If you have about $60 to $70 you might try Star Office. Open Office is the open source development side of Star Office, much like Mozilla is to Netscape. I don't know if it's true anymore, but you might be able to get Star Office on a trial - time limited - basis to see if you like it (via download). They sell it at places like CompUSA (that's if you're in America), BestBuy, etc... I have also heard that using CodeWeavers office plugins for wine works quite nicely, in fact many report it runs M$ office as well as in Windows. You would need to get Wine (acronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator) up and running. The plugins at codeweaver do cost money but I understand it's worth it for many people. The plugins are called the CrossOver Office plugin and the CrossOver plugin so you can run "Run Windows web browser plugins such as QuickTime, Windows Media Player, and Shockwave in Linux." The website is at http://www.codeweavers.com. Between Star Office (which I hear is also pretty nice (better then OO) and the Code Weaver stuff you should be able to find a solution. Just a couple of things to consider. The CodeWeaver stuff takes a Wine installation, which can be a bit tricky, especially for new/1st time users. I have written an FAQ for setting up Wine at http://susefaq.sourceforge.net/wine.html. The upside of this is that it runs M$ programs such as Office and Lotus Notes and provides almost every feature that these programs offer (and codeweavers is improving all the time - very good and getting better). The other thing to consider is Star Office. I understand you can open and save programs in M$ formats with Star Office, with the exception of heavily "macro" ladden documents. This too is improving and SunMicrosystems (Star Office maker) provides access to all the updates to Star Office 6 (that's the not for free one you would want) for the life of the product. The upside to this is that it installs into linux natively, and comes with CD (or you can download it - at which point I would burn it to a CD asap in case things go awry and the Linux needs to be re-installed). Anyway, check these out and if you have any other questions post again to the list. HTH, Curtis. On Monday 09 December 2002 14:59, DB Troll wrote:
Which office app would anyone suggest? I have tried OO and Koffice but they both seem hard to use. I only recently switch to linux and have a problem with the office apps, in M$OS I used Corels Office 2000 and Print Office, esp print office because it had tons of templates. I would appreciate any suggestions. Thanks David
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