Chapter 9. Productivity Applications


IN THIS CHAPTER

  • Office Suites for Fedora

  • Productivity Applications Written for Microsoft Windows

  • Reference

With the rapid growth of open source software, particularly in the enterprise, it was inevitable that open source office suites would reach a level of maturity that means they are suitable for deployment in a corporate environment. Thanks to the open-sourcing of Sun's StarOffice, Linux can benefit from a true Microsoft Office style office suite by the name of OpenOffice.org. Many businesses already use OpenOffice.org and its commercial counterpart, StarOffice, and they are already enjoying the cost benefits of not having to pay license fees or support costs. Of course, there are more suites available than just OpenOffice.org and in this chapter we will explore the options available.

Despite what some hacks have found, OpenOffice.org is making real inroads into directly replacing Microsoft Office, thanks to a lot of hard work by Sun and the community at large. Although not 100% compatible with Microsoft binary formats (DOC, XLS, and PPT) OpenOffice.org gets it right nearly every time. Unless you are working with extremely complex documents that involve specialized functions only available with MS Office, you should encounter no problems with OpenOffice.org.

Note

Why is OpenOffice.org not 100% compatible with Microsoft Office? Well, Microsoft is notoriously secretive about its proprietary file formats and the only way that OpenOffice.org could ensure compatibility would be to reverse-engineer each file format, akin to taking apart a telephone to see how it works. This reverse-engineering could be classed as illegal under U.S. law, which would make OpenOffice.org somewhat of a potential hot-potato if they chose this path. However, OpenOffice.org manages to maintain a very high standard of importing and exporting so you should not experience too many problems.


A productivity suite could be classed as containing two or more applications that could be used for creating documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and databases. Other applications could include email clients, calculators/formula editors, and even illustration packages. Commonly they are all tied together by a default look and feel, which makes sticking to one particular suite much easier. Because Fedora uses OpenOffice.org as its standard office suite, we will introduce you to Writer and Calc, the two most popular OpenOffice.org components. We will also take a brief look at some of the other Linuxbased office suites that are available.

Note

As with most projects, the more active development that has taken place, the bigger the overall project. Fedora is no exception to this and the team at The Fedora Project has been very busy putting Fedora on a dietremoving packages that are not considered to be essential to Fedora or are duplicated in functionality. This includes some productivity applications, so if you try to find one in Add/Remove Programs and it is not there, try installing it with yum (see Chapter 37, "Advanced yum").




Red Hat Fedora 5 Unleashed
Red Hat Fedora 5 Unleashed
ISBN: 067232847X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 362

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