my dad is thinking about getting a laptop, and he needs something that will open up word, excel, and powerpoint documents. if i wanted to do this with linux, what would be the best program to do it with? i don't really want to get into emulation, as that will slow it down. i've heard some negative things about oo.o and ms office documents, is there any better application than that for linux?

I have not seen a problem with open office yet. What are the concerns with it, maybe someone can give some better details about the problem.

You could also check koffice.

I use open office, and I have switched back to MS office, except in the way of spreadsheets. Open office is an exceptional program, but I work in an environment on campus that requires movement between MS office and OOo quite frequently. This does not boed well when many images are involved, or statistical analysis is required. I find that image caption placement done in OOo and ported to MSO does not go smoothly at all. Also, there still remain some functions etc... that don't go accross systems seemlesly.

If my projects were only my projects, and I never had to go between the two products, I would never use anything but OOo. Especially now that they have the KDE look! OOo can do everything MSO does, and can do it better. I only use OO calc to do statistical stuff because it is more intuitive and faster to handle various statistical information generation.

But I am a college student, and I am unable to dictate what I do or don't use in the student labs. I also prefer PowerPoint over OO's presentation setup. They're both very similar but I think Powerpoint is a little more powerful, and once again, it's what is on school systems.

Find out how Xandro's does their office integration, there site shows ms office in linux.:

http://www.xandros.com/images/screen...osoft_word.png

I've heard good things about Vmware and office. And Cross over office also looks very promising, although I have yet to try either:

http://www.codeweavers.com/

Whatever you decide to go with, let us know so that others with a similar question to yours can figure it out on their own.

HTH.
Mike.

i think im just gonna go with a windows emulator. my dad's going to need a lot of stuff with images, and he's also going to need to swap documents with co-workers. plus he needs to use chem-draw, i know there's Xchemdraw or something like that, but he needs better integration than that.