[PLUG] Crossover office...

[plug_0 at robinson-west.com]

In the interest of not having to own a copy of Windows to run Office 2003,
this looks interesting.

Apparently Outlook support is weak, but I ignore that part of the
suite anyways and I generally uninstall Outlook when I set Windows
up anyways.

The idea that you have to run the separate applications in separate
containers has me a little concerned.  After all, Excel and Word
probably need to interoperate to work correctly.

At $40-$80, this is a lot cheaper than paying for a vmware workstation
license plus a fully licensed copy of Windows.

Especially if you use Windows update, it's hard to deal with updates
in the Windows world long term.  I've been trying to grab the last
updates to 98SE and 2000, but I am running into trouble.  One of the
updates for 98SE doesn't seem to exist anymore on a Microsoft corporate
support web site.  Why Microsoft didn't release a service pack for 98SE
is totally beyond me with the number of updates there were.

I think crossover office long term is a better approach than vmware,
at least until ReactOS or something similar matures.

Does anyone have experience with this product?  Concerning updates,
if I buy a copy of crossover office today and it substantially improves,
can I trade up?  To just run Word and Excel from the Office 2003 suite,
is crossover office or vmware the best choice?  How about TurboTax
and Quicken?  How about Corel Wordperfect Suite 8?  I've been looking
at 2000 Pro on top of say CentOS, but maybe crossover office will work
and ease migration by removing the need for a copy of Windows.

Well, another concern I have about crossover office is that I don't
want it to make my Linux system as vulnerable as Windows to: worms,
spyware, trojans, and viruses.

Michael Robinson

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