but do you
really want to do this? This kind of stuff is one of the few areas
where NT really shines. The best Linux can do in this area as far as
offering the same features as office suites would be WordPerfect or
StarOffice, neither of these are as stable as Office on NT4. The
stability of the filesystem is also a major question, you'd have to use
ReiserFS on everything as ext2 is no replacemnet for NTFS. Don't even
start in on IE versus Netscape, Mozilla is better, but it will be less
stable and will give more buggy renders. If your goal here is to
evangelize Linux to non-techie types, the worst thing you can
do is portray it in a bad light. The same thing happened to Macs in the
educational market and it's not a mistake you want to make. I mean
c'mon, don't use Macs as web servers and don't use Linux boxen for
destkop publishing, to each tool its purpose.
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