Didn't Work Out

Well, it happens. I wound up deleting Kubuntu from my work machine and restoring XP to the entire hard-drive. My boss is kinda wondering why I was unproductive for a couple of days :-).

Why you ask?

Simple. More and more people are sending me .docx and .xlsx files which are files made by Office 2007. I can't open them under Linux. I can't keep asking people to convert them to .doc and .xls forever. With Office 2003, I was able to install a simple update from MS that will let me open and edit these newer files.

I have also developed a disturbingly long list of problems OOo has when saving .doc files. For example, if you highlight text in OOo, Word users will struggle to un-highlight the text because it's not highlighted. OOo uses a different Word function / featurethat NOBODY ever actually uses besides OOo.

So, I am back on Windows but at least I'm using a large number of cross-platform open-source tools. OOo IS installed and I use it when / where I can. I have Songbird installed as my media player. I'm using R for statistical analysis. And there are a few useful Windows-Only Apps that I'm using like Tinn-R. I may have to try and install Tinn-R in Wine to see how it works.

The upshot? I'm stuck with Windows until OOo, or some other Linux Office Suite, offers compelling, stable, accurate and complete Office Open XML read/write.