Hi, everyone. I haven't participated in the group since I moved to the east coast a few years ago, but I'm on the list and feel the need to throw in my two cents worth. As always, your mileage may vary.
I'm the only desktop Linux user in an office an agency (USDA Agricultural Research Service) that is quickly becoming a Microsoft monoculture. I mention this to show that I have to interact with people on a daily basis who are using MS Office. I'm happily using OpenOffice 2.2 and experience essentially no interoperability problems, although the odd heavily-marked-up DOC file will lose some formatting. Four or five years ago I wrote my dissertation using OpenOffice 1.something. I've given presentations at scientific meetings all over the country using Impress. I recently had published a manuscript that was prepared entirely in Writer and exported to Word format at the end. Writer's equations look much better than Word's, even when compared to MathType, but neither can touch LaTeX. I make only cursory use of Calc, the spreadsheet, so I can't offer any insights into how it stacks up versus Excel. That said, I can probably get by doing this because I have a support scientist to whom I pass documents that need touching up when going from, say ODT to DOC. One frustrating thing I keep experiencing is that more and more scientific meetings require that you upload your presentations early -- so that the PCs in the presentation rooms can be pre-loaded -- in PowerPoint. The days of taking my laptop with OO.o on it are quickly coming to an end, and Impress -> PP is not yet seamless. This disappoints me, but from a logistical point-of-view it makes sense. It would, of course, make even more sense to let people upload their presentations as PDFs so it wouldn't matter with which software they're prepared. I also run into the issue that our lab-wide reference database is maintained in Reference Manager, which does not play well with OO.o. That's not a big deal in an office setting, and I can live with it, but for some academics it's a real show-stopper. For what it's worth, I don't find OO.o to be particularly slow and ungainly, at least compared to Word or WordPerfect (why has thou forsaken Linux?). That's all for now. :-) Regards, John -- John B. Cole
