Linux Desktop for university staff
David Curry
dsccable at comcast.net
Tue Feb 15 20:14:43 UTC 2005
Murat Tepegoz wrote:
>SNIP
>
>Office: Openoffice.org. Write and calc are perfect alternatives to word and
>excel. Abiword always crashes abnormally. I could not try koffice yet. I use
>kile for latex.
>
>
SNIP
I think "perfect alternative" to excel is a bit of overstatement
regarding oo.o calc. Calc is limited to 32,000 rows whereas excel can
handle larger files and calc does not have as many built in functions
for users to draw on (date manipulations such as determining the time
between two dates come to mind). Gnumeric appears capable of handling
files as large as excel can take, but the last time I evaluated
statistical and financial functions in Gnumeric some of those functions
did not produce output that was directly useable for polished
presentations.
Additionally, I have not shared your experience with Abiword crashing
abnormally. I also find that Abiword is capable of importing more
formats than oo.o and can accept text/numbers copied from, say, a
mozilla browser screen where oo.o Write cannot.
I use oo.o write and calc, abiword, and gnumeric as needed to meet the
requirements of my projects.
The "R" statistical package (http://www.r-project.org/) is a good
substitute for S" and should not be overlooked in your list of software.
Gretl (GNU Regression, Econometrics & Time Series Library) is another
application worth mentioning to the university crowd and can be found at
http://gretl.sourceforge.net/
Thanks for initiating this thread and leading with your list of apps.
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