acknak wrote:Yes, I've seen this arrogant attitude myself, that people who use MS Office think that the world revolves around "the way Excel does it", or "that's the answer I got in Excel, so it must be right".
It has nothing to do with arrogance. And I have the clear impression that both of you did not read the story about the "1900 dates bug" in Excel. Excel introduced it to mimic the behaviour of 1-2-3 (the leader at the time) so that users could rapidly make the swap. This strategy paid off, people made the move to Excel and it became the market leader. Microsoft decided to maintain this behaviour in future releases and in fact it is still present. But it works fine.
Let me put it this way: whatever alternative software suite you want to propose, nobody (except those manifest against Microsoft) gives a damn about how good and how perfect the internal routines are developed and how many things are solved. They are simply interested in having a good product that allows them to work and share with the rest of the world. In this world, Microsoft Office is the 'de facto' standard for office documents, whether you (include me, I am a strong supporter of open source software) like it or not. Understand that the product is a tool and not a worship.
Calc
claims to be Excel compatible and that it can read and write (I copy from OO's Calc page: "Of course, you are free to use your old Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, or save your work in Excel format for sending to people who are still locked into Microsoft products."). Then it should continue to behave like Excel. This means that whenever I
explicitely enter 01-18-1900 in Excel, I
must see the same value when I open Calc. And the other way around also.
acknak wrote:In all seriousness, OOo is not right for everybody, and Calc is not right for you. I consistently recommend that people who need to share working documents with MS Office users should not use OOo--at least not without very careful consideration and testing--for exactly the reasons you listed. Life is hard enough without worrying about software compatibility introducing more problems.
Here you got the point, and this is probably one of the major reasons why OO is still a
niche player in the Office Suites business and confined to small realities. Do you really think it is normal that one needs to do
very careful consideration and testing before being able to use OO as an alternative for Office? Common, be serious.
acknak wrote:Even so, using only MS Office and having spreadsheets with bogus data in them is going to bite you in the... rear end at some point.
No evidence of that. OO bit me instead.
