Recommended word processor and spreadsheet

H

honk

Hi,

I'm using FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE with fluxbox as wm. Now I'm looking for a good word processor and a spreadsheet application. Which programs do you prefer? Should I install the huge OpenOffice suite or should I better go with gnumeric, abiword? The most important aspect for me is that it should run stable. I don't need that much features (a very old M$ Excel and Word would suffice). Currently I hesitate to install any of these monsters because of their dependencies and long build times. I only install from ports. Installing/compiling once is not the problem, but as I try to keep my system and all ports up-to-date, it would be annoying to recompile OpenOffice all the time because of an update of one library it depends on...

Whats your opinion? Or what do you use on your FreeBSD desktop?

cheers,
honk
 
I ended up installing openoffice (exporting pdfs, working with *.doc garbage, bleh), though it is a fat, bloaty monster. math/gnumeric is good, though it doesn't properly support some of the macro features of excel (which sucks for running other people's spreadsheets).

Honestly, I despise oowriter; abiword is smaller, but even less useful. For actually writing, I like editors/joe (which can be invoked as /usr/local/bin/jstar to work like my good friend wordstar). For prettyfying, use print/scribus*, which isn't so far from the old, but good Aldus PageMaker (alright, not that similar, but still, heck of a lot better than msword and its clones for layout and publishing).

As far as integrating spreadsheets, pictures of hopping monkeys, or slideshows of cute animals falling off of ponies into documents, openoffice is probably the path of least resistance.


*does depend on qt, though, which I have to have to run opera, anyway. still, I don't like qt much.
 
The main thing you have to decide is how important MS Word compatibility is for you. If it is, practically you have to use Oo_O Writer. I've found AbiWord's compatibility to be terrible. Not that I've found Oo_O's compatibility to be that great either.

Otherwise, AbiWord and Gnumeric are fine -- they have most of what I need as long as compatibility is not required.

FWIW, I use groff and Gnumeric for most things, though others prefer TeX. If I need more than that, I just open a remote desktop session and run Word and Excel and Powerpoint from a Win7 box.
 
DrJ said:
Otherwise, AbiWord and Gnumeric are fine -- they have most of what I need as long as compatibility is not required.
Click to expand...

Yep, both are fine for my basic needs :)
 
If you have a copy of MS Office you can always run it with wine.
It works fine even on low-end computers such as eeepc 900 & you'll have a full MS Office compatibility.
 
Thank you guys. I installed gnumeric and abiword and will give it a try. So far these programs look fast, clean and usable.
 
cpcnw said:
For basic letters I use Ted :)
Click to expand...

For people who are happy with basic compatibility with MS Word and Excell (read 2003 and before) by far the best office suite is Siag.

http://siag.nu/

Unfortunatelly it is not ported to FreeBSD. Works fine here on OpenBSD and I know that works well on NetBSD.

By the way pathetic writter which is part of Siag is lighter than Ted even though I will concede that Ted is exceptional application.
 
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