[ubuntu-uk] MS vs. OO

[Simon Greenwood]

I think you can do it but it would involve setting up the spreadsheet as a
data source, which isn't transparent in my experience, but can be done with
a bit of head scratching and judicious Googling.

s/

On 15 Sep 2010 09:11, "Mark Harrison" <Mark at ascentium.co.uk> wrote:

> From: Jacob Mansfield <cyberjacob at gmail.com>
> of corse you can do it in OO, why the f**k would you want to use M$


Couple of things:

1: I've not used MS Office for about 5 years now, however the one time I
needed to was in 2007 for a really complex mailmerge, which is one area
where MSO is still better than OOo :-(

There are lots of areas where OOo is genuinely better, in terms of
functionality, as well as being free (in the cash sense). Actually, it's not
quite Free in the OpenSource sense, if you read the Sun licence carefully
:-)


2: I'm not sure you CAN do this in OOo - ie, create a link in a spreadsheet
that then creates a pre-populated document in Writer. This wasn't a question
about mailmerge, but about how to achieve a particular task. To be fair, I
don't think that mailmerge in MSO is the right answer either, but given the
user in question feels that mailmerge is too complex, I'm guessing that
telling them that it needs about 20 lines of VBA macros probably isn't going
to work either :-)


3: If you asked a question about OOo, and someone replied "MSO can do this,
why the f*** would you use OpenOffice instead", would you:

A: Feel that the respondent had a good point, and you should go out and try
MS Office.

B: Feel that the respondent was a jerk, and that you wanted to steer clear
of the kinds of things he was recommending.



The reason I bring this up is that I had a meeting with the IT Director of a
FTSE 100 company a couple of years ago, and that one of the things that came
up was OpenOffice as a possible replacement for MSO.

The reply I got was "This is like Linux. I'm fed up of Linux people. They
come in and want to have a religious conversation. I want to have a business
conversation."


This over-the-top, "why the f**** would you" stuff is actually DRIVING
PEOPLE AWAY FROM LINUX.


If I ran for Microsoft's Dirty Tricks Division, then I'd pay people to join
LUG lists and post nasty comments about MS to make people feel that the
Linux community were nutters :-)


So, thanks for harming the spread of Free software.


Mark

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