On Sun, Jul 06, 2003 at 06:18:03PM +0100, James Green wrote:
I looked at OpenOffice 1.0, and whilst it worked to a point, I wouldn't want to try and wean someone off MS Office using it. OTOH, how many people use a function within MS Office that isn't bog standard functionality across OpenOffice/other OSS?
I reckon that there are more people out there who use office 97 or 2000 and use possibly 5% of the features while running windows 98 than there are people who use 95%+ of the features in Office XP or 2003.
In all my experience of people using office apps I only think maybe less than 5% use any of the "advanced" features at all. Even then I think this is a very conservative estimate, most people could get away with Works and still have too much functionality. Most people I have ever seen who have the whole office suite usually use word to write letters, use Excel to look at spreadsheets other people created and the same for powerpoint. I think I only ever saw a couple of people use Access for a database and then get a bit upset when Access destroyed their files a few months later (fortunatley for them we had backups) I also read the other day on slashdot i believe that Gnumeric now equals all the functions of Excel and has at least 100 more. In addition to that I find that Open Office has far too many features many of which I will never use for the tasks I use it for.
Adam