A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days: The Windows User's Guide to Ubuntu, Part 3: Living Without MS Office

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The Windows User's Guide to Ubuntu, Part 3: Living Without MS Office

Posted by Jessica Doyle on Tue May 08, 2007 at 10:43:27 AM EST

(First see Part 1, five reasons to refrain from switching from Windows to Linux, and Part 2, a brief introduction to Linux.)

If you are thinking about jumping off the S.S. Gates, quite possibly the two biggest things holding you back are:

1. I don't particularly want to learn a new operating system, especially one used primarily by big nerds.

2. Everyone around me uses Windows and Windows products.

The first objection we'll get to later in this series. (Long story short: Ubuntu advertises itself as "Linux for human beings," i.e. Linux for people who, like myself, do not have computer science degrees or comprehension of half the stories on Slashdot.) The second is today's topic: no Windows, no Microsoft Office.

You may love Office. You may hate Office. You may think that Office is helping to destroy the flow of information. You may not remember anything other than Office. (I was lucky: my parents, among the many favors they did for me, introduced me to DisplayWrite and WordPerfect 5.1 before we got trapped in Office.) If you've been using nothing but Office for years, leaving it behind may be slightly intimidating.

So what I'll do is run down your options (at least, the ones I know of. Commentors, chime in and make fun of my ignorance!)

First, OpenOffice. It does 90% of everything MS Office does. Not everything is going to work entirely smoothly -- as I mentioned in the first post, I have had some issues with Track Changes and commenting. But what OpenOffice does do is give you the option of saving your document with a .doc extension, so you can send it to an MS Word user and they can open it with no trouble. OpenOffice can open MS Word documents; MS Word cannot open OpenOffice documents (which end with the extension .odt), so you just have to remember to save two copies. OpenOffice also has a nifty "Export to PDF" command, which the pre-2007 MS Word does not.

This goes for other parts of MS Office, too: OpenOffice Calc = MS Excel; OpenOffice Impress = MS Powerpoint; OpenOffice Base = MS Access (God help you). But the best thing about OpenOffice is that you do not have to be on Linux to try it. Seriously. There's a Windows version available for download. Give it a whirl. I was using OpenOffice for a couple months before I switched to a Linux-based system.

If you're a WordPerfect person, you can stay with WP. It's not the easiest trick in the world to pull off, since Corel is no longer offering WP for Linux-based systems, but it can be done.

Then there's AbiWord. Myself I've only used AbiWord occasionally, but it's received some glowing reviews. See this, as well, for a side-by-side AbiWord / MS Word comparison. Like OpenOffice, AbiWord is free, and available as a Windows download, so you can give it a dry run on your Windows system.

Also on my computer, since I run Kubuntu, is KOffice. Unlike AbiWord and OpenOffice, you can't see KOffice unless you're running a Linux system with the KDE Desktop Environment. I have not fooled around with the various features of KOffice either, but take a look and see what it offers. And yes, you can go from KOffice to MS Word, though it's not as easy as in OpenOffice.

And now, your secret weapon: Google Docs. The brilliance of our Palo Alto Overlords is such that Google Docs can take in documents from MS Word, plain text (.txt), Rich Text Format (.rtf), and OpenOffice (.odt). Which means that if you use Linux at home and Windows at the office, you can upload your document to Google Docs before leaving for work and grab it when you get in. And it's backed up, to boot! Now, you may not feel comfortable with the Palo Alto Overlords having your documents on their servers. I've made my peace with it, and have used the OpenOffice -> Google Docs -> MS Word process to turn papers in to Word-using professors more than once.

Next in the series: after all this fuss, why should you go for Ubuntu?

< The State Of Ramadi | Victories Do Not Come Through Impatience >

The Windows User's Guide to Ubuntu, Part 3: Living Without MS Office | 4 comments (4 topical, 0 hidden)

OK, here's a question (none / 0) (#1)
by Wacky Hermit on Tue May 08, 2007 at 06:35:15 PM EST

I'm thinking about becoming a Linux convert, but I've been using Quickbooks for my business. However I have an older version of Quickbooks (2004), and it keeps telling me I have to upgrade, but I'd be willing to jump ship if there's a comparable Linux-based product. Is there?

: Quickbooks (none / 0) (#2)
by Jessica Doyle on Wed May 09, 2007 at 10:01:46 AM EST

If your Quickbooks '04 is anything like my Quicken '04, they're no longer allowing you to download bank info. Fair warning: I've never used Quickbooks and I've never run a business.
There are Linux-based accounting programs: here's a list (I don't know how recently it was updated) and Wikipedia's list. Here's a more recent thread on the subject. The best-known program is GnuCash. I played with GnuCash and found it much less user-friendly than Quicken, but it may compare more favorably to Quickbooks. One source pointed me to Quasar Accounting, which I'm not familiar with.
It appears that you cannot run Quickbooks via a Windows emulator, so if you don't want to give up Quickbooks, one option is to dual-boot: sometimes your computer runs a Linux system, sometimes Windows. I have been told that dual-booting is really, really easy with Ubuntu's setup (see this video and this how-to); I didn't do it, but that was because I wanted to leave Windows all the way behind, not because it was hard. I want to say that Ubuntu Linux for Non-Geeks also has information on dual-booting in the installation chapter.
What I would do is back up everything six ways from Sunday and play around with an Ubuntu Live CD -- if you can, and you want to be extra safe, play with it on a different computer than the one on which you've got your Quickbooks data. If you like it, then see how comfortable you are with dual-booting, and try out some of the Linux equivalents on the Ubuntu desktop.
I wish I could find you a more knowledgable community -- AskMeFi often has Linux users answering questions, for example. Good luck.

[ Parent ]

Thanks so much! (none / 0) (#3)
by Wacky Hermit on Wed May 09, 2007 at 12:03:44 PM EST

I am actually about to get a brand new, virgin hard drive for my business computer so I think between me and my computer-savvy husband we could manage a dual boot. I've already got everything backed up thoroughly in anticipation of the imminent crash of my current hard drive. I'm excited!

I will look into the options you mentioned for accounting. I wonder if any of them will talk to ZenCart; I've never been able to get Quickbooks to talk to ZenCart despite installing a module to that effect (I've never had time to troubleshoot it, but it wouldn't import sales to Quickbooks.) The bank transaction import thing is more of a nuisance than anything else; I've never been able to import my PayPal transactions successfully into Quickbooks, and I do the bulk of my business through PayPal, so I'm accustomed to entering those in by hand, and there aren't too many transactions to import from the bank. So if it takes me a few months to get this up and running it won't be so bad.

: ZenCart (none / 0) (#4)
by Jessica Doyle on Wed May 09, 2007 at 12:46:56 PM EST

Poke around here, if you haven't done so already. They've got a whole section devoted to ZenCart/Linux/Unix compatability.
When I went to Ubuntu, I did it on a brand-new hard drive -- at my husband's insistence, so if it didn't go well my existing XP drive wasn't affected.

[ Parent ]