Chapter 9. Productivity Applications

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Office Suites for Fedora

• PDA Connectivity

• Scanner Applications for Fedora

• Web Design Tools

• Fax Client Software

• Other Office and Productivity Tools Included with Fedora

• Productivity Applications Written for Microsoft Windows

• Reference

Today's modern businesses are beginning to learn what experienced Linux users have known for years: There are great cost benefits when using Linux and free productivity software. Stepping off the software licensing and upgrade treadmill immediately contributes to the bottom line. This chapter provides some details about popular office productivity software included with and available for Fedora. Despite the nay-saying of a few tech industry pundits, Fedora can be used to support desktop operations in business settings. You can create efficient personal computing environments by carefully choosing and installing select productivity software packages. A wealth of usable, reliable, and free software is available for Fedora.

Productivity clients include free office suites and tools that can be used for creating documents and for scheduling, organizing, and calculating.

In this chapter, we examine the default office productivity applications that Fedora provides. You will see how easy it could be to migrate your employees to Linux desktops because similar applications are available that can make use of existing Microsoft-formatted data files. You will learn about alternative applications provided by Fedora, as well as some applications that you can install yourself. This chapter describes how to install, configure, and launch the applications; information on using the applications is provided only to make you aware of special issues associated with the use of a given application.

NOTE

The full version of Fedora now comes on five CDs or a single DVD as opposed to the original three. As with most projects, the more active development that has taken place, the bigger the overall project. The Fedora Project team has already started putting Fedora on a diet removing packages that are not considered to be essential to Fedora. This has included some of the productivity applications, so if you try to find one in the Add/Remove Programs and it is not there, try installing it with yum (see Chapter 36, "Advanced Yum").