I voted for OpenOffice because it is my favorite office suite out of the options provided, but primarily I use TeX for all of my documents. I'm pretty sure TeXlive can do presentations, and for tables I'll probably just use Google Docs when the need arises.

The "beamer" package for LaTeX does a nice job for presentations.
I have my own package for plain TeX, but someone starting from scratch would probably want to use beamer.

to hndle later formats, ms has either "viewers" or "converters" for download. a lot of people save in older versions for the reason you have described. i used to save into mso6/95 years after using mso2000. now i usually save to mso97.

since the most non-graphics i've done in nix is minimal text editing, i can't contribute to the poll (which btw doesn't, and likely cannot practically, give *proportional* "popularity" comparison. I like these comments, though.).

i recently began using oo3 (win32, already installed on winxp laptop). I since have carried around portable oo3 (used on on winxp.)

oo3 spreadsheet usage/ui is very similar to ms excel 2000, imo. before carrying around oo3 portable, i once tried opening my spreadsheet file in mso2007 and soon noticed that mso2007 doesn't properly open the resulting file :-(

oo3 word processor is klutzier than msword2000 (my usage is primarily only presentation, usually "virtual printed" to pdf. otherwise for plain text, i use text editor(s))

have never used any *TeX.

hmm... but that should be faster than computing the *last* 1M digits of pi... :-)

on winxp:

msword2000 loads "instantly" on c2d, and pretty fast on sub-1ghz pc100 era. excel2000 seems slightly slower. (almost "instantly" on c2d)
"installed" oo3.0.0 build9358 calc. startup (empty default spreadsheet) takes a verbally counted 22sec, but restart after shutdown takes ~2sec, so i guess i haven't bothered killing the preloader option. :-)
this on pentium m laptop. (msinfo shows cpu at ~600mhz, but google gives either 1.3 or 1.4 ghz. 512mb. seems to be 400mhz fsb. avira and kerio2.5 running. also, i haven't reduced any/many extraneous services.)

(in winxp) portable apps seem to take longer to load than installed versions, so the startup "count" of oo3 portable on c2d wouldn't be useful?

"*proportional* "popularity" comparison"?

Can you translate that into English, please?
Thanks.

Just tried it on a 3.0 GHz, P4, with 2 Gigs of RAM.
In XP, SP3.
ms-word 2003, from a "cold: start, 19 seconds.
Tried again after shutting it down and a "warm" start was, 9 seconds.
OpenOffice (Go-OO) 3.1.1, from a cold start, 9 seconds.
From a "warm" start, 2 seconds.

heh, that was my shorthand :-)
i was trying to imply that it would be difficult to poll for number of users of each *ware WITH some type of relationship to how many of those users prefer that *ware.

as of my beginning this slow batch of my keyboarding, the poll shows 84.89% prefer oo. i also suspect nearly 100% of those responding have tried oo (though some tried only versions older than oo3).
meanwhile 0% to 7% preferred (one of) the other officewares

but we have no idea of how many of all poll responders have used other than oo... for example, siag. Consider that it's possible that all who rated siag as "best" are the only poll-responders who ever tried siag[1]. *If* all siag responders have tried oo, then oo "loses" 0:100 against siag.

and... what's are possible influences upon just *trying* certain officeware? for example, maybe some people usually avoid trying software that isn't (claimed) crossplatform? (IIRC, Abiword has downloads for many oses, though older abiword versions for some Oses... eg, Beos...)

an extra complication (made evident in these comments) is *usage*. eg...
Graphing from excel. Hmm.. i recall google searches displaying talk of generative graphics (3d, i think) from excel. i lacked time to follow my curiosity, so that's all i know about graphing from spreadsheets.
"Pivot tables" with excel is notorious topic, but I've never spent enough time to discover what pivot tables are. :-)

i'm not a stats person, so i'm commenting ~qualitatively :-)

endnotes:
1] and immediately fell in love with siag. omg, I don't want to even imagine the furtive software affairs, then perhaps software polygamy...

I voted for open office, but when I have to do M$-compatible office stuff, I usually do it in Google Docs!

Jim
---
Slacking since 3.6

where is latex??

latex + vi + kile + lyx

for viewing other documents, i use openoffice

Latex is not an office suite. Please see the first message of this thread.

Nearly 86% of people on the poll find OpenOffice most productive, fairly conclusive I would say. Is there any chance of getting it into the default Slackware install or /extra?

samac

KOffice

I'm also curious about this as well, samac. If OOo does not make it in I'll continue to happily use rworkman's package.

I'm waiting for go-oo 3.2 and I will compile it via sbopkg and slackbuilds. Though if a Slackware package was available that would be my first choice.

samac