I haven't had complete success with linux 'excel' clones, but Softmaker makes an excellent WP called Textmaker. They even offer a Windows version.

Hi,

I agree with your comment that OpenOffice is not at par with MS Office. But I do not blame OO.org for not being able to provide 100% compatibilty with MS Office file formats. The fact of the matter is that none of these formats are published by MS. Apart from that, MS keeps on revising these formats ever so often to either provide more feature or prevent reverse-engineering (I am not sure which, so take your pick).
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Other than that as a programmer myself, I agree with the point that OpenOffice needs to work on making the UI more pleasent and appealing as well as making improved speed and lower memory usage a reality. An Office suite is a huge app and I beleive that OO is making good progress. I would rather see different office suites including and primarily MS Office support the Open Document format approved by the OASIS community. It would make it easier to share documents between platforms and allow us to convert wealth of documents from MS file formats.

Once the open document format is accepted, the choice to use either OpenOffice or MS office will lie with the user and they can do whatever they want.

I believe that the community will come up with something better and I will continue to try the new apps out, but in the meantime there is not a good substitute for Word or Excel on any platform. And on the Mac, OO.org is exceptionally painful to use. I join this statement.

One avenue that OpenOffice might want to explore is innovation. With all due respect to all individuals involved in the OpenOffice project and the hard work done thus far, OpenOffice should avoid mimicking MS Office.

We got the point that OpenSource can do the same things that Microsoft does. OpenOffice feels like a good clone of MS Office but with some shortfalls.

Putting creativity in the mix might be a nice way to differentiate OpenOffice and offer something new in terms of interface. I don't imply all functionalities have been discovered yet for an Office suite but let's be reasonable: a word processor is a word processor; with 50 functions it's there (write, copy, paste,...).

It might be time to refocus around innovation and creativity and steer away from how MS Office does things. Easier said than done indeed...

I also think that the community will offer something better as there are lots of gifted people everywhere. As Microsoft managed to find a way to stay a monopolist (in reality) (in spite of the laws), I believe people will find a way to have the luxury level of MS products for a lower price or free