I was just wondering if any of you have tried out CrossOffice and/or CrossPlugin yet? I've been hearing some good things about this software and am seriously considering buying it. I would definitly load RedHat 7.3 on my laptop if I could still use Word and Excel. thanks in advance, Rick

Never heard of it but why pay for it when you can get a copy of StarOffice for free!!! I have used StarOffice even before Sun Microsystems bought that company and it is working great. It can read MS files... You can download a copy at www.sun.com. Lawrence

StarOffice is won't be free for much longer. Also Star doesn't fully handle all the functionability of Word. Formating is lost sometimes. Star is nice but it just doesn't hold a candle to Office2k IMO. Getting CrossOffice is a better solution for me if it works. You can read more at http://www.codeweavers.com

If that's the case, then perhaps it's time to start using Office from KDE!!! But I will check out the web from above to see what it has to say then. Lawrence

Common, KOffice? KOffice is a nice little freebee but it's hardly office productivity software. I'm not being critical of you, I'm just saying that M$ O2K is the best there is. Being able to use it on Linux will allow me to finally ditch Windows altogether.

Rick The people who make CrossOffice (CodeWeavers) also have a version of Wine that is really slick. I downloaded it, and it has a great GUI configuration. I am using Red Hat 7.3, and I am able to reliably run MS Word, Excel, CadStd, and a number of other MS apps. I have tried CrossOffice Plugins and it worked well, but it only uses what is called MS Word Viewer and Excel Viewer, which are just that -- viewers. You can only view docs and spreed sheets -- nothing else. If Codeweavers' CrossOffice is anything like its version of Wine, it will be worth trying for only fifty some bucks. I have yet to find Star Office, WordPerfect 8, Koffice, AbiWord, or any other Linux Office apps that has met the standard of productivity I desire and get from MS Office. The apps I have tried (and only the apps I have tried) all seem to have a problem with file conversion -- even with RTF files, even after I have run the files through WordPort first. I can't afford the time to re-format a seventy thousand word document. If there is someone out there who can tell me how to convert without losing format, please tell me. Mean while, I will continue to use MS Word, but I will run it on Red Hat using CodeWeavers' Wine. I haven't the money to spare for buying a lot of commercial software like WordPerfect, Star Office 6, or other Linux ported office software, but I might if I could be assured that I wasn't throwing my money away. Try using CodeWeavers' Wine emulator before giving up on Linux and keep a close ear to the ground for anything that might be coming down the pike. Wine can be used with or without a Windows partition (fake_windows) although I have better results using the Windows Partition with Wine. Software development for Linux is quickly moving forward and one never can tell when that perfect, (if there is such a thing) app might just pop up and make your life worth living. There are a lot of great thing that Linux and Linux software has to offer. Keep your finger in the pie. You can find Codeweavers at: http://www.codeweavers.com/home/ Regards, Bigchris

Hi everybody: Bigchris: I haven't lost formatting using OpenOffice 1.0, from http://www.openoffice.org They manage the open source from StarOffice released from Sun recently. However, I did run into troubles with this and the fonts in RedHat 7.2. I just needed to up2date my font server. Now everything's ok and free. By the way, what I am having troubles with is installing MS Project using wine. Has anybody installed it using CrossOfiice? Regards, Vicente