[ Thanks to Scott
Knight for this link. ]
“With my anti-Linux-desktop prejudice in full force, I set out
to prove to myself that Linux was not a viable choice for the
desktop. I decided to take the RedHat 8.0 system on my desktop and
put it through the paces of our business. I intentionally built a
stock workstation install with no special configuration options for
my tests.“First, I took a key budget modeling Excel spreadsheet used
regularly at InfoWorld and decided to load it into a free
spreadsheet program. The most convenient one on the desktop was
OpenOffice Calc, but I could have used StarOffice with just a
little more work. This particular spreadsheet is probably the most
complex one I use at InfoWorld. I transferred it to my Linux
machine and opened the spreadsheet in OpenOffice Calc. It worked
flawlessly. I tried several other key spreadsheets and had no
problems with any of them. In fact, as I was working with one of
them, one of our sales people came into my office. This particular
salesperson had not seen Linux in action, and as I turned to
demonstrate, he looked at the open spreadsheet on my screen and
said, ‘I didn’t know Excel ran on Linux.’ In one simple sentence,
the usefulness of the OpenOffice Calc program was
validated—if my spreadsheets work and a salesperson
recognizes (functionally at least) the software at a first glance
in the Linux environment, the training is mostly done…”