Re: [gentoo-user] office softs

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

Apparently, though unproven, at 22:28 on Wednesday 25 May 2011, Stéphane 
Guedon did opine thusly:

> On Wednesday 25 May 2011 22:07:15 Paul Hartman wrote:
> > On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 2:31 PM, Stéphane Guedon <stephane@22decembre.eu>
> 
> wrote:
> > > Hello
> > > 
> > > Some of you tried both LibreOffice / OpenOffice / Calligra recently ?
> > > 
> > > What do you think of them ? Which is stable / not yet fully finish ?
> > > ...
> > 
> > They are both very mature and stable and should be able to do almost
> > anything you need, as long as that need is not 100% MS-compatibility.
> > ;)
> 
> I need a small MS-compatibility, as anyone I think.
> 
> I wonder if calligra is mature enough to be used (cause openoffice not
> fully integrated with my desktop environnement).
> 
> Openoffice/Libreoffice... => which to choose ?
> 
> Openoffice is heavy whereas I think calligra light, thus, easier to update,
> but is calligra solid enough ?

Calligra is pretty OK. As a comparison, I'd say it's comparable quality-wise 
to ~amd64 meaning it should work just fine and as a Gentoo user you ought to 
be able to deal with issues where it isn't.

But you are asking the wrong question - you want "MS-compatibility" but don't 
say what that means. Keep in mind that Office is not even compatible with 
itself between versions.

What exactly are your needs? 

100% complete compatibility of all Office features requires Office.

If you don't need 100% but do need something pretty damn close, OOo is you're 
first choice. If you just want to be able to read the text of .docs and .docxs 
and to hell with the formatting, then KWord or Words should be fine.

It's a very complex question with no easy answer, and only you can tell. I say 
install KOffice and give it a test drive, see for yourself. Rest assured it 
won't eat your kittens when you run it.


-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com