[ale] A Real Sad Loss for Open Source in the Atlanta Area

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Thu, 2010-10-14 at 15:18 -0400, Chris Fowler wrote:
> Correct.  I would suspect that most people on this list, including me,
> have no clue about what can be done with Excel.  My wife spends hours
> per day in that program and I've tried to give her OO on her laptop
> but unfortunately it just does not support as much as Excel does.  For
> UPS, she use Excel at work, they pay for it.  When Office 2000 fails
> to load on newer systems I she'll have to use OO because I'm not
> paying for Excel. 

The interesting thing is that I keep seeing people say that
"OpenOffice.org doesn't support feature X" or "thing Y".  I say that it
is interesting because I come across this all the time.  When I ask for
specific examples, I either get no example, or the example I am given
has (frequently) the exact same notation and/or formatting as in Excel,
but the person who made the assertion couldn't be bothered to figure
that out on their own by simply just trying it.  And often, when I show
them that it works exactly the way that they're used to (because I will
have them show me what they say they couldn't do) they're like, "Oh,
well, you must have done something different..."

So, I'm going to ask, _what_ is it that it doesn't support?  If there is
something that it legitimately doesn't support, have you filed any bug
report or asked someone who understands the issue to document and file
one?  If not, why not?

	--- Mike