Re: OO as GNOME software (topic change)

[Bart Decrem <bart eazel com>]

Sam TH wrote:

> [snip]
> Well, curious that you mention working with MS documents.  AbiWord, in
> fact, has the best Word importer outside of MicroSoft products.  And
> I'm told Gnumeric does fairly well in this category as well.

Hi Sam,

I actually did a non-scientific test on this a few months ago.  I randomly went
through my files and took 10 Word documents and 10 Excel documents and opened them
up in StarOffice and then in AbiWord and Gnumeric, respectively.  Here's what
happened:

Word doc in StarOffice:
- 8 documents opened fine without formatting problems
- 1 document had a page-break problem
- 1 document had a passowrd problem

Word doc in Abiword:
- 2 documents opened fine without formatting problems
- one document messed up on a graphic
- one document messed up on bolds
- one document had other formatting problems
- one document had bullet list format off and missed my footnotes
- one document lost a graphic and screwed up alignment
- one document lost font information and bold information
- one document last tabs and table settings
- one document lost password and table settings

Excel doc in StarOffice:
- 10 documents opened fine without formatting problems

Excel doc in Gnumeric:
- 5 documents opened fine without formatting problems
- one document screwed up my formulas in a mysterious manner
- another document screwed up my formulas
- the Group function was missing in one document, creating formatting problems
- graphic not imported in one document, table misformatted
- one document crashed when I tried to print it

I do apologize to the Dom, Jody and the other AbiWord and Gnumeric contributors for
not explaining the problems in more detail, and for not filing bug reports for the
problems I experienced.  I didn't have a lot of time when I did this exercice and
wasn't trying to do a scientific comparison, just wanted to check my instincts.
But I did keep the files I used for this exercice, and would be happy to send them
to or post them online (I'm not sure if any of these documents have confidential
information in them).

Cheers,

Bart




>
>
> However, on the larger point you make, yes, AbiWord and Gnumeric don't
> have all the features of OO.  But OO doesn't have all the features of
> MS Office, which is what everyone measures all of these products
> against anyway.
>
> Now, it should be obvious why MS Word isn't in GNOME.   But it does
> show that features and MS compatibility aren't the only, or even the
> most important, criteria for inclusion in GNOME office.
>
>
>         sam th
>         sam uchicago edu
>         http://www.abisource.com/~sam/
>         GnuPG Key:
>         http://www.abisource.com/~sam/key
>
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