Date: Wed, 22 Nov 2000 20:06:23 +0000
From: Sean Rima
On Tue, 21 Nov 2000 18:27:54 +0000, Sean Rima wrote:
This is not for me first of all :)
My mother has a Win98 box with Lotus Smartsuite. She uses Lotus 1.2.3 to do various business accounts and billings. She also has palyed with the databases for doing bills etc.
I do not use X, prefer to be a console man. I am tryng to convince here to get SuSE Linux Personal 7, to use it to do the accounts that she handles with 1-2-3. Basically she uses a lot of macros.
Would StarOffice be a sufficent replacement for SmartSuite or should I be looking elsewhere in the Linux world.
Sean --
Unless she is prepared to start almost everything from scratch, StarOffice is not a good choice. The reason I say this is that StarOffice does not have the conversion filters to import her existing Lotus 123 spreadsheets. Probably the only way she could get her existing spreadsheets into StarOffice would be to export the Lotus files to a Win Excel file while she is in Smartsuite. Then she could reboot into Linux and import the newly created Win Excel files into StarOffice. If she really likes playing with computers for the sake of playing with computers then this might be OK, but if she is trying to get any work done then this is not very practical.
Actually the same problem appears to exist in switching from Lotus Smartsuite to WordPerfect for Linux. WordPerfect for Linux does not have import filters to bring in Lotus files. If you have to convert Lotus files into MSOffice files before they can be imported into StarOffice or WordPerfect then it is easier to reboot to the operating system where hundreds of files already exist rather than convert to Linux office suite.
She doesn't know about this yet :) I am going to spring a surprise with her permission later this year by install SuSE onto a spare HD that I have and putting that inside her PC. She is fairly computer illerate and if the PC came with DOS she would work with that. File conversions will be past her but not me. All the files will be backed up to Floppy etc anyway. Sean -- GNUPG ID 92B9D0CF | Fidonet: 2:263/950 ICQ: 679813 | Homepage: http://www.tcob1.net Linux User: #124682 | My Current Uptime is 1d, 7h and 28m on Linux 2.2.17 ...What's a new brides' wedding night dread? Microsoft.