In defense (was Re: what to do about Windows email worms)

[cdevers at pobox.com (Chris Devers)]

On Wed, 28 Jan 2004, Dan Barrett wrote:

> On Wednesday 28 January 2004 08:40, Rich Braun wrote:
> > My list includes:
> >   - Excel/Word
> 
> OpenOffice 1.x works fine

It's definitely not as polished though. 

I used to be fairly proficient with Word, Excel, and Access, but I haven't
really spent much more than five minutes at a time with any of them since
Office97 or so, and I'm sure much has changed since then. I find that the
less I have to use these programs, the happier I am. 

That said, a few months ago I had to do some data analysis & graphing, and
the three tools I had to work with were Excel, OpenOffice, or Perl. I
probably could have done what I needed to do with Perl scripts, but I
wanted to be able to noodle around with something graphical, so I just
looked at the spreadsheets. 

I tried OpenOffice, but it was an absolute bear to deal with -- it was
slow, and got rapidly slower as the data got anywhere near "big" (i.e. it
would choke on 1000 rows or so), and the graphs it made made the
sluggishness so bad as to make the application unworkable.

So I tried Excel. And it was easy. And it was fast. And I found that, even
though I hate VB, it was actually pretty convenient to be able to get the
program to record my actions as a VB macro, then hand-edit it to be able
to do the rest of my work for me automagically. And the graphs that Excel
produced were easy to work with, quick to generate, and presented the data
in an attractive, richly descriptive manner. 

And this was after barely touching Excel for five years or so. I do not,
in any way, consider myself an advanced user of the application. And yet
the things I was trying to do in it were pretty easy to accomplish, while
the same tasks worked sluggishly if at all in OpenOffice. 


My wife, on the other hand, is an accountant. She *is* an advanced Excel
user, and I've seen her whip up complex tables with cascading dependencies
surprisingly quickly. The clever tricks I've seen people do with text in a
Perl one-liner, she can do equivalents with numerical data with a minute
or two with Excel. I didn't really appreciate how good Excel was at this
sort of thing until I'd seen her using it a few times. 

If OO.o can meet my wife's needs -- and I'm not saying that it can't,
necessarily -- it would either have to emulate the Excel interface &
functionality very well (to the point of infringement?), or it would
require her to retrain & rethink how she goes about solving things. 

I'm not yet convinced that it's worth the tradeoff. 


I like Linux. I like Free Software. I use it as much as I can.

But it isn't always the answer, even for me. 

And for some people, if it ever will be the answer, that day is still a
long way off. 



I think my wife would beat the crap out of me if I were to replace WinXP
with some version of Linux on her laptop, and I really don't blame her :)




-- 
Chris Devers