[UFO Chicago] Meeting Followup: LibreOffice Accelerates Open Source Spreadsheets, Thanks to AMD

[Neil R. Ormos]

Brian Sobolak wrote:
> Neil Ormos H wrote:

>> Apropos of our discussion at the last meeting,
>> in which one faction argued that people
>> (mis-)use spreadsheet software for applications
>> that should be implemented using other tools,
>> here's a report of an effort to ensure
>> LibreOffice Calc is at least as mis-useable as
>> Microsoft's Excel. :-)

> Does anyone use LibreOffice?  I'm not being
> cynical; I know it ships with many copies of
> Linux and such.  But has it been adopted by any
> businesses, specialty areas, academics, etc.?

In the U.S. and Canada, corporations and
institutions can afford Microsoft Office.  Since
there's a genuine need for document and macro
compatibility with other users of MS Office, and
at least a pretextual justification that whines
about the cost of retraining users to operate some
other office suite, it is unlikely there will be
widespread adoption here of LibreOffice or
OpenOffice any time soon.

> (For example, I know WordPerfect was
> longstanding standard in legal documents and it
> took it much longer to move to Word than many
> other businesses.)

At that time, WordPerfect handled long and complex
documents better than Word did.  The principal
advantage of Word was that it had a user interface
that was easy for new users to learn, at least for
the simplist of documents, but this didn't help
much in law because the word processing staff and
secretaries already knew how to use Word Perfect
and a lot of documents weren't simple.  Also, in
practice, many documents are prepared using an old
document as a template, which meant that even
after Word was introduced into a workplace, it was
still necessary to use Word Perfect for a lot of
documents.  All in all, there was a lot of Word
Perfect inertia.