On 5/21/2014 6:50 PM, Tom Davies wrote:
Hi :)Those are specialist tools each for a single purpose. They are mostly part of the same eco-system as LibreOffice. LibreOffice is the only one that does so many different things and is the only office suite. For example Lyx is not a better spreadsheet program. So you are not being disloyal or anything like that. Even if any of the other 3 were direct competitors it would probably be better for us to know so that we could figure out how to compete fairly.
I hate to say it, but in the realm of individual components, these programs *are* direct competitors.
Think about it. The database folks keep talking about other programs being better than Base. You have often written about Gnumeric being more useful than Calc. My Atlantis, while not nearly as full featured as Writer, is much easier to use (precisely because of its feature limitations), as well as fast and rock solid. Oh, and btw, while Atlantis is written only for Windows, it behaves very well in Ubuntu with Wine.
Yes, LO is an office suite, but how often do people actually use the integrated features of the suite? Once a year, I take an address list created in Calc and run it through Base, so I can print out labels in Writer for Christmas cards. Several years ago I did the same thing with Microsoft Works and it was *much* easier (and I am no fan of M$). Aside from that, I never import data from one component to the next. I use each component as a standalone program. The fact that a program is an integrated office suite means little if, for any one of its given components, there is a smaller, quicker, easier or more stable alternative.
So, I ask myself, instead of constantly wrestling with the depth of a complex office suite, would I be better off using standalone programs like Gnumeric and Atlantis?
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