Chapter 9. Productivity Applications


IN THIS CHAPTER

  • Office Suites for Ubuntu

  • Productivity Applications Written for Microsoft Windows

  • Reference

Office suites have become one of the most important parts of the modern computing world. Nearly every office in the world has access to a word processor of some description, with a large majority also using either a spreadsheet package or presentation software. Until recently the dominant force in office suites has been Microsoft with their all-encompassing Office system. However, with the increased interest in open-source solutions, several worthy rivals have emerged from developers across the world. Each of these has its own benefits, with some also having some drawbacks. However, the overriding feeling is that you as an end user are no longer totally dependent on having to run Microsoft Office, which can be prohibitively expensive, especially if you have more than a handful of users.

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 Microsoft 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 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. In this chapter, we look at OpenOffice.org, which is the primary office suite shipped with Ubuntu. You will learn about the different components of OpenOffice.org and learn how to do some basic tasks in Writer and Calc (the word processor and spreadsheet applications). You will also discover some of the alternatives to OpenOffice.org available through Ubuntu's software library. Finally, we take a look at desperate measures when you just have to run Microsoft Office under Ubuntu.

Note

Ubuntu is fairly unique in the Linux world because the entire distro ships on a single CD. However, this means that initially you are stuck with Ubuntu's default software. This does not mean that you do not have access to any other software; quite the opposite, actually! Ubuntu has access to thousands of software packages through the other repositories.

During this chapter, we may look at software that is not initially available with a standard installation of Ubuntu. If you have not already downloaded and installed the software, just go to synaptic, search for the related package, and install it.




Ubuntu Unleashed
Ubuntu Unleashed 2011 Edition: Covering 10.10 and 11.04 (6th Edition)
ISBN: 0672333449
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 318

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