[PLUG] Windows Apps for Unix?

[Daniel Brian Czerwonky]

In article <200008162158.QAA71076@epicenter.eas.purdue.edu> you write:
>
>Don't get me wrong, though: MS Office on any platform is crap and
>I won't buy it, use it, or recommend it until they use only standard
>file formats.  (And, yes, getting MS Office's native formats pushed
>through a real standards committee would be fine.  That's the last
>thing Microsoft wants though.)

It may be crap to you, but who can argue with the success of the product?

I've done thousands of spreadsheets in my 10+ years as an accountant,
and I was always pretty impressed by what could be accomplished with
Excel.  No, it's not perfect, but neither do it's users have the capacity
or need to use even 10 percent of it's capability.

An even bigger problem exists though, and you've somewhat aluded to
it with your comments about file formats - the business world simply
cannot manage information efficiently - there is too much of it, and not
enough people with the ability to do it.  I cringe every time I see 
a worker retyping information from a printed spreadsheet to another
spreadsheet.  Granted, sometimes it isn't worth the effort to turn
a small task into a big project, but to not even recogonize the problem
is truly disgusting.

I think issue of file formats is completely lost on the average user - 
all they care about is saving their data for later.  They can already
copy and paste between spreadsheets, right?  To a user the endproduct
of a spreadsheet is the printed document and a file that can later be
modified, not the formatted file.